Comparison of vocational school graduates and dropouts

Graduates and dropouts from six vocational training programs were compared on data taken from school records and from their responses to a questionnaire. Results revealed that age, level of education, high school completion, marital status, physical or health disabilities, and GATB scores were not significant factors in distinguishing between graduates and dropouts in vocational training programs. Two significant factors were: (1) whether the vocational school offered the student's first choice of a vocational program, and (2) whether a student transferred from a college academic program to a vocational program or directly entered a vocational program without prior college academic work.     

Work orientation vs hygienic orientation: A bi-polar approach to the study of work motivation

Based on the work of Herzberg and associates 1959 a bi-polar measure of work orientation vs hygienic orientation was constructed. In addition to providing reliability estimates, the convergent and discriminant validity is shown through correlation of the measure with other measures of work motivation, personality measures, values, and abilities. Finally, criterion-related validity is shown by correlating the new measure with supervisor's ratings of how long it will take newly hired college graduates to reach the third level of management.     

Developmental differences in frequency judgments of words and pictures

Children in kindergarten, third, and fifth grades were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented for varying numbers of times on the study trial). In both picture and word conditions, half of the Ss estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two items had occurred more often on the study trial (relative judgments). The primary finding was that while frequency judgment performance improved with age for both pictures and words, there was relatively greater improvement for pictures (i.e., the picture-word difference increased with age). These results lend strong support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning and, in particular, may be useful in accounting for effects associated with age and with age by stimulus mode interactions.     

Social facilitation in chickens: A different level of analysis

An assumption of the arousal (D × H) model of social facilitation effects is that in an otherwise constant stimulus situation the simple presence or absence of a conspecific has a quantitative influence on the D component, and that the habit hierarchy in the situation (H) is unaffected. However, certain evidence from avian subjects seemed inconsistent with the multiplicative effects predicted by the model, and experiments were conducted with the aim of resolving this discrepancy. In general, chickens were tested for consummatory responses in the company of companions, in isolation, or in the company of strangers. Clear findings emerged from these tests that showed that only the companion conditions were “facilitative”. Under the other test conditions there were qualitative (as opposed to merely quantitative) shifts in responses. Apparently, the different social test conditions evoked qualitatively different response hierarchies, and “facilitation” reflected this sort of shift rather than simple quantitative changes in arousal (D) across conditions. It was argued, therefore, that the appropriate level of analysis for facilitation effects for animals in a free response situation is not within the (D × H) envelope, but rather at the level of S (stimulus situation) in the S → (D × H) → R formulation. Implications for the analysis of social facilitation effects in humans were discussed.     

The effects of perceived similarity upon the use of reward and punishment

Subjects were led to perceive a trainee as either similar or dissimilar to themselves. During subsequent influence trials, subjects attempted to assess the causes of the trainee's performance and to employ rewards, punishments, or manipulations of the trainee's environment to optimize her performance. It was predicted that subjects would perceive the performance of dissimilar trainees as caused more by the dispositional factor of motivation than the performance of similar trainees, and that dissimilar trainees would thus be rewarded more upon success as well as punished more upon failure. The hypotheses were supported, and a model of reward-punishment behavior and attribution is discussed.     

Auditory-verbal short-term memory impairment and conduction aphasia

The specific impairment of performance on repetition tasks has classically been identified with conduction aphasia. It is argued that this impairment can be subdivided and a deficit in span performance distinguished from that of the reproduction of single words. An explanation of the span deficit in terms of auditory-verbal short-term memory is preferred to hypotheses involving disconnections or damage to order retention systems. It is shown that a short-term memory component is present in many patients previously classified as conduction aphasics.