Time perspective of female prisoners related to success in a training program.

This study compared scores on future time perspective of 50 female prison inmates who were participating in a vocational training program within the Julia Tutwiler Prison. There was no control group. Zimbardo's measure of future time perspective, administered a year earlier, was associated with success or failure in the program. Associations of future time perspectives with education, age, and ethnicity were investigated. An analysis of covariance between the 21 graduates and 16 dropouts while controlling for education was significant. Despite the incomplete design, some implications are of interest.     

The effect of a prior presentation on temporal judgments in a perceptual identification task

Subjects read aloud words presented once at the rate of one per second. A perceptual identification task, involving 30- or 50-msec presentations, followed. Some of the words presented for identification had been read previously; others were new. After each presentation, in addition to identifying the word, the subjects judged its duration. The data indicate that a single presentation of a word affects its later perception, as revealed by enhanced perceptual identification, longer duration judgments, and better temporal discrimination. A second experiment showed that a single presentation influenced duration judgments even when identification was not required. The final experiment addressed the issue of what is preserved in memory from a prior presentation. The results from the three experiments indicate that duration judgments provide a valuable dependent measure of memory in the perceptual identification task and support the misattribution hypothesis: A prior presentation enhances perceptual identification, and this increase in relative perceptual fluency is incorrectly attributed to a longer presentation duration.     

Contextual cuing and memory performance in brain-damaged amnesics and old people

In Experiment 1, groups of Korsakoff amnesics and alcoholic controls learned a list of paired-associate words in a standard testing room or in a room with distinctive contextual features. Recall was tested 48 hr later in the same or other context. This procedure was repeated in Experiment 2 with old people living in institutions or in the community, but matched for age, health, education, and socioeconomic background. The amnesic patients and institutionalized old people, relative to their comparison groups, were more impaired in recalling the lists under standard conditions and were more responsive to contextual cuing, especially when the distinctive cues were provided during original learning. The results highlight the susceptibility to interference of Korsakoff amnesics and institutionalized old people and offer further evidence that both groups are more responsive to salient contextual cues than either young people or old people living in the community.     

The level of anxiety in counseling

Pastoral Psychology -     

Emote aloud during learning with AutoTutor: Applying the Facial Action Coding System to cognitive–affective states during learning

In an attempt to discover the facial action units for affective states that occur during complex learning, this study adopted an emote-aloud procedure in which participants were recorded as they verbalised their affective states while interacting with an intelligent tutoring system (AutoTutor). Participants’ facial expressions were coded by two expert raters using Ekman's Facial Action Coding System and analysed using association rule mining techniques. The two expert raters received an overall kappa that ranged between .76 and .84. The association rule mining analysis uncovered facial actions associated with confusion, frustration, and boredom. We discuss these rules and the prospects of enhancing AutoTutor with non-intrusive affect-sensitive capabilities.     

Drooping out: Relationship of speaking anxiety to self-esteem, crime, and educational achievement.

This study focused on the relationship that anxiety about speaking has to educational achievement, self-esteem, and type of crime. The data gathered from 46 female felons indicated significant relationships and suggested that programs designed to decrease anxiety about speaking can be effectively presented. Perhaps such treatment should be the first step in developing and correcting deficiencies in skills thereby preventing the skid toward dropping out and delinquency.     

Influence of Question Format and Text Availability on the Assessment of Expository Text Comprehension

This study examines how passage availability and reading comprehension question format (open-ended vs. multiple-choice) influence question answering. In two experiments, college undergraduates read an expository passage and answered open-ended and multiple-choice versions of text-based, local, and global bridging inference questions. Half the participants were allowed to refer to the passage when answering the questions and half were not. Participants' prior domain knowledge relating to the text contents was assessed using multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Correlation-based analyses in the two experiments indicated: (a) a decline in the relationship between prior domain knowledge and comprehension when the passage was available during question answering; and (b) a high correlation between multiple-choice and open-ended question answering performance when the passage was not available for reference. Overall the results indicate that the nature of the reading comprehension assessment is influenced by the specific task with which comprehension is assessed.