Considerable academic debate exists as to whether students with a background in economics exhibit distinct behavioural patterns that set them apart from students in other academic disciplines. Primarily, the debate concerns whether students who fit the stereotype of the economist choose to study economics (the self-selection hypothesis) or whether…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is an ongoing research program conducted at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research under a series of investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse beginning in 1975. The integrated MTF study includes annual surveys of nationally-representative samples of 8th, 10th,…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

The Personal intelligence is one of the multiple intelligences concerned with individuals' internal characteristics. It plays a major role in understanding of oneself in all one's aspects being aware of one's abilities and acting accordingly. personal intelligence also reveals the extent of individual's honesty with themselves and enhances their…

Research shows that various pharmaceuticals can offer modest cognition enhancing effects for healthy individuals. These finding have caused some academics to support liberal use of pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) in schools and universities. This approach partially arises from arguments implying there is little moral justification for…

The authors report the results of a phenomenological, qualitative research study involving 20 students who participated in a weekend poverty immersion experience. Analysis of the tape-recorded interviews included coding, checks for internal validity, and the generation of themes common to most of the research participants. Two overall results were…

Previous research regarding peer assessment has investigated the relationships between peer feedback and learners' performance. However, few studies investigate in-depth learning processes during technology-assisted peer assessment activities, particularly from affective, cognitive, and metacognitive perspectives. This study conducts a series of…

Within an experimental paradigm that simulated systematic desensitization, the effects of manipulated cognitive expectancy on avoidance behavior were evaluated. The results indicated that both overt avoidance behavior and two verbal indexes were differentially affected by expectancy and that no relationship between avoidance behavior and autonomic…

Five groups of 15 female subjects reporting fear of snakes participated in two behavioral avoidance tests employing a snake as the target object. Results are discussed both in terms of implications for psychotherapy outcome research design and possible usefulness of situational variables in the development of more effective anxiety-reduction…

Results support the hypothesized relationship between meaning and phobia. Semantic desensitization techniques based on counter conditioning of meaning were significantly effective in altering the semantic value of the word from unpleasantness to neutrality. (Author)

Administered a questionnaire on expected effects of alcohol to 150 college students. Results showed that subjects expected alcohol to affect other people more than themselves for both positive and negative effects. Moderate and heavy drinkers expected as much pleasure from alcohol as they expected others to receive. (Author/LLL)

Investigates the efficacy of two behavioral self-control procedures as additions to the typical treatment for college students' study behavior--study skills advice. Predicted self-monitoring would be an effective treatment addition to study skills advice and study skills advice would be superior to the control groups. Results supported…

Undergraduates, trained to discriminate understanding from nonunderstanding statements, verbally reinforced each statement they felt to be understanding during counselor interviews. Ratings indicated that beginning counselors had increased their understanding statements, suggesting that such statements can be a function of the number of…

This study investigated the therapeutic feasibility of self-administered punishment of imagined behavior. With heavy-smoking males, the imagined-smoking treatment was the only highly effective therapy. It was significantly more effective than the placebo or actual-smoking treatments, and it replicated. (Author)

The hypothesis that success influences task preferences was tested. Results supported the hypothesis: the probability of change in task preference was greatest under high success reinforcement ratio conditions. (Author)