Area-matching strategies used by young children

Across three studies, conditions were varied under which children aged 4–5 years matched the area of a rectangle with a given width (or height) to that of a square. In the first study, subjects observed the rectangle being changed in height from trial to trial and had access to their immediately preceding response. Under these conditions, rectangle width (the dimension under subject control) was a linear decreasing function of rectangle height. This function was interpreted as evidence for a hypothetical addition/subtraction strategy for maintaining equality in area between the comparison rectangle and the standard square. As a test of this hypothesis, in a second experiment the subjects were denied access to their immediately previous response, and in a third study they were also unable to observe the rectangle as it was altered by the experimenter between trials. The purpose of these changes was to remove the information necessary for readily implementing an addition/subtraction strategy. In both studies, area matches seemed to be based on a side-matching strategy, such that subjects matched one dimension of the rectangle to one side of the standard square. It was suggested that young children use different cues or strategies with different variants of the matching task because they do not possess a fixed, specific concept of area.     

Antecedents of employees' mental health—The role of career and work satisfaction

It was hypothesized that individual and situational variables, as a whole, will show stronger relationships with work-related attitudes than with mental health indices. Work-related attitudes, on the other hand, were expected to contribute more strongly to mental health than the individual and situational variables. Results obtained from two groups of staff professionals and retail store managers, using primarily questionnaire data, supported these hypotheses. Career and work satisfaction emerged as the strongest contributors to mental health. Situational variables such as job characteristics, supervisory style, and pay related more strongly to the attitudinal variables than to mental health. This pattern suggests that career and work satisfaction may serve as intervening variables in the relationship between situational variables and mental health.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1975: A review

This paper presents a review of selected literature concerning career development and vocational behavior during 1975. Topics covered include sex roles and career development, women's careers, recent trends in interest measurement, trends in vocational theory, life span aspects of career development, vocational interventions, and racial differences and similarities in career development.     

Evaluating job satisfaction and success for emotionally maladjusted men

Work histories of male psychiatric patients were compared to see if they varied as a function of psychiatric diagnosis. It was predicted that there would be significant differences between diagnostic groups for types and levels of jobs held, amounts of job success achieved, and levels of job satisfaction attained. All three predictions were supported. Results indicated that the more severe the maladjustment, the less likely the men were to have been employed above the semiskilled level of occupations. Job satisfaction and job success were found to vary as a function of the personality characteristics of the different diagnostic groups. A direct relationship was found between severity of psychiatric disorder and unemployment time. Implications are discussed.     

Binocular disparity as a discriminable stimulus parameter for young infants

The ability of 8-week-old infants to discriminate between projected stereograms with and without retinal disparity was tested with an habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Infants in two experimental groups received six trials with either the disparity or the nondisparity stimulus and then were given two trials with the other display. Infants in two control groups viewed the same stimulus, either disparity or nondisparity, on all eight trials. There was a suggestion of some response decrement over time in both cardiac deceleration and sucking suppression, although this effect was not significant. However, significant increment was obtained on the dishabituation trials for heart rate in the group that was shifted from the nondisparity to the disparity stimulus. These results were interpreted as indicating that the infants could discriminate between stimuli when the only difference between them was binocular disparity.