Expectations,procedural justice,and alternative reactions to being deprived of a desired outcome

People often find that they do not have some positive outcome they once expected to obtain, while others around them have attained that outcome. Two experiments were conducted to assess how four possible responses to such a situation are affected by procedural justice (i.e., the fairness of the procedures by which the object was denied) and by one's expectations about obtaining the outcome in the future. The four possible responses examined were anger responses, achievement strivings, devaluation of the object (X), and self-deprecation. A repeated-measures analysis revealed that the dependent variables were differentially affected in Study 1, but less so in Study 2. Analyses further revealed effects of procedural justice, such that unfair procedures led to more anger, lower achievement strivings, greater devaluation of X, and (in Study 1 only) marginally less self-deprecation. Expectations had only a marginal affect on achievement strivings in Study 1, and an effect on self-deprecation in Study 2, with higher expectations leading to lower achievement strivings and less self-deprecation, respectively. Procedural justice and expectations interacted to affect subjects' derogation of the agent who deprived them (Study 1) and their devaluation of X (Study 2). Implications for future research and for theoretical development are discussed.     

Expectancy,integration, and interactional processes: Age differences in the nature of words affected by sentence context

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. Across both experiments, the largest age difference in contextual facilitation was obtained for highly predictable, best completion words. Pronounced age differences in facilitation effects were also present for semantically acceptable target words which were much less predictable in the sentence context than the best completion words. However, age differences in contextual facilitation were negligible for target words which were associatively related to the best completion word, but which were not also semantically acceptable in the sentence context. Thus, the semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's as compared to adults' word identification times, both when the word was highly predictable, as well as when it was much less predictable in the sentence context.     

Do children use similar processes to read and spell words?

The use of spelling-sound information in both reading and spelling was evaluated by having children read and spell nonwords and five types of words that differed in terms of their regularity for reading and spelling. The subjects were grade 3 children who had been psychometrically defined as good readers and good spellers (“good”), good readers and poor spellers (“mixed”), or poor readers and poor spellers (“poor”). Results indicated that all children attempted to use spelling-sound correspondences in both reading and spelling, although children in both the mixed and the poor groups had weaker knowledge of these correspondences and were less systematic in their use of them. Furthermore, even though the children in the mixed group had been matched with children in the good group on reading comprehension, the number and type of errors made by the mixed subjects on both the reading and spelling tasks were more similar to those of the poor subjects than to those of the good subjects.     

Imagery, encoding specificity, and prose recall in 6-year-old children

Partial pictures depict only selected portions of prose passages. Partial pictures hypothetically aid retention by inducing young children to generate imagery for nonpictured prose. Results from two hundred eighty-eight 6-year-old children indicated that (a) partial pictures at study facilitate recall, (b) identical study and retrieval prompts facilitate recall, and (c) imagery instructions and training do not affect retention. Partial pictures apparently help children to encode information more efficiently at study, but there is no evidence that young children generate images with the aid of the partial picture cues, nor that they have a retrieval deficit for these images as suggested by M. Ruch and J. Levin.     

Patients' perceptions of treatment for kidney failure: The impact of personal experience on population predictions

Estimates of the probability of various outcomes associated with treatment for kidney failure were made by chronic dialysis patients, dialysis patients awaiting transplant, successful transplant patients, and unsuccessful transplant patients back on dialysis. The latter two groups can be considered a natural experiment testing the impact of personal experience on population predictions. Consistent with the law of small numbers and the availability heuristic, successful transplant patients gave higher estimates of the population success rate for transplantation than unsuccessful transplant patients gave.     

Orientations toward relationships: Choosing a situation in which to begin a relationship

An investigation was conducted to examine how individuals choose situations in which to initiate relationships. It was hypothesized that individuals' self-monitoring orientation and the characteristics of their relationship partners would interact to determine situation choices. Accordingly, low- and high-self-monitoring men were asked to rate their preferences for interacting in romantic and nonromantic situations with particular types of partners. The characteristics of the partners were varied along two dimensions: physical attractiveness and personality desirability. Results demonstrated that low-, relative to high-, self-monitoring individuals' preferences for interacting in romantic situations were more influenced by the personality characteristics of potential partners. In contrast, high-, relative to low-, self-monitoring individuals' preferences for interacting in romantic situations were more influenced by the physical attractiveness of potential partners. Neither of these effects occurred when preferences for nonromantic situations were assessed. Implications of these differences for the initiation, maintenance, and dissolution of relationships were discussed.     

Three-state models of memory development: A review of advances in statistical methodology

A certain family of three-state Markov processes has been widely used in experiments on children's memory. Although the statistical machinery for these models is well developed in most respects, two shortcomings have been noted in recent literature reviews. First, the parameters of the models are not identifiable. Second, goodness-of-fit tests are laborious to execute and their sampling distributions are unknown. New procedures for dealing with these difficulties are reported.     

Children's preference for novelty in selective learning: Developmental stability or change?

Data relating novelty preference to age for normal children are inconsistent, although a current theory predicts a developmental shift from novelty to familiarity preference in selective learning (D. Zeaman, 1976, in T. J. Tighe & R. N. Leaton (Eds.), Habituation: Perspectives from child development, animal behavior, and neurophysiology (pp. 297–320), Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum). Support for this theory, however, has been derived primarily from studies of retardate learning. Normal children's novelty preference was examined within a modified Moss-Harlow (E. Moss & H. F. Harlow, 1947, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 40, 333–342) design to compare Zeaman's model with that of S. L. Witryol and W. Wanich (1983, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 143, 3–8). Each of 16 problems, consisting of three single-stimulus demonstration trials and one two-choice test, was administered to 180 children (mean CA 4, 5.5, and 7 years) in three reward conditions. Novelty was manipulated by varying stimulus familiarization in the demonstration trials. Experiment 1 showed strong preferences for novel over familiar (demonstrated) stimuli at each age. Experiment 2 revealed novelty preference across age levels, two levels of reward contrast, and two levels of task difficulty. It was reasoned that Moss-Harlow tasks designed for normal children typically present a much higher level of difficulty than that intended by researchers. Furthermore, developmental decreases in novelty preference by retardates may derive from (a) transfer of training from prior experiments and (b) specific, repetitive instructions which may have directed attention away from stimulus novelty.     

Control of children's observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning

Four experiments examined the control of observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning. Second-grade children participated in Experiment 1; kindergarten, second-, and fifth-grade children were subjects in Experiments 2 and 3, and grade 5 and adult subjects were tested in Experiment 4. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 activated lights in viewing boxes; in Experiment 4, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Fifth graders and adults observed the discriminative stimuli for longer times on trials following negative feedback than on trials following positive feedback; in contrast, kindergartener's observing was not affected by type of feedback. Second graders showed smaller and less reliable reactions to type of feedback than did older subjects. These results support the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive processes associated with hypothesis testing.     

Memory and aging: Implications for theories of memory development during childhood

Research is reviewed suggesting that early school age children and older adults demonstrate a similar pattern of performance deficits (relative to the performance of young adults) on memory tasks, raising the possibility that age-related changes in some common factor might account for both memory development and memory decline. It is argued here that whereas “metamemory” theory of memory development does not provide a viable theory of memory decline, Craik's (F. I. M. Craik & M. Byrd, 1982, in F. I. M. Craik & S. E. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes, New York: Plenum; F. I. M. Craik & E. Simon, 1980, in L. W. Poon, J. L. Fozard, L. S. Cermak, D. Arenberg, & L. W. Thompson (Eds.), New directions in memory and aging, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) attentional deficit theory of memory decline provides a viable theory of memory development as well. Evidence supporting this position is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.