Research suggests that individuals who were never heavy, were once heavy but lost weight, or who are currently obese can be differentiated by physical self concept, number of hours spent in various activities, and the hierarchial reinforcement value of different behaviors. Subjects (N=99) completed the Tennessee Self-Concept Test, the Self-Control…

Although widowhood is a disruptive and inevitable phenomenon for many older people, few studies have explored either adjustment to widowhood or the impact of widowhood on the lives of elderly people. Recently widowed persons (N=51), ranging in age from 49 to 83 years old, were interviewed to examine their relatively immediate psychosocial…

Several researchers have explored the role of alcohol in domestic violence and attributions of blame. To compare the amount of blame attributed to an incident of wife abuse, alcoholic (N=52) and nonalcoholic (N=159) subjects read an account of wife abuse and distributed a percentage of the blame to the man, the woman, and the situation.…

Cheating behavior has been found to relate to emotion-attribution explanations. Prior research with second-grade children has indicated that increased self-control occurs in a watching task when the child's emotional response is attributed to internal rather than external actions. In the present study, freshman women (N=221) took a reading…

Utilizing data derived from 277 rural, male respondents initially enrolled in Lenawee County, Michigan high schools, the Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control Scale was employed to test the hypothesis that locus of control will have interactive rather than additive effects on the process of status attainment. Locus of control was defined as…

Chinese immigration to the United States in the 19th century was predominantly male. White racism led to the passage of Exclusion Laws, which severely restricted the immigration of the wives of the earlier migrants. This, coupled with miscegenation laws, has seriously affected the demographics of Chinese Americans. The underrepresentation of…

During the last decade, great strides have been made in the enrollment of black youth in colleges and universities. Despite these gains, at least two concerns remain. First, enrollment rates of black and white youth are not yet equal. Second, the retention rate among blacks who enroll is lower than that of white students. A longitudinal study of…

This program offers assistance in developing a workshop on assertiveness training for students. It discusses how assertiveness helps one learn self-control and take responsibility for one's own behavior. Examples of assertive and non-assertive behavior and exercises to increase assertiveness are delineated as they relate to classroom skills,…

The interactive effects of implicit normative and explicit situational consensus information were examined regarding the processes of causal attribution and evaluation. Stimulus items were single sentence descriptions of antisocial and prosocial behaviors representing the extremes of high and low normative consensus in each behavior category, as…

For many years researchers have investigated the relationship between alcohol consumption and human aggression. A "policy-capturing" methodology was used to determine how judgments of responsibility for aggressive behavior are influenced by information about a person's alcohol consumption, sex, and degree of injury to a victim. Male subjects (N=8)…

This study tests the hypothesis that individual differences in locus of control orientation may mediate elementary school students' responses to positive verbal feedback. A total of 30 kindergarten through fourth grade subjects were assessed for locus of control orientation using the Bialer Children's Locus of Control Questionnaire. To establish a…

Intrinsic motivation and self-reinforcement can be used identically to explain behavioral persistence in the absence of external reward. Yet the relationship between these concepts has not been adequately explored. Since intrinsic motivation appears to be dependent on an interesting task and self-reinforcement independent of task, it was…

The effects of winning or losing and the impact of being "cut" from an athletic team on the self-concept of a volunteer group of adolescent boys was examined. State anxiety levels both before and after competitive events and "try-outs" were studied by means of a short form of Spielberger's children's trait anxiety inventory questionnaire. Results…

The relationship of student locus of control (SLOC) to six achievement measures and a number of student characteristics measured in a study of student performance in a reading tutorial program was examined. Subjects were 121 elementary and junior high students, individually tutored two hours daily by high school and college students and adults.…

This study was designed to: (1) investigate the relationships between internal-external (I-E) locus of control and academic achievement for boys and girls over a nine-month period and (2) to determine whether the moderate ability of I-E scores to predict academic achievement is due to the moderate reliabilities of the I-E measures. A total of 279…