Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are used to measure important components of professional competence that cannot be assessed via traditional tests of knowledge and skills. Despite their increasing popularity, there is a significant gap in the validity evidence and research on the response process to support how SJTs measure their intended…

A distinction is drawn between two value systems: (1) idealistic, in which societal ideals and values are accepted as literal, moral values; and (2) pragmatic, in which values are utilitarian and norms are seen as probablistic rather than prescriptive. It was hypothesized that when expectations of fairness are disconfirmed, persons holding…

Results of paper were reported at the 1969 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. (WY)

Presents a study designed to examine the relative influence of situation and person factors on children's nonverbal communicative responsivity which was investigated during dyadic interaction. Field-dependent and socially-oriented children exhibited higher levels of nonverbal responsivity in situations providing both social and task cues. (Author)

To examine the effects of one kind of cost on helping behavior, subjects were provided with an opportunity to help spontaneously in a nonemergency situation. Helping was more frequent in nonembarrassing conditions. Results support contentions that potential embarrassment deters helping in nonemergency situations. (Author/BEF)

Since many acts of aggression in society are more than simply an aggressor-victim encounter, the role played by third person instigated aggression also needs examination. The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory procedure to systematically investigate instigation. In a competitive reaction time task, high and low Machiavellian Males…

Results of this investigation suggest that moral reasoning of college students, when assessed using the DIT format, is the same whether the dilemmas involve hypothetical or actual situations. Subjects, when presented with hypothetical situations, become deeply immersed in them and respond as if they were actual participants. (Author/BEF)

This study tests the hypothesis that persons will express relatively independent degrees of preference for ambiguity in different experiential domains. An original measure consisting of four subscales was developed to assess individual differences in the theoretical, social, economic and aesthetic domains, and was administered to a student sample.…

Verbal Situation Exercises composed by Rosenzweig showed degrees of adjustment or maladjustment to frustrating situations. Mixture of Socially-accepted and non-accepted class disruptors from grades 3,6,9 participated. More maladjusted behavior choices were elicited from rural children in comparison to their urban counterparts. Very little…

The possible effects of acquiescence response style upon endorsement of items in the Vocational Development Inventory-Attitude Scale were investigated. It was concluded that responses to the VDI-Att are not significantly affected by acquiescence; rather, it was hypothesized that they can be conceptually related to discrimination learning…

Students high in moral development cheated less than other students overall, but in a low threat/low supervision situation, they were just as likely to cheat as subjects low in moral development. (Ed.)

Repressors and sensitizers were given "noncontextual" and "contextual" tasks, with galvanic skin response as a measure of arousal. Results from the noncontextual task showed that repressors had lower arousal levels than sensitizers during perception and verbal report, but higher during free association. Findings were reversed, however, in the…

Investigated the utility of situational assessments of trait anxiety in predicting state anxiety reactions. Results indicated that the STAI-A-Trait and the S-R GTA Evaluation measures correlated significantly higher with each other than either did with the S-R GTA Physical Danger measure. Both stresses produced significant increases in state…

At the George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tennessee, 50 male students responded to a questionnaire concerning their reactions to individuals having mental or physical disabilities, to persons of another race, and to gifted persons. The 20 questions (scale items) focused on association with 12 types of "disabled" persons (disability…