When presented with abstract notions through the verbal media of books, newspapers, talks, TV and radio, people often produce quite erroneous generalizations. Describes a method of investigating such possible trends among young people and adults and reveals their extent in samples of graduates, undergraduates, adult education students and…

It was hypothesized that specific styles or verbal processing would be characteristic of 96 high school students drawn from different social class/sex groups. Such distinctive patterns of functioning, it was assumed, could be largely explained by earlier socialization experiences. Sex differences and six dimensions of verbal processing were…

A specific aspect of learning strategy (the extent to which 14 students developed their understanding on a broad or narrow front) was examined. Results support hypotheses predicting positive relationships between a broad strategy in learning, wide attention deployment, a flexible approach to problem-solving and cognitive complexity. Relationships…

A consistent picture regarding the reliability of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities cannot be obtained from current literature. A clear understanding of the stability of the MSCA would be particularly useful in establishing and planning academic programs and this research attempts to provide such an estimate of reliability. (Author/RK)

The conceptual differences between coded regression analysis and traditional analysis of variance are discussed. Also, a modification of several SPSS routines is proposed which allows for direct interpretation of ANOVA and ANCOVA results in a form stressing the strength and significance of scrutinized relationships. (Author)

This research was designed to clarify the role of autonomic response and evaluative self-awareness in test anxiety. Autonomic, self-report, and performance measures of anxiety were collected from both test-anxious and non-test-anxious individuals in an analogue testing situation under three experimental conditions. Results support cognitive…

Examines the latency of associative activation in memory by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime word and a test word, thereby establishing the minimum SOA needed to produce a significant associative priming effect on lexical decision times. (Author/RK)

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the systems model and proposes an alternative approach, the paired bind model. The paired bind orientation retains the major advantage of the systems approach (its focus upon couple and family interactions) while eliminating its major disadvantage (its oppositional tone). (Author)

Two tachistoscopic tests of cerebral lateralization, one measuring spatial functions and one measuring verbal function, were administered to 73 subjects classified by handedness, hand posture writing, and sex. Tests the proposal that an inverted hand posture is indicative of a language hemisphere ipsalateral to the dominant hand and that the…

Grant and Roberts found that houselight presented throughout the delay period on a delayed matching-to-sample task caused pigeons to demonstrate a much lower level of accuracy than was found when the delay was spent in darkness. A series of experiments was carried out to examine possible mechanisms responsible for this light-induced retroactive…

Argues for the importance of combining the concerns of the functionalist (Dewey, 1910) approach to memory with investigations of the effects of context and task demands. Two experiments are reported that demonstrate interactions between task demands and the more traditional functionalist variables. Particularly demonstrates that the effects of…

Three experiments were designed to clarify the perplexing ability of subjects to discriminate between to-be-remembered (T BR) and to-be-forgotten (TBF) items in memory. Results implicate within-list retrieval of TBR items as a potent tagging or strengthening operation that provides a basis on which those items may later be discriminated from TBF…

A series of experiments was reported in which three models of word identification were evaluated: the direct-semantic-access model, the visual-features stage model, and the phonemic-recoding stage model. A modified Stroop task was used to contrast these three models. (Editor/RK)

The design of this experiment was based on the assumption that a stressful atmosphere, on the one hand, and failure at a preliminary task, on the other, would each make an independent, additive contribution to an examinee's state of internal arousal. Because of a supposed curvilinear relationship between arousal and task performance, it was…

A formal elaboration of the original theory of achievement motivation (Atkinson, 1957; Atkinson & Feather, 1966) is proposed that includes personal standards as determinants of motivational tendencies. The results of an experiment are reported that examines the validity of some of the implications of the elaborated model proposed here. (Author/RK)