Anxiety research in Japan

Abstract

This article focused on traumatic stress and adjustment in the Middle East. Conservation of Resources (COR) stress theory was proposed as a template to explain the relationship between traumatic circumstances and subsequent adjustment. According to COR theory, moderate and major life events produce negative psychological, functional, and health sequelae to the extent that resource loss is experienced. Resource loss that is developmentally overwhelming, or chronic, or a threat to survival was proposed to produce extreme or prolonged adjustment difficulties. Conversely, the replenishment of resources was seen as alleviating psychological suffering. COR theory was applied broadly to children, adults, civilians, and military personnel.     

Students' perceptions of characteristics associated with social success: Changes during early adolescence

Students' endorsement of different characteristics associated with social success (sincere, responsible, dominant, disingenuous behaviors, appearance/athletic characteristics) were examined at six-month intervals for four time points spanning the transition from elementary to middle school (N = 558; 53% girls, 47% boys; 56% African American, 44% European American). Students' perceptions of socially successful children as sincere and responsible declined over time, whereas students' perceptions of socially successful children as dominant, disingenuous, and attractive/athletic increased over time. However, sincere behavior remained a top-rated characteristic at all time points and dominant and disingenuous behavior remained at the bottom, indicating that although the developmental trends were concerning the overall picture was not bleak. At all time points, girls endorsed sincere behavior as more important, and dominant and disingenuous behaviors and appearance/athletic characteristics as less important, to social success than boys. African American girls perceived appearance/athletic characteristic as less important to social success than other students.     

Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality

A perceiver's actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed.     

Existential measurement: A factor analytic study of some current psychometric instruments

The foray of quantification research into the arena of existentialism and ontology has given rise to several psychometric instruments pertinent to the area. Both exploratory and Confirmatory principal-factor analyses were used to study the relationships among 16 existential scales currently in use in the research literature. Participants were 133 individuals comprised of 74 females and 59 males with a median age of approximately 30.5 years. Approximately one half of the sample was in attendance at the University of Regina and Saskatchewan during the 1976–1977 fall term, while the remainder was drawn from the respective communities. Confirmatory factor analysis supported both the prediction of substantial condensation of existential scales and the presence of an avoidance of ontological confrontation factor. Exploratory factor analysis provided some support of the theory that the avoidance of existential confrontation is a central function of neurosis. Extracted factors were interpreted and examined with respect to implications for existential-ontological theory and research.     

Recall in preschool children

Free recall, cued recall, color recall, organization in recall, and sorting of 3- and 4-year-olds was assessed on 9-item lists of objects that were orthogonally varied on color and category dimensions. Half of the children in each age group were presented items successively, and the other half simultaneously. Older children recalled more items than younger children in both free and cued recall, and also organized their recall more. Moreover, simultaneous presentation benefited the older, but not younger children. Clustering and sorting data suggested a decreasing reliance on perceptual information, and increasing utilization of conceptual information, over the preschool years. The results were discussed in terms of the importance of concrete, external stimulus support at both time of encoding and retrieval.     

Statistical analysis of binary relational data: Parameter estimation

Binary interaction data, measuring the presence or absence of a relation between pairs of actors in a “dyadic interaction situation,” are commonly gathered to study the social structure of the group of actors. Recent developments have made the statistical analysis of such data statistically easier and more substantively sophisticated. These developments allow researchers to simultaneously study several sociometric structural properties, such as reciprocity, differential popularity, and equivalence of actors. Building on this research, we review the stochastic models responsible for this breakthrough, and discuss methods for estimating expected values and model parameters. Throughout, we also highlight recent advances designed to incorporate nodal or actor attribute data into the relational data analysis. We conclude with an example illustrating these ideas based on conversational activities among actors in a group of eight people.     

Partial reinforcement and autoshaping of the pigeon's key-peck behavior

Pigeons were exposed to continuous and partial reinforcement (25%) schedules in an autoshaping procedure. The number of trials and/or pairings per session were equated across two factorial group sets and all groups were trained for a fixed total number of acquisition trials (192). When acquisition was analyzed as a function of reinforcements delivered, the groups receiving fewer number of trials per session acquired the response faster, independently of the percentage of reinforced trials. Moreover, the number of reinforcements to satisfy an acquisition criterion was a monotonic function of the number of trials per session but not of the schedule. The results are discussed in relation to the neocontinuity and the scalar expectancy theories.