Conversational skill and locus of perception

The present study attempted to identify behavioral skills associated with global perceptions of communication competence and to determine if the relationship between competence and skills varies as a function of perceptual locus. Fifteen dyadic conversations were videotaped. Each interactant rated self and partner and was rated by four observers who viewed each tape. Results indicated that subjects' perceptions of their partners' skills accounted for 87% of the variance in subjects' ratings of partners' competence and 80% of the variance in subjects'self-perceived confirmation. Observers' ratings of subjects' skills predicted 83% of the variance in observers' ratings of subjects' competence. Observers'ratings of subjects'skills were unrelated to subjects' self-rated competence.     

Validation of the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale

Relationships between sociometric indices and scores of 160 elementary-school children on the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale (CABS) were examined to determine whether this instrument differentiates children of varying levels of social competence. Children who obtained either high or low scores on peer nominations of friendship and admiration were identified and compared on CABS passive, aggressive, and assertive scores. Children who scored high on positive peer nominations responded in a significantly less aggressive manner than children who received low scores on such nominations. These effects were observed for the CABS format that consisted of stimulus situations involving adults but not for the form involving peers. With regard to responses toward peers, a significant interaction between sex and sociometric status emerged. These findings suggest the importance of incorporating subject variables such as race and sex as well as assessments of behavior toward both adults and children in isolating and training components of social skill.The authors wish to express their appreciation to Jean Birbilis, Gail Hammersly, Marieta Knopf, and Donna Wadley for their assistance in data collection and analysis.     

The Heterosocial Assessment Inventory for Women: A psychometric and behavioral evaluation

This paper presents a preliminary psychometric and behavioral evaluation of the Heterosocial Assessment Inventory for Women (HAI-W), a novel self-report instrument that evaluates five dimensions that may influence performance in 12 heterosocial situations: likelihood of initiation, anxiety, skillfulness, expectation of outcome, and influence of attractiveness. Study I obtained acceptable reliability and concurrent validity data and described the factor structure of the HAI-W with female college students. Study II found a significant relationship between the HAI-W factors and global ratings of the role-play performances of high- and low-heterosocially competent female college students as rendered by the male confederate, peer judges, and expert judges. The implications of these findings for the multidimensional assessment and facilitation of heterosocial competence are discussed.This study is part of a dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, under the direction of Michael A. Milan. Portions of these data were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Los Angeles, 1982.     

The impact of confederate responsivity on social skills assessment

The current investigation examined the degree to which judges' ratings of skill, anxiety, and attractiveness are influenced by the responsivity of the confederate. High-, medium-, and low-skilled subject-pool groupings, as well as self-referred clinical groups, were exposed to either a moderately or a minimally responsive confederate. Results indicated that subjects were rated as more skillful when interacting with a moderately responsive confederate than when interacting with a minimally responsive confederate. Further, there was a groups × condition interaction for anxiety ratings such that both the high- and the medium-skilled groups appeared more anxious under the minimal condition, whereas the low-skilled and self-referred groups did not. Self-referred subjects received significantly lower attractiveness ratings than did the high- or medium-skilled groups. Implications of these results and future directions for research are discussed.This research is based on a M.S. thesis carried out by the first author under direction of the second author.     

Factor analysis of the social performance survey schedule

There are several studies suggesting that the Social Performance Survey Schedule (SPSS) is a reliable and valid measure of social skill. However, the factorial structure of the SPSS has never been examined. In the present study, SPSSs taken by 652 college students were factor analyzed by the method of principal components and the resulting factors were rotated according to the varimax criterion. Separate factor analyses were conducted for men and women. Seven factors, which accounted for a little over a third of the total variance, were retained for each sex. A large general factor labeled Prosocial Competence emerged for both sexes. Beyond this, the factorial solutions for the two sexes tended to diverge, with males showing a large negative factor (Social Offensiveness) and three smaller negative factors and females showing five relatively small negative factors. Suggestions were made concerning additional factor analytic studies of the SPSS and the ways in which derived factors might be used in research and clinical work.This research was supported by funds from the Rutgers University Research Council. Thanks are due to Leona Aiken for her statistical consultation.     

On optimal smoothing and derivative estimation from noisy displacement data in biomechanics

Estimating derivatives from noisy displacement data is a notoriously ill-posed problem in signal processing and biomechanics. Following the work of Wood and Jennings (1978) and Hatze (1979, 1981), the present paper describes the use of optimally regularized, natural quintic splines for estimating smoothed positions, velocities, and accelerations from equidistantly sampled, noisy position measurements. It appears that the nature of the boundary conditions of the data is of some importance, since various algorithms used hitherto result in artefacts throughout the data if the true derivatives at the record ends differ significantly from zero. Natural quintic splines do not suffer from this disadvantage below the third derivative.The ill-posed character of movement analysis has some interesting implications for movement synthesis and optimization, similar to the indeterminacy of muscular co-contraction from merely external, biomechanical measurements.     

Increasing senior citizen participation in a community-based nutritious meal program

Two experiments were conducted to compare the effects of several prompting and reinforcement procedures on the participation of elderly citizens in a nutritious meal program. Experiment I employed a variation of the multiple-baseline design across three groups of approximately 60 households each. Elderly persons not previously participating in the program were introduced to the following conditions: (1) public service radio announcements for four weeks to advertise the meal program and the availability of free transportation, (2) a home visit that served as a personal invitation and a second prompt for participation, (3) a followup telephone call, and (4) an incentive menu for participation, which was sent through the mail. Results indicated that the home visits and incentives were both effective as recruitment procedures and superior to other conditions; however, incentives proved to be the most cost-effective intervention. Experiment II used a variation of the multi-element design to compare the effects of scheduled activities and incentives in maintaining higher levels of participation by those persons who had attended the meal program at least once in the past, but whose current rate of participation was low. Results showed that activities improved attendance levels somewhat and that incentives substantially increased the number of meal program participants. Data from these experiments thus indicate that relatively inexpensive procedures may be used effectively to increase the extent to which elderly persons make use of potentially beneficial community-based services.     

A test of the self-perception explanation of the effects of rewards on intrinsic interest

An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that rewards undermine or enhance intrinsic interest in a task to the extent that individuals interpret their behavior as being motivated by the reward. It was predicted that when subjects were denied the opportunity to develop and confirm this attribution, rewards would not produce an undermining effect, but rather would enhance dispositions and behavior. Subjects were recruited to evaluate a new sugar-free soft drink. Two levels of incentives (reward-no reward), two levels of examination (opportunity-no opportunity), and three levels of outcome (good-neutral-poor) were employed. The results support the prediction that an incentive's effect depends on the examination opportunity. In the examination condition, rewarded subjects attributed their behavior more to external factors than did unrewarded subjects, but gave more negative product evaluations only after tasting it. In the no examination condition, there were no differences in the attributions made by rewarded and unrewarded subjects, and rewarded subjects were more positively disposed toward the product both before and after tasting it. These results are explained as a consequence of two properties of rewards, enhancement through reinforcement and undermining through discounting, and of hypothesis-testing processes.