Self-destructiveness can be viewed in two ways: as performing an act which one knows cognitively is not conducive to one's welfare but nonetheless leads to some pleasurable affect (e.g., overeating, smoking); or not performing an act one knows one should perform but which has some negative affective consequences (e.g., dental checkups, saving…

Two Minnesota Importance Questionnaire (MIQ) scales, Creativity and Independence were validated by experiment. Subjects (N=68) were exposed to four task conditions representing joint combinations of high or low levels of Creativity and Independence. The behavioral results were consistent with the subjects' MIQ score levels on the two scales,…

Compulsivity and obsessiveness are vaguely defined terms which include a broad range of behaviors and cognitions that have been elusive to quantify. To introduce the 22-item Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (OCS) and to perform preliminary validation studies, 114 (46 male, 68 female) college students and 57 counseling clients completed the OCS on two…

The researchers devised a system for classifying earliest school recollections (ESRs). To determine the validity of this system, judges classified 100 third- and fourth-grade public school students according to their earliest school recollections. A statistically significant agreement was found between judges' and teachers' classifications of…

This study examined the effectiveness of the Behavior Summarized Evaluation to discriminate 58 autistic from 58 nonautistic mentally retarded children. The measure clearly separated the two samples with between-group differences highest on four items indicating the most particular pattern in autistic children was the association of autistic…

The Situational Self-statement and Affective State Inventory, a research inventory comprised of five hypothetical situations involving interpersonal conflict, and a series of self-report measures of psychopathology were administered to 224 undergraduates to examine the correlational relationship between specific cognitions and affective states in…

Development and initial validation are described for an instrument to assess the behavioral coping skills of adolescents. The Assessment of Behavioral Coping Skills (ABCS) was designed for use in the South Carolina Coping Skills Project, a school-based coping skills prevention program for adolescents at high risk for substance abuse. The ABCS…