Agencies conducting needs assessments in which respondents are asked about their awareness of the agency must be alert to a bias that inflates awareness (agency awareness acquiescence). A study with 157 college students demonstrated such awareness bias, which was related to the impression management component of social desirability. (SLD)

The president of the State University of New York at Binghamton sees intellectual leadership as the first responsibility of any university president. She urges presidents to consider their institution's place and time in the culture and their own personal history in determining the intellectual agenda and developing vision and creativity. (DB)

The possibility that perceptual predispositions may assist young language learners in the initial identification of words in speech was investigated in a corpus of early words. Results suggest that syllables that are stressed or final in adult speech are particularly salient to young children and likely to be extracted and included in first…

A total of 100 university students observed photographs of the faces of 9 males and 9 females at each of 5 age levels from 5 to 22 years of age, and rated the faces for attractiveness. Found a significant degree of stability in ratings of facial attractiveness across the age levels. (MM)

Premature infants with subependymal or intraventricular hemorrhage took longer to habituate on a habituation task, and scored lower on a measure of mental development, than did other premature infants or full-term infants. Both groups of premature infants were less successful than full-term infants on an object permanence task. (BC)

Clarifies the concept of aesthetic experience in terms of the stages required to actualize the phenomenon and the behaviors in which it is manifest. Examines and categorizes various conceptions of aesthetic experience that have influenced the area of aesthetics in the past 10 years. (DMM)

Reviews Gibson's contributions to the domain of perceptual learning, including her classic experiment concerning the perception of scribbles. Discusses Gibson's research on differentiation and the links between perception and learning, the status of her research and ideas, and her experimental approach. (BG)

Components of emotional processing (communication channel, processing mode, and emotional valence) were examined in psychiatric and neurological populations, using an experimental affect battery. The test battery exhibited good psychometric properties and discriminated among diagnostic groups. (Author/JDD)

This article identifies key issues in gender communication including gender as a primary social category; how to best understand gender; the role of gender stereotypes in communication; and socially created gender differences. Ethnographic research methods are seen to be particularly appropriate for investigating gender communication. (DB)

Examined single mothers' well-being and perceptions of their preschoolers' behavior. Findings from 76 single, employed mothers indicated that variables reflecting interface between work and family roles were important for well-being and perceptions of children's behavior. Depression appeared allied with stability and resources in mothers' lives;…

Describes an instrument developed to assess students' or teachers' perceptions of five dimensions of actual or preferred classroom environment: student cohesiveness, open-endedness, integration, rule clarity, and material environment. Instrument is included in the appendix. (ZWH)

Reports on gender differences in the perceptions of General Certificate of Secondary Education and A level pupils toward technology-based courses. The study involving 90 male and 94 female pupils revealed that technology is perceived as being similar to science subjects rather than to craft subjects and both group's perceptions of technology are…

Shows that role appropriation to the transition to parenthood is a three-part, overlapping process: expectations regarding roles, enactment of those roles, and negotiations about the roles. Shows that central dilemmas involve the accuracy/inaccuracy of role expectations, other's facilitation/inhibition of self's role enactment, and…

Presents examples of four board-superintendent relationships that have survived dynamic changes in school districts and communities. Key to success lies not in survival checklists but in basic principles of educational and democratic theory: rigorous search for truth, genuine understanding, mutual respect for divergent views, sincere commitment to…

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)