The effect of pretraining and feedback on the reasoning of young children

Three experiments are reported in which kindergarten and first-grade children were given one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks that were modifications of those used by T. C. Toppino (1980, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30, 496–512). In the first two experiments, the nature of the stimulus compounds (partitioned or unitary) was varied in a series of tasks of increasing complexity. First-grade children (Experiment 1) and kindergarten children (Experiment 2) performed extremely well on all of the tasks presented. Experiment 3 was designed to identify factors that contribute to these high levels of performance, relative to those obtained under the conditions used by Toppino (1980). The results indicated that a combination of feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the tasks are sufficient to produce the high performance levels, and that the verbal labeling of stimulus components is not an essential constituent of the training.     

Response-outcome contingency: Behavioral and judgmental effects of appetitive and aversive outcomes with college students

In two experiments, positive, negative, and zero response-outcome contingencies were responded to and rated by college students under a free-operant procedure. In Experiment 1, outcomes were either neutral or were associated with point gain. In Experiment 2, subjects were administered different outcome treatments: neutral outcomes, outcomes associated with money gain, or outcomes associated with money loss. In both experiments, subjects' judgments of response-outcome contingency and their operant responses were each strong linear functions of ΔP, the difference between the probability of an outcome given a response and the probability of an outcome given no response. Appetitive and aversive outcomes produced opposite and symmetrical response patterns. In Experiment 1, no differences in ratings occurred with neutral or appetitive outcomes; however, in Experiment 2, more potent appetitve outcomes led to somewhat more extreme ratings than either neutral or aversive outcomes. Increasing outcome probability produced only a slight bias in ratings of noncontingent problems in Experiment 1 and no bias in Experiment 2. Contrary to predictions derived from an analysis of superstitious behavior, increasing outcome probability in noncontingent problems decreased operant responding when outcomes were appetitive and increased operant responding when outcomes were aversive. Trend analyses revealed that Δ P was superior to several other metrics in predicting subjects' estimates of contingency and the behavioral effects of contingency. Operant responding was in closer accord with matching predictions than with maximizing predictions.     

The role of the magazine-response contingency on signal-directed responding in pigeons

Three experiments used a procedure for directly delivering water into the thirsty pigeon's mouth to explore the role that the instrumental magazine contingency plays in autoshaped responding. Magazine training was accomplished by requiring birds to contact a “magazine” key when it was illuminated, in order to obtain intraoral injections of water. Other subjects received water injections independent of a magazine-response contingency. Subsequently, magazine-trained subjects showed a transient enhancement in responding to the illumination of another “signal” key, whether that stimulus was presented alone or paired with water delivery. The overall level of maintained autoshaped responding was little influenced by the instrumental magazine contingency, although the within-trial time course of signal-directed responding was affected. When illumination of the signal key preceded access to water only when the signal was not contacted, pigeons directed many responses toward the signal key. However, there was no evidence that the instrumental magazine contingency enhanced responding on this omission schedule of reinforcement. These results thus confirm a small, but measurable contribution of the magazine-response contingency to signal-directed responding; they fail to support the conclusion that the instrumental magazine contingency greatly affects the outcomes of autoshaping studies.     

Personality differentiation and prediction of persistence in physical science and engineering

Discriminant analyses techniques were applied to freshmen California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and Holland Vocational Interest Inventory (VPI) data for 914 male students and were used to predict curricular membership after two years of university education. The results suggest that those who persist in physical science, engineering or other curriculum are significantly discriminable from one another on the basis of freshman personality data, and that these personality variables show reasonable predictive stability when applied to a cross validation sample. Physical scientists appear to be markedly differentiated from engineers or others along an introspection-intellectual versus social conventional dimension. The predictive power of CPI and VPI personality variables while statistically exceeding chance is considerably less than that previously reported for ability or interest measures.     

Assessment of children's social skills

Various methods of social skills assessment with children were reviewed. Based upon an extensive review of the literature, it was found that behavioral observations, sociometrics, and teacher ratings have been the most often used methods of assessing children's social skill deficits. Advantages and disadvantages of each assessment technique were discussed within a psychometric and social validation context. Conclusions were that school psychologists should utilized all three measures to secure a comprehensive picture of children's social behavior and to obtain some measure of social validation.     

Effects of age,stimuli, and category recognition factors in children's inquiry behavior

One hundred twenty-eight children of average intellectual ability from grades K, 1, 2, and 5 (ages 6, 7, 8, and 11, respectively) were administered a 20-questions task involving the presentation of 24 stimulus pictures and a forced-choice post-test. The four-factor design included four grade levels, two stimulus conditions (basic-level and superordinate), and two instruction conditions (cueing and non-cueing) for boys and girls. Results indicated older children generated more efficient questions, all children in the Cued-instruction condition asked more constraint-seeking questions in the Basic-level condition than in the Superordinate condition on the 20-questions task, and all children in the Basic-level condition selected more efficient questions in the post-test forced-choice task than in Superordinate condition. It was concluded that even younger school-age children will generate efficient constraint-seeking questions when Basic-level stimuli are used and when children are cued.     

Caffeine ingestion,misattribution therapy,and speech anxiety

While theoretical analogs of misattribution therapy appeared promising (Nisbett & Schachter, 1966; Ross, Rodin, & Zimbardo, 1969), attempts with clinically relevant behaviors have not been so successful (Kellogg & Baron, 1975; Singerman, Borkovec, & Baron, 1976). Since the plausibility of the misattribution manipulation appears to be the central problem, the present study attempted to increase plausibility by manipulating familiarity with the setting and actual psychological arousal in a clinically relevant situation. Subjects only slightly fearful of giving speeches presented a speech in front of two observers. Familiarity was varied by having half of the subjects give a pretest speech, while arousal was manipulated by having half of the subjects ingest caffeine while the others ingested a placebo just prior to the test speech. The subjects' attributions were varied by giving them either arousal or irrelevant symptom instructions regarding the effects of the ingested drug. Direct suggestion rather than misattribution effects occurred: Those subjects receiving arousal symptoms reported more nervousness than subjects who had received irrelevant symptoms. The authors conclude that while the misattribution effect may have experimental validity, it is not effective with clinically relevant behavior.     

The effect of grammatical complexity upon disfluency behavior of nonstuttering preschool children

The effect of grammatical complexity on the disfluency behavior of nonstuttering 3- and 4-yr-old children was examined. Thirty normal children repeated after the examiner 30 sentences which represented six different grammatical constructions. These grammatical constructions represented a range of grammatical complexity.The total number of disfluencies that occurred in each sentence type was compared. The occurrence of specific disfluency categories in each sentence type was also examined. Subjects produced significantly more disfluencies on passive sentences than on any other sentence type. The passive elicited significantly more interjections, word repetitions, and revisions than the other sentence types.The effect of sentence type on imitation performance was also examined. The auxiliary Have and negative sentence types elicited significantly more imitation errors than other sentence types. Initiation and fluency performance for individual subjects were also examined.The results of the present investigation suggest that when grammatical complexity is controlled, the relationship between disfluencies and grammatical complexity is complicated. When grammatical constructions were relatively difficult for children, complexity affected the occurrence of disfluencies. However, factors other than grammatical complexity affect the occurrence of disfluencies in pre-school children.     

Reactions to stigmatized others: Response amplification vs sympathy

Four experiments examined the conditions under which responses to handicapped persons are characterized by sympathy or response amplification. The first two experiments tested the hypothesis that contact with a handicapped person would lead to amplified positive and negative responses in comparison to contact with a nonhandicapped person. The results indicated that mere contact was not sufficient to elicit response amplification. Instead, contact led to more positive evaluations of the handicapped than of the nonhandicapped other, regardless of whether she behaved in a positive or negative manner—a “sympathy” effect. The third and fourth experiments indicated that amplified positive and negative responses to the handicapped will occur when the behavior of a handicapped person is highly relevant to the evaluator. A two-stage model of responses to stigmatized others is proposed to account for these results.     

A multidisciplinary model of voluntary employee turnover

This paper proposes a model of employee turnover based upon the existing literature from psychological, sociological, and economic perspectives. Voluntary turnover is posited to have three major classes of determinants: characteristics of the individual employee, work-related factors, and the states of certain economic variables. The model proposes that economic factors serve to control the degree to which individual and work-related factors can explain variation in turnover. It is hypothesized that individual and work-related variables will be more predictive of turnover under prosperous economic conditions than when the economy is strained. The model also proposes four classes of consequences of turnover: individual, organizational-social, organizational-economic, and societal. Recommendations for future turnover research are discussed.