Examined whether preschool children's play-partner choices were stable over time and how they influenced behavior. Found that partner preferences were highly sex differentiated and stable over time. Identified two types of consequences of partner choice: a binary effect that influenced differences between the sexes and a social dosage effect that…

Past research has shown that the way people deal with religion is related to prejudice. Therefore, it is important to study the determinants of individual differences in adolescent religious attitudes. In the present study, it is proposed that both differences in personality and identity formation might determine these religious attitudes.…

Background: This paper presents results from the first wave of a longitudinal study examining the effects of various psychosocial variables on scholastic achievement and behaviour at school. Aims: The main aim is to investigate the nature and strength of the effects of major individual difference dimensions on important outcome variables at school…

Risk covariates of neuropsychological ability (NA) at treatment entry and neuropsychological recovery (NR) across 15 months were examined and replicated in 2 samples (Ns = 952 and 774) from Project MATCH, a multisite study of alcoholism treatments. NA at treatment entry was associated with age, education, and other covariates. Statistically…

This study tested the hypothesis that previously reported associations between personality traits and vocational interests can be accounted for by associations between lower order personality traits and interests. Personality traits were explored using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, I992b), which measures the…

Although comparative judgment methods have a number of distinct advantages over ratings, they share one common problem: On the basis of comparative judgments, it is not possible to recover the origin of item evaluations. One item may be judged more positively than another, but this result does not allow any conclusions about whether either of the…

Sensitivity theory proposes that there are wide individual differences in what motivates people with intellectual disability. The Reiss Profile MRDD is a rating scale that measures 15 fundamental motives. This study examined the internal consistency and interrater reliability of the 15 subscales as well as the validity of motivational profiles.…

When a considerable amount of reading is done in different courses by high school students, this presents a problem for struggling readers. Reading is a favorite way of learning for students possessing verbal intelligence, (See Gardner, 1993), but a goodly number of high school students do not possess this as an important intelligence. Thus, the…

Research examining the relationship between workplace literacy and training-related factors is virtually nonexistent. This study examined how variations in individual learning transfer system perceptions were associated with job-related workplace literacy skill differences. Results indicated significant differences in learning transfer system…

The authors present the cases of two pupils who both show very serious, apparently similar learning difficulties, mainly in mathematics. An analysis beyond appearance of their learning activities revealed remarkable differences between them, in terms of both weaknesses and strengths. The authors point out that when teachers are planning remedial…

The possibility, which is based on the concept of reactive personality-environment transactions, that individuals learn different things from the same experience as a function of personality differences may help explain individual differences in adult developmental trajectories. In an analogue, longitudinal design, business students were taught…

This study examined the effects of three stimulus variables and background music on paired-associate learning of foreign language (FL) vocabulary. The stimulus variables were the frequency and concreteness of the native language (L1) words and the (phonotactical) typicality of the FL words. Sixty-four L1-FL pairs were presented for learning six…

Rate of forgetting is putatively invariant across individuals, sharing few associations with individual-differences variables known to influence encoding and retrieval. This classic topic in learning and memory was revisited using a novel statistical application, multilevel modeling, to examine whether (a) slopes of forgetting varied across…

Most studies have considered the effects of particular characteristics on academic achievement individually, which means that little is known about how they function together. Using the population-based Minnesota Twin Family Study, the authors investigated the effects of child academic engagement (interest, involvement, effort), IQ, depression,…

Optimal performance is the goal of all athletes, particularly when rewards are high. However, in pressure situations, many athletes perform suboptimally despite a high motivation to succeed. One of the more popular theories addressing performance breakdown under stress implicates self-focused attention. Attention directed to the self may interfere…