A prototype is a theoretical standard against which real people can be evaluated. To derive a prototype of a lonely person, 40 students were asked to describe a lonely person whom they knew. All descriptions were studied by judges who formed a final listing and frequency of all identified features. The 18 features which formed the prototype fell…

Although sports are a part of the child's everyday experience, little is known about factors that relate to children's participation in sports, to their perceptions of self-competence in sports, and to the impression by others of the competence. Children (N=110) participating in a Pediatric Sports Medicine Project completed the psychological…

The effects of observational purpose are thought to impact on such diverse processes as categorization, behavior perception, trait ascription, and memory. The role of observational purpose in the categorization of behavior was explored to determine whether differences between trait and goal concepts affect certain information-processing…

The stimulus for this colloquium was the convergence of several significant developments bearing on the construct validation of standardized tests and other assessment methods. Of these developments, some were fundamental to psychology as a science; others reflected socio-political pressures on measurement in education and employment. The ten…

This paper reviews, compares, and summarizes writings from 1974 to 1980 which address the concept of burnout. The 48 writings are summarized in a tabular format and presented in chronological order to provide the reader with a sense of trends. The table also includes authors, year of publication, the occupation of the "burned-out" individual, and…

A survey of 47 Pennsylvania school districts examined the traits of deference and authoritarianism among educators and investigated the relationship between these two psychological qualities and school administrative promotion. Questionnaires returned by 493 school administrators and teachers measured each respondent's degrees of authoritarianism…

The study described in this paper examined certain personality factors and dispositions characteristic of two types of inner city black high school students: those who achieve and those who fail to achieve. Interviews with eight black students from a ghetto high school in Chicago were analyzed. This analysis revealed six dichotomies which seemed…

People's cognitive maps (images of self, beliefs and values, evaluations of relationships with individuals and groups) determine attitudes and behavior, provide the basis for communication, and determine in part their response to events. The cognitive map of an organization performs the same function for groups. Thirty-five newspaper employees…

The effects of three major variables--the perceived sex of the evaluatee, the sex of rater, and the sex-role identity of rater--were investigated with respect to conceptions of psychological health. The Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Sex Role Stereotype Questionnaire were administered to 222 undergraduate students. Using the difference in the mean…

This study investigated possible sex differences in need for achievement (nAch) among 225 organizational employees as measured by a nonprojective questionnaire developed by Hermans (1970). Further, several hypotheses suggested by previous research were tested in an effort to explain sex differences in nAch. A significant difference between males…

A recent revision of the proposed DSM III description of the borderline category is presented with reference to the work of Masterson and Grinker. The contributions of Roger Shapiro and his group to a psychoanalytic formulation of the developmental and familial dynamics are summarized with reference to genetic factors and the lack of validation,…

A Sample of 228 suicide attempters admitted in the emergency rooms of four general hospitals in an industrial city was studied as part of an ongoing follow-up investigation of the interaction of life situations and stresses and coping skills. Approximately 60% of the sample came from chaotic homes torn apart by family conflict. An assortative…

Field independence, empathy, perceived social distance, and self-esteem are being examined in this on-going investigation of the characteristics of a good language learner. The results of various measures of these four variables are being correlated with language proficiency tests and teacher and self-evaluations. It is suggested that conflicting…

Course instruction was manipulated to yield two different levels of structure in an exploratory analysis of the effects of course structure on student satisfaction in 166 introductory educational psychology students. Results suggest that student satisfaction for different degrees of course structure depends on personality attributes. Seven…

Much research in the area of person perception has dealt with the problem of how people organize information about other people, including how familiarity mediates the cognitive organization of person information. One multi-operational investigation found that information sets about familiar people, as opposed to unfamiliar people, resulted in the…