Investigated needs and coping strategies of 124 university students, five university staff, and five other persons involved in long-distance relationships. Most effective coping strategies appeared to be frequency of visits and quality of verbal communication. Results support the importance of relationship subtypes and frequent visits. (Author/NB)

Use level, visual encounters, crowding expectations, and feelings were examined by regression techniques to explain perceived crowding among innertube floaters. Degree of user specialization and specificity for any given activity and place is offered as an explanation for the discrepancy from previous findings. (Author/DF)

These studies conducted before and after implementation of an international residence program indicate the proximity of American students to foreign students in conventional residence halls. International halls encourage cross-cultural interaction and interest in international activities. (NRB)

Analyzes the use of physical and imagined space and time in three plays. Describes how these features interact, assume dramatic force, and augment the tension, irony, and meaning of the play. The plays used are Chekhov's "The Three Sisters," Moliere's "Tartuffe," and Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." (JMF)

Two studies examined 9- to 15-month-olds' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback. Results showed that physical connectedness between stimuli and reward was key to performance. In the absence of the perception that stimulus and reward were components of a single thing, even close spatial and temporal proximity were…

Data from a sample of 595 Canadians who care for elderly relatives suggest that the spatial arrangement of home, workplace, and the relative have an impact on stress. Travel time to work and to the elder impinge on work and family responsibilities. Most respondents sought to modify the home-elder axis rather than the home-work axis. (SK)

Projective spatial terms such as ''below'' specify the location of one object by indicating its spatial relation with respect to a reference object. These relations are defined via a reference frame that consists of a number of parameters (orientation, direction, origin, and distance) whose settings configure the space surrounding the reference…

Recent legislative, policy, and research initiatives affirm the importance of improving social outcomes for adolescents with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities. Using observational methodology, we examined the influence of level of integration and Peer Buddy proximity on social interaction between students with intellectual disabilities…

Using a message interpretation perspective, this study (N = 379) examined how sex of the student, sex of the teacher, and the setting affect the messages students receive from a teacher's excessive use of immediacy. Results reveal that students interpret excessive immediacy from female teachers as caring, but the same behavior from male teachers…

In her second semester teaching for Arizona State University, the author suddenly found herself teaching a fully online writing course for the first time. Originally she had been scheduled to teach the course in a hybrid format, meeting face to face with students once a week; however, a coding error in the online class schedule resulted in the…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

A naturalistic study of 112 families in two parks examined proximity and touching between family members as a function of age and sex of child, sex of parent, and family composition variables. Mothers and fathers were strikingly similar in their behavior. Distance from parent increased and touching decreased as age of child increased from the…

According to Piaget, young children have a profoundly different conception of distance than do adults. In fact, Piaget argues that young children do not have a conception of distance since they do not conceive of distance as being composed of fixed units of space. In contrast, results of a series of studies indicate that in tasks requiring…

Preschool children copied peg locations with standardized comparison pegboards aligned horizontally and diagonally and with three levels of pegboard complexity. Error patterns varied with type of alignment and display complexity. Results failed to support Bryant's hypothesis that mirror image confusions are no more frequent than other in-line…

Results of a study to determine whether paired-comparisons i intransitivity is a function of intransitivity associated with specific stimulus objects rather than a function of the entire set of stimulus objects suggested that paired-comparisons intransitivity relates to individual differences variables associated with the respondent. (Author/CTM)