Parents differing along a concreteness-abstractness dimension of conceptual development, as defined by the model of Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder, described their attitudes and practices regarding their children's home play environment. This was done using structured questionnaires. Potential creativity of the 3- and 4-year-old children themselves…

This study investigated decision behavior exhibited by elementary school aged children in a laboratory decision task. An effort was made to separate 247 children into "auditory" and "visual" subjects on the basis of their performance on two immediate memory sub-tests from the revised (1968) ITPA. Since the correlation for the Visual test did not…

The present study compared the responses of Negro and white lower socio-economic ninth grade adolescents on belief in internal versus external control of reinforcement and delay of gratification under high and low status conditions. Negro students were significantly more likely to be external and to be less likely to delay gratification than were…

Concentrating on theory and practice on sensitivity training groups (T groups) in human relations training laboratories, this study investigates aspects of the process whereby participants are said to learn cooperatively about their group and about themselves as members. As evidenced by training "dilemmas" noted in the literature, relevant T group…

These are the authors' personalized statements of how organizations function, how organizational excellence is to be judged, and how an organizational development effort can contribute to the achievement of such excellence. The book deals with the fundamentals of planned change as they apply to the corporation. It describes the principles and…

This study explores the efficacy of two methods of teaching students, modeling and concept formation, to express warranted uncertainty in classroom discussions and in written work. The subjects were fifth graders from a lower middle class background who were divided into four groups: (1) a control group, (2) a group that observed a model express…

The effects of arousal on literal and inferential comprehension of text over short- and long-term retention intervals were studied using 369 elementary school children. Putative arousal manipulations were of two types: expectation and deviations from expectation as established by an advance organizer followed by text that for different…

This paper defines the variables involved in relational communication, incorporates and organizes these variables into a framework, and proposes relationships between these variables to produce a model with heuristic capabilities. Relational messages include information about the feelings, personalities, and identities of the people involved in…

There is some evidence that the timing of death may not be random. Taking into consideration some of the variables which possibly affect death, this paper reviews intervention techniques with the possible goal of saving lives. Knowing that the elderly respond to the environment, society should accept as its responsibility the provision of support…

Confined to the interaction of subject sex with stimulus complexity, this paper reports a portion of the results of an experimental study which hypothesized a series of relationships between theatre audience members' information-processing abilities and their responses to complex and simple plays. The subjects for the study were 60 female and 30…

This paper builds a theory of organizational communication which explains communication at several system levels. The theory is built around a decision-situation model of communication theory and incorporates concepts of organization structure and behavior taken from research on complex organizations. The theory is supported with original data…

The relationship between prior and present socioeconomic status and 10 symptoms of social and psychological stress were examined for mobility effects. The analysis was confined to a 5-year, intragenerational mobility panel from 2 Illinois regions--Putnam County and segments of 3 other adjacent counties in north-central Illinois, and a portion of…

An experimental preschool was set up to study the effect of mixing children differing in SES and race on racial awareness and interaction. It was hypothesized that racial self-selection could be explained in terms of SES level and that interracial contact when different SES children were included would serve to counteract racial stereotypes and…

In designing group day care for infants, special attention has been given to efficient care practices, so that all the children's health needs can be met and so that the staff will have ample time to interact with the children. One efficient method is to assign each staff member the responsibility of a particular area rather than a particular…

Human communication research has identified and tested numerous aspects of interpersonal transactions, but at present there exists no empirically verifiable data as to how people end these transactions. This study is concerned with the rhetoric of goodbye--determining and assessing the peculiar behaviors, both verbal and non-verbal, with which…