This discussion focuses on elements of children's immediate experience that influence their food preferences. Some evidence suggests that there may be sensitive periods early in life that are critical for the formation of food preferences and aversions. Additionally, the familiarity and the sweetness of foods appear to be important determinants of…

The need for psychological skills in coping with anxiety on the part of athletes and coaches is discussed. Courses are proposed to teach techniques for controlling bodily responses to anxiety, self understanding and positive thinking, and goal clarification. (JD)

Self-disclosure to a therapist was investigated with 120 female subjects who viewed a video-taped vignette of a simulated psychotherapy session. Therapist self-disclosure was manipulated so that subjects saw a therapist exhibiting no disclosure, interpersonal disclosure, or intrapersonal disclosure. Subjects rated these therapists on a variety of…

Type A behavior is characterized by extremes of time-urgency, competitive achievement striving, impatience and hostility. Type A persons have distinct patterns of responding to opponents' strategies for lowering hostility. Since minimum retaliation allows the opponent control over one's behavior, the strategy should effectively lower Type A…

Understanding, one of the chief components of prevention in mental health, is not for the researcher or clinician only, but for all who may be concerned with their own conflict and pain or that of family members. Looking at neurotic disorders requires the examination of guilt which burdens individuals as they realize their failure to fulfill…

The various relationships of stress arousal and stress-prone personality traits to menstrual distress were investigated in order to quantify psychophysiological arousal differences between high and low menstrual distress symptom reporters and examine differences in stress-prone personality traits between high and low menstrual distress symptom…

The effects of meaningfulness of the stimulus materials and the presence or absence of contextual cues on problem-solving behavior were investigated. Third-graders (N=80) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions and their performance in a series of discrimination problems was observed. Subjects in Conditions I and II responded to stimuli…

This paper discusses the attitudes of terminally ill adolescent patients towards their illness and their behaviors during their treatment. Preliminary results are reported on an ongoing study of 12 boys and six girls (age 8-21) with metastatic pediatric solid tumors and lymphomas that failed to respond to conventional treatment. Interviews of…

Eight major findings are the result of an exploratory investigation into how students evaluate residence-hall environments and how they behave in them. Students report their own time allocation, space usage, study patterns, and need fulfillment. References and appendices include a sample questionnaire and improvements on residence hall facilities…

This study assesses college students' reactions to both men and women who were portrayed as behaving in a manner either congruent or incongruent with sex-role stereotypically based social expectations (e.g., either crying or evincing anger in response to either the death of a spouse or severe job criticism). The subjects were 94 women and 107 men,…

This paper explores the role of empathic arousal in mediating helping behavior. Undergraduates listened to a recording of a radio newscast that described the situation of a young woman whose parents had been killed in an automobile accident. Subjects were instructed either to imagine how the woman felt about her situation (imagine condition), or…

This final report attempts to summarize the major findings of three and one-half years of research in the area of understanding and accurately judging others. The author's research on person perception focuses on the use of sound motion pictures of interviews as the primary stimulus and vehicle for the research. Subjects used for these studies…

Subjects judged the behavior of a target person who had helped or not helped a person in distress while the target person was either alone or with confederates who also had helped or not helped. In addition, subjects were told that either (1) 80 percent of all persons tested had helped, (2) 20 percent had helped, or (3) nothing about the…

This report presents estimates of the distributions of perceptions of teachers and other school officials on selected behavioral characteristics of youths 12-17 years of age in the noninstitutional U.S. population by age and sex. These findings are based on questionnaire responses obtained from last schools attended by youths examined in the…

A stable, ordered dominance hierarchy was found via observational and sociometric methods for a group of 13-year-old boys during a five-week summer camp. This group structure was formed early in camp and was stable across settings, time, and types of dominance interactions. The hierarchy correlated significantly with the rank-orderings bed…