“Did You Bring the Yarmulke for the Cabbage Patch Kid?” The Idiomatic Communication of Young Lovers

The relationships of various aspects of idiomatic communication to the interpersonal sentiments of 100 romantically involved heterosexual couples were examined. After completing measures of love, liking, commitment, and closeness, the partners of each dyad were questioned about any words, phrases, or nonverbal signs they had created that had meaning unique to their relationship. The 647 idioms reported were coded for their form (i.e., verbal versus nonverbal), context of use (i.e., private idioms, which were used only when others were not present, versus public idioms, which could be used in the presence of others), and function (i.e., confrontations, expressions of affection, labels for outsiders, nicknames, requests, sexual invitations, sexual references/euphemisms, and teasing insults). For both sexes, loving, commitment, and closeness were correlated with number of reported idioms that expressed affection, initiated sexual encounters, and referred to sexual matters. The only significant relationship for liking was between females' liking scores and the frequency of idioms with sexual referents. A log-linear analysis revealed a significant association between the function of the idioms and their form; labels for outsiders, nicknames, sexual references/euphemisms, and teasing insults were almost always verbal. A significant association was also found between idiom function and context of use; labels for outsiders and teasing insults were most often used in situations involving other people, whereas sexual invitations and sexual references/euphemisms were usually used in private situations. Finally, males were the inventors of idioms much more often than females.     

THE JOINT REPRESENTATION OF CONSTRUCTS AND ELEMENTS IN REPERTORY GRID DATA BY COMPONENT ANALYSIS: SLATER'S INGRID IS NOT THE BEST SOLUTION

The dominant method of analyzing repertory grid data in order to produce a joint spatial representation of constructs and elements has been Slater's INGRID procedure, often labeled "principal components" but more accurately described as a singular-value-­decomposition. This approach also involves centering the grid about construct means. In this article, it is shown that this removes a relationship between construct means and first component loadings for constructs. It is also shown, however, that a strong relationship between element means and element first component loadings remains. Ways of overcoming this problem are examined.     

A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF PROMPTING SELF-REGULATION IN TECHNOLOGY-DELIVERED INSTRUCTION

Two studies were conducted to examine the effect of prompting self-regulation, an intervention designed to improve learning from technology-delivered instruction. In Study 1, trainees who were prompted to self-regulate gradually improved their declarative and procedural knowledge over time, relative to the other conditions, whereas test scores declined over time for trainees who were not prompted to self-regulate. In Study 2, basic performance remained stable over time and strategic performance improved over time for trainees who were prompted to self-regulate, relative to the other conditions, whereas performance declined over time for trainees who were not prompted to self-regulate. Trainees' cognitive ability moderated the effect of the prompts on basic performance and task-specific self-efficacy moderated the effect of the prompts on strategic performance. Prompting self-regulation resulted in stronger performance gains over time for trainees with higher ability or higher self-efficacy. These results demonstrate prompting self-regulation improved performance over time, relative to the other conditions, in both online, work-related training and laboratory settings. The results are consistent with theory suggesting self-regulation is a dynamic process that has a gradual effect on performance and highlight the importance of using a within-subjects design in self-regulation research.     

CONCEPTUALIZING CONVERSATIONAL COMPLEXITY

A successful conversation requires participants to have knowledge of both the topic under discussion and the nature of conversation. This study asks whether people who are more sophisticated in their representation of conversation behave differently than their less sophisticated counterparts. This issue was probed by devising two operationalizations of what we call Conversational complexity. The two measures assessed peoples' constructs about conversation (operationalized by a measure of construct differentiation) and the manner in which people psychologically structure conversations (via a sorting task tapping the degree to which they focus on the surface features, or deeper structures, of conversations). Individuals who completed the two measures of complexity also participated in conversations and completed a number of personality indices. Each operationalization of conversational complexity was positively correlated with a variety of conversational involvement behaviors, measures of conversational enjoyment and person complexity, and memory for the interactions. Generally speaking, effective interactants who enjoyed conversations and recalled them well tended to have more constructs about conversations and psychologically represented conversations at a deeper level than their counterparts.     

Comparison of Alcohol and Other Drug Use Trends Between a Prohibitionist University and National Data Sets

This article provides information on a decade of trends and prevalence of substance use at a Midwestern prohibitionist university. Trends were based on three data collection times, 1995, 2000, and 2005. This information was compared with results of a number of national surveys to identify trends in the data. Total averages for the prohibitionist sample were 42.6% for alcohol use; 18.2% for binge drinking; 35.4% for tobacco use; and 34.1% for marijuana use. With the exception of binge drinking, which remained stable, the gap between substance use rates for the prohibitionist university and the results of national surveys have widened slightly.