Utilizing 182 subjects, this study determined the concurrent validity between the Activity Vector Analysis (AVA) index of anxiety and scores on the IPAT Anxiety Scale. The IPAT and the AVA index of anxiety seem essentially to measure the same construct of basic anxiety. (Author/PN)

Psychoanalytic theory predicts that humor preference is a derivative of unresolved childhood conflicts. Analyzed students' (N=104) Rorschach protocols to yield measures of preoedipal fixation. Students ranked jokes from most to least funny. Results showed that the ranking of jokes was a function of the fixation measures for women only. (Author/RC)

The most widely used limits reported by psychoanalytic, nondirective and other therapists pertained to protection of playroom equipment, safety and health, and physical attacks upon the therapist; least used limits were those associated with symbolic expression. Results closely approximate the 1961 and 1963 investigations of Ginott and Lebo.…

Participants in assertiveness training groups who rated their degree of interest in improving their assertive skills in 26 areas indicated that being assertive when confronted with another's aggression was the highest priority, whereas saying no in various situations assumed a much lower priority. (Author)

Evidence from cross cultural studies and observational studies are provided to support the contentions that males are more aggressive than females and that this sex difference is evident as early as the preschool years. (Author/MP)

A child abuse analog was created by placing an adult in a frustrating teaching situation with a child. Failure was programed regardless of the adult's efforts. Intensity of responses to the child's signals of success and failure, particularly responses to signals of failure, increased without the adult's awareness. (Author/DB)

The role of fantasy in moderating overt expressions of aggression was investigated by examining the relationship, in 15 incarcerated adolescent women, between aggressive behavior and hostile content on the Thematic Apperception Test. Results suggest no significant relationship between these variables, at least with this incarcerated, predominantly…

Children who engaged in fantasy behavior after a frustrating incident were significantly more extrapunitive than control subjects. Age was significantly but negatively correlated with outward aggression. (Author/DB)

Two studies of aggressive and unaggressive emotionally disturbed boys (total N=72) in residential treatment examined whether the more aggressive children exhibit either an attributional bias to infer hostility regardless of the nature of the social stimuli that they appraised or an actual ability to detect true instances of hostility. (Author/CL)

Examines how variation in the number of modeled motor and verbal sex-typed behaviors might differentially affect boys' and girls' subsequent performances. (JMB)

Two studies investigated preschool children's acceptance of the reciprocity norms that allow retaliation and that require returning favors. Children viewed cartoons that portrayed animal puppets involved in reciprocal or nonreciprocal aggressive and prosocial behavior. They were then asked to evaluate the actor in each cartoon as "good"…

This study investigated the parameters of the smile as a signal. (Subjects were 733 adults of both sexes.) It was hypothesized for adults that gender influences rates of smiling, that smiles effectively elicit smile responses and that a social milieu increases smile responses. (MS)

Eighty male college freshmen participated in an experiment designed to investigate the hypothesis that enhanced arousal will facilitate subsequent aggressive behavior and that an increase in aggressive behavior will be more likely to occur in a setting of situational permissiveness rather than situational restrictiveness. (Editor)