A total of 128 recently separated mothers and their children were interviewed and completed a number of adjustment measures as well as a measure of interparent acrimony. Legal information regarding the separation and divorce, which also serves as a measure of acrimony, was collected from public court records. Several variables assessing…

The developmental psychology literature has focused on strategy use and comprehension monitoring of children performing simple memory tasks; however, less attention has been given to the same factors in older subjects engaged in more complex cognitive tasks. In order to evaluate study strategy effectiveness, and students' ability to self-monitor…

Over 75 percent of the students enrolling as freshmen in Chicago's public high schools during 1978, 1979, and 1980 made up the sample for a study of the student characteristics that affected dropout rates. The characteristics assessed were reading achievement (as indicated by eighth-grade standardized test scores), age at enrollment in high…

To systematically test previous assumptions about grief in widows and divorcing women, 410 separated, divorced, or widowed women, between the ages of 23 and 76, with at least one child, completed the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory--Form C, the Attachment Index, and the…

Four studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between communication and predictive accuracy. Subjects, students enrolled in various college speech and communication classes, completed the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values, first in terms of their own values and then in terms of how they believed a specified target would respond.…

While alcoholism is no longer regarded as a unitary disorder, conventional measures of congition and personality have yet to be shown capable of consistently predicting clinical outcomes. To investigate cognitive dysfunction and locus of control as predictors of post treatment outcome in a large sample of alcoholics, 106 alcoholics (74 men, 32…

This study investigated the ways in which 56 children in families facing transfer and relocation viewed their adjustment to a corporate move by examining the children's attitudes toward moving, schools, and their new neighborhood. The study also examined: (1) changes in children's activities before and after the move; and (2) factors that made…

While forgiveness has long been a crucial concept in the churches' formulations for the establishment and the preservation of spiritual, social, and emotional health, consideration of forgiveness by psychology pales in comparison. Research is needed to identify the psychological factors in mothers and fathers which serve as antecedents of the…

This study assessed the impact of an explicit goal to remember and thematic organization on the strategic behavior and recall performance of preschoolers. A total of 41 subjects were instructed either to remember 12 items for later "purchase" at a play store or to play with them. The items for half the children in each condition were…

Findings from a study of 47 children between 3.5 and 12 years of age who received tonsillectomies at a children's hospital are presented. During a home visit before hospitalization, the child's adjustment, cognition, temperament, and family characteristics were assessed. Tonsillectomies were followed by an overnight stay at the hospital, and…

Because research had indicated that there is a correlation between older fathers and Down's Syndrome, this study attempted to generalize that knowledge to other genetically attributable cases of mental retardation. Fathers (N=222) who had institutionalized offspring labeled as mentally retarded and a comparison group of 248 fathers were analyzed.…

To find predictive relations between measures taken in infancy and later scores on intelligence tests, a study was made that measured in the infant those cognitive processes examined later in life. Operant conditioning tasks were employed which required 3-, 7-, and 11-month-old infants to execute some response to produce an environmental…

Individual variability in response to behavioral weight loss programs remains an unresolved and perplexing issue for health psychologists. Determining in advance who will succeed or fail at losing weight would be useful in devising programs that produce a more homogeneous and dramatic response to treatment. In order to examine which responses to…

Health psychologists continue to have difficulty identifying prognostic indicators of weight loss success. Psychological, social, and demographic factors have been examined, but correlations with weight loss are disappointing. Actual behaviors or quantifications of specific actions and historical measures were examined for their validity in…

Nursing, as a profession dealing with the health care system, places considerable emphasis on empathy, i.e., responsiveness to the feelings of another. To investigate whether individual differences in empathy are reflected in freshmen nursing students' scores on the Paired Hands Test (PHT), which measures the construct of the "others'…