Racial differences in intelligence: The importance of the executive system

The race-IQ controversy arose at a time when psychometric views of intelligence dominated. Little attention was paid to more process-oriented models in spite of the fact they provide alternative perspectives on the causes of individual differences in problem-solving. We hypothesized that much of the IQ spread commonly observed between black and white children can be attributed to differences in components of their executive systems, including the knowledge base, control processes, and metacognitive states. To test this possibility, black and white children who differed significantly on fluid and crystallized intelligence were tested on multiple tasks reflecting components of the executive systems as well as on perceptual efficiency tasks. Striking group differences were observed in metamemory, stragegy use, and general knowledge, but few reliable differences were found in perceptual efficiency. Regression analyses showed that different factors predicted fluid and crystallized intelligence, with metamemory predicting the latter but not the former. An implication of these findings has potential educational significance: training directed at executive skills, introduce at an early age, might elevate learning and problem-solving skills in black children, thereby reducing racial differences in crystallized intelligence.     

Sex differences in retention of verbal and spatial characteristics of stimuli: A cross-cultural replication

This study is a partial (omitting college students) replication of R. V. Kail and A. W. Siegel (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1977, 23, 341–347) in Ghana and Scotland on boys and girls with 4 and 7 years of education. After viewing sets of five or seven letters in a 4 × 4 matrix they remembered either (a) the letters, (b) positions of the letters, or (c) both letters and positions. Contrary to the results of the original study, no sex difference in relative recall of letters and positions was found. There was also evidence that verbal and spatial information is not always processed independently. A prediction that Scottish children would have better recall of positions was supported. The discussion notes the limitations of intracultural research as a basis for generalizations.     

Impact of adults' appeals for sharing on the development of altruistic dispositions in children

Third- and fourth-grade boys and girls (mean age 7 years, 10 months) were directly instructed to share half their winnings from a bowling game under one of three types of verbal appeal: a power assertive appeal emphasizing punitive consequences for noncompliance, an inductive appeal emphasizing the child's potential contribution to the well being of another person, or a neutral appeal. While they complied with this request, half the children were monitored by television camera; the other half were not. A measure of generalized sharing (noninstructed sharing under anonymous conditions) was then collected. It was predicted that generalized sharing would be greater for children who had heard the inductive appeal than for children who had heard the power assertive appeal and would be greater for children who had shared without television surveillance than for children who had shared under survellance. As predicted, generalized sharing was highest among children who had received the inductive appeal. However, prior surveillance depressed noninstructed sharing only for girls who had received the power assertive appeal. There was one additional and unexpected finding: when children were asked to reinforce themselves for having shared in the instructed sharing phase, boys who had shared in compliance with a power assertive appeal indulged themselves more than children in any other condition.     

Depression in aphasic patients: Frequency, severity, and clinical-pathological correlations

Twenty-five hospitalized nonfluent, fluent, and global aphasic patients who were several months past the onset of their illness were compared for presence and severity of depression based on four psychopathological measures. The nonfluent aphasic patients had both greater frequency and severity of depression than the other two groups. CT scans showed that the global aphasic patients had the largest lesion size (volumetric) and showed a strong correlation between lesion size and degree of depression. In contrast, patients with fluent aphasias showed an inverse correlation between severity of depression and lesion size; among the nonfluent aphasic patients there was no significant correlation. Depression appears to be common in this population of hospitalized aphasic patients with chronic illness and nonfluent patients are the most depressed group within this population. The increased frequency and severity of depression in the nonfluent patients did not appear to be related to their overall physical or cognitive impairment; two possible mechanisms are discussed.     

Language in a congenitally acallosal brain

A case of complete callosal agenesis shows two limitations of cognitive development. The first, a discrete loss of syntactic-pragmatic function within the language domain, may or may not be associated with anomalous cerebral lateralization of speech and language; its neural basis is unknown. The second deficit, an inability to identify free-field or dichotic speech sounds with overlapping temporal-acoustic properties, appears due to a nonlinguistic limitation of the acallosal brain, the inability to suppress ipsilateral information.     

Sociodramatic play: Social class effects in integrated preschool classrooms

In previous studies, social class differences in children's sociodramatic play were studied in socially homogeneous, segregated schools. However, social class differences in play behavior were attributed to the abilities or interests of the children rather than to the situation in which they were observed. In the present study, sociodramatic play was observed in middle and lower class children attending the same preschool classrooms. In accord with previous studies, middle class children engaged in a higher level of play than did lower class children. Analyses of individual play components indicated that although middle class children verbalized more frequently, the quality of the language used by the two groups did not differ. Age differences were also significant. With age, play roles became more socially coordinated, the duration of play episodes increased and language became more complex. But social class groups did not differ on these measures. The implications of these results for the developmental lag hypothesis, other explanations of social class differences and classroom strategies are discussed.     

Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of labour power. These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of appearance and reality). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.     

Cognitive differentiation in women and pioneer-traditional vocational choices

In order to test the hypothesis that women who went into male dominated fields (pioneers) were more cognitively complex in social relationships than women who went into female dominated fields (traditionals), 83 college seniors were classified and tested using a grid for cognitive complexity in their roles. As predicted, the pioneers were more differentiated (p < .05) in their perception of various social roles and supported the research in cognitive complexity in vocational behavior.     

Punishment persistence and sequence: Some effects of P-length and N-length in the rat

In a runway investigation, two groups of rats received partial punishment training with P-lengths of 1, 2, and 3 (Group P123) and P-lengths of 1 (Group P1), respectively. Two additional groups received partial reinforcement with N-lengths of 1, 2, and 3 (Group N123) and N-length of 1 (Group N1). An additional group was given unpunished continuous reinforcement in the runway, but received control shocks in a separate apparatus. Following training all subjects received punished extinction (shock plus nonreward). The results indicated that P-length increased resistance to punished extinction, however N-length did not have the corresponding effect. In addition, partial reinforcement did not increase resistance to punished extinction relative to continuous reinforcement. These results were interpreted within a sequential-theoretical framework.