Affective isolation as a coping strategy for persons with low and high amounts of life stress

Previous research has investigated two diverse operational definitions of stress, experimentally induced, short-term stress and long-term, life stress. The purpose of this study was to intersect these two research methodologies and determine the effect of a laboratory-induced stress (failure feedback) on persons with differing levels of life stress. Women with high or low amounts of life stress were given failure feedback, no failure feedback, or a cognitive coping strategy (affective isolation) in addition to failure feedback. Failure feedback increased self-reported anger and anxiety immediately following feedback and also after a follow-up test and decreased expectations about performance for the second test. Affective isolation significantly reduced anger and anxiety but failed to affect expectations. Women with high amounts of life stress reported significantly less anxiety than women with low amounts of life stress in response to failure feedback. These results were interpreted within C. D. Spielberger's (in C. D. Spielberger & R. Diaz-Guerrero (Eds.), Cross-cultural anxiety, New York: Wiley, 1976) cognitive model. It was proposed that differing levels of previous life stress cause people to make varying judgments about the degree of threat in a short-term stressful situation. Persons with high amounts of life stress may not be aroused in response to short-term stress because they perceive the short-term stress as only a “drop in the bucket” compared to the other events which they have experienced.     

Metamemory and the transfer of an interrogative strategy by EMR children

EMR children were taught to produce an interrogative strategy as an aid to paired-associate learning. Interrogative training was spread over four sessions with experimenter guidance gradually faded; training was followed by tests of long-term retention for the trained items, strategy maintenance, and generalization. Metamemory was assessed prior to training and following generalization. Analysis of recall demonstrated successful maintenance and generalization of the interrogative strategy; the quality of elaborations produced by the trained children predicted recall accuracy. Importantly, metamemory pretest measures for the interrogative trained children were related to strategy use at generalization. Metamemory posttest reliably predicted recall during training, maintenance, and generalization sessions and strategy use at maintenance. Interrogative training did not noticeably improve general aspects of metamemorial knowledge.     

Development of classification: The use of similarity and dimensional relations

Findings about perceptual development indicate that overall similarity is the primary perceptual relation by which young children compare complex objects. Traditional studies of classification, however, did not focus on children's organizational use of holistic relations but rather on their ability to classify by dimensions or criterial attributes. The results from such traditional studies suggest that young children are deficient classifiers. The present research investigated the possibility, contrary to the traditional view, that 4- to 6-year-old children are competent and systematic classifiers at least by overall similarity. In three experiments, preschoolers and kindergarteners classified various sets of multidimensional stimuli that could be organized into categories by overall similarity or by dimensional attributes. Consistent with the research in perceptual development, the children were highly attentive to overall similarity. However, the preschoolers in particular showed marked difficulty in using this relation to form categories of more than two objects. The children's difficulties were highly reminiscent of traditional claims about early classification. Analyses of the classification strategies used by the children, however, suggest that even the youngest children understood the purpose of a classification. The developmentla changes appear to be in the ability to execute a classification. Importantly, type of classification strategy was independent of type of category organization. Individual children used the same strategies both when classifying by overall similarity and by dimensional attributes. These results strongly suggest that it is the classification skills themselves, and not just the ability to classify by particular relations, that change with age.     

Response conflict theory,error rates and hybrid processing: A reply to McLeod

McLeod (1977) has proposed a parallel processing model of the psychological refractory period quite similar to an earlier model most recently adumbrated by Kantowitz (1974a). This article corrects some erroneous statements made by McLeod about the testability of the response conflict model and emphasizes the importance of error data in distinguishing among conceptually similar models of the PRP effect.     

Another look at the theoretical assumptions of adolescent egocentrism

We attempt in this paper to reevaluate the theoretical assumptions of D. Elkind's theory of adolescent egocentrism Child Development, 38, 1025–1034). We argue that the construct is not well placed in the ontogenetic context of Piagetian logical development, and that the theory cannot account for stage transition or the appearance of the imaginary audience (IA) and personal fable (PF) components. We argue that the IA and PF constructions are better understood as problems in interpersonal understanding. These components are reinterpreted in terms of stage sequence that describes the ontogenesis of interpersonal understanding. The advantages of this model are highlighted.     

Perceptual interference and hemispheric specialization

Two experiments evaluated the effect of stimuli presented at fixation on the recognition of faces or random shapes presented to the left or right visual half-field (VF). Increasing the processing demands of the center stimulus produced a large, linear decrease in recognition from both VFs for both faces and shapes. Recognition of random shapes was decreased more in the right visual field by center digits and in the left VF by center faces and shapes. In addition, interference was found between the VF faces and the center digits to the left of fixation. It was concluded that differences in the processing capacity of the two hemispheres are a function of the verbal-nonverbal nature of the stimuli at a later stage in processing but that the two hemispheres may also differ along other perceptual dimensions at an earlier stage of visual recognition.