Individual differences in immediate serial recall: A matter of mnemonics?

Normal adults differ in a fairly general immediate serial recall ability which is commonly assessed on individual IQ tests. Two experiments tested the role of rehearsal, grouping, and chunking strategies in producing such individual differences. The general approach was to limit interindividual variation in the application of these mnemonics and observe the effects on individual differences in recall. This was accomplished by (1) presenting items too fast to allow variation in rehearsal strategy and (2) requiring all subjects to group and chunk items in the same way. Both manipulations affected average recall, but neither one affected the size or order of individual differences. It was concluded that immediate serial recall differences between normal adults are largely a consequence of something other than differences in rehearsal, grouping, or chunking strategies.     

Habituation during exposure treatment: Distraction vs attention-focusing

To investigate the effects of distraction and attention-focusing during in-vivo exposure to feared stimuli, the responses of 16 obsessive-compulsives with washing rituals were studied. A cross-over design was employed in which 6 of the subjects underwent exposure with attention focusing on the first day followed by exposure with distraction on the second day. The remaining subjects received the reverse order. Habituation of both heart rate and subjective anxiety was observed under both conditions, the rate of habituation tending to remain constant throughout the 90-min exposure. Greater between-session habituation and greater synchrony between the psychophysiological and the subjective measures of anxiety was observed when attention-focusing preceded distraction. Since habituation and synchrony have previously been found to be positively related to treatment outcome, the present results suggest that treatment by exposure to feared stimuli may be more effective if attention-focusing is promoted.     

Conditional reasoning and the competence-performance issue: A developmental analysis of a training task

Empirical investigations of conditional reasoning have generally found that both children and young adults perform poorly on tasks that require the selection or evaluation of those propositions that test the truth status of conditional statements (if p then q). Earlier work (D. O'Brien & W. F. Overton, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1980, 30, 44–60) suggested that poor performances with these tasks by young adults show improvement following the introduction of evidence that contradicts earlier faulty inferences, and this improvement generalizes to other conditional reasoning tasks. The effects of the contradiction training were not found with younger subjects. The present research is an extension of the contradiction training paradigm. Ten-, fourteen-, and eighteen-year-olds were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement with an evaluation and a conditional syllogism task. Significant improvement in performance was found for the twelfth grade students following the contradiction training, and this generalized across tasks. This effect was not found for the two younger groups. The usual poor performance of the oldest group is considered to be a false negative assessment of their conditional reasoning competency. Further, it is suggested that several correct performances of younger reasoners are false positive assessments of their conditional reasoning competency.     

Selectivity and strategy in early search

Early information-processing strategies were examined in a study of very young children's search for hidden objects. Sixteen younger children (mean age: 1 year; 11 months) and sixteen older children (mean age: 2;6) received search problems in which observational and/or verbal information about an object's location was provided. The question of primary interest was how they would respond when given two conflicting sources of information, which differed in modality (observational vs verbal) and in currentness. Both younger and older children showed some use of an appropriate strategy of relying on the more current information, although they did not follow it consistently. Children also showed preferential use of observational over verbal information and response biases favoring the middle location. Age differences were found in children's use of verbal information, in the degree to which they benefitted from practice, and in response biases. These results suggested a distinction between two aspects of the development of search: the acquisition of new search skills and the establishment of appropriate priorities among skills already in the child's repertoire.     

Evaluation of social competence training in the schools

A social competence program for high risk children is described and evaluated in this paper. Advanced undergraduates majoring in psychology used interpersonal problem-solving techniques to work with 32 maladapting first through third graders who were seen on a small group basis. The intervention program was conducted for 14 weeks. Compared to a control group of 32 children, results indicated that children in the program made siginficantly greater gains in classroom adjustment as rated by teachers. Additionally, socimetric status served as a criterion for evaluating program effectiveness. Results demonstrated that children who participated in the social competence training made significantly greater gains in peer acceptance as measured by a brief sociometric questionnaire than the controls. The implications of these findings and the methodological limitations of the study are discussed.     

The effects of unipolar sex-role identities and situational determinants on components of fear of success

In the present study the relationship between unipolar models of sex-role identity (i.e., the degree to which a person perceives him/her self as relatively masculine and/or feminine) and situational cues (i.e., females engaged in successful activities which vary in their sex-role appropriateness) on fear of success was investigated. An alternative, objective measure of fear of success was employed which generated 16 variables thought to reflect various theoretical and empirical components of the motive to fear success. These variables dealt with personal attributes of the successful characters, reasons for their success, and possible consequences of their success. It was found that situational rather than psychological variables are of greater importance in affecting female response to female success. However, there was some support for the notion that general diffusion of sex-role identity (undifferentiated sex-role identity group) rather than high femininity may be related to avoidance of success.