Seventy-two unselected male and female Anglo- and Mexican-American drivers found their progress blocked by a car that failed to move after a traffic light turned green. These experimental trials were systematically varied among six intersections in a city of dual ethnic population. Half the subjects in each ethnic class were frustrated by an old…

A death anxiety scale developed in 1973 by Nehrke was administered to 655 adult subjects. Their responses were differentiated according to age, sex, race, and level of education. Data were also analyzed using the varimax rotated factor matrix procedure to determine significant factors that the scale was, in fact, measuring. Loadings on four…

The state of a higher education evaluation project aimed at improving efficiency and increasing the capacity for self-renewal in higher education at the beginning of 1978 is described. The working methods of the project include: building up a knowledge base from literature and from foreign and Swedish universities and colleges; examining problems…

Contingency contracting has been demonstrated to be an effective procedure for achieving weight loss. A problem with this type of contract is that the S may have to permanently forfeit an item for a failure to lose weight when in fact his/her eating behavior has been appropriate. The following procedure was developed to overcome this problem. A…

Student perceptions of their behaviors in graded courses were compared with those in courses where they received written evaluation. While they reported working equally hard and being equally anxious, they did more of the reading in the evaluation courses and "got more out of" the graded ones. "Getting something out of" a…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducted cross-cultural surveys of educational achievement in six subject areas: reading, science, literature, civics, French as a foreign language, and English as a foreign language. Each of the surveys contained items which measured the extent to which parents…

Implications for affective education are drawn from an empirical study of 60 upper-middle socioeconomic class 6 to 15 year-olds' responses to questions asking how videotaped actors felt. Percentage frequencies of category use in tape-recorded transcripts coded by two judges revealed no differences by child's sex. Marked developmental differences…

This study investigates whether variations in method of presentation of anxiety items (experimenter's voice, experimenter's taped voice, subject's taped voice) will result in differences in autonomic arousal (as measured by self-report, galvanic skin response, cardiac rate, blood pressure). Ss were 24 Naval Academy midshipmen. The procedure…

This annotated bibliography deals with many aspects of gerontology. In addition to a group of general works, there are sections on psychological characteristics, intervention, education, work and retirement, services, and living situations. Annotations are quite detailed, often listing findings of studies and summarizing the author's main…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the validity of a self-estimated persistence measure as a predictor of academic achievement and to study whether persistence interacted with instructional method. It was hypothesized that a moderate amount of persistence--neither too much nor too little--would lead to the highest achievement, forming…

This investigation compared courtship patterns and early marital adjustment in a sample of 30 white middle class couples, slightly less than half of whom had lived together prior to marriage. Intensive interviews were conducted individually and conjointly with all couples at specified intervals prior to and following marriage. Interviews were…

Self-esteem and job complexity were investigated as moderators of self, supervisor, and peer ratings of performance and satisfaction with work, supervisors, and peers testing balance and activation theories. Subjects were 153 registered nurses. The important variable was perceived job complexity. (Author)

Three behavioral techniques--relaxation, satiation, and combined relaxation/satiation--were compared to determine relative effectiveness in reducing cigarette smoking behavior in 53 volunteer smokers. Results indicate all three approaches were effective initially but only combined relaxation/satiation effectively maintained a significant reduction…

The Group Atmosphere Scale (GAS) was developed to measure systematically the psychosocial environment of therapy groups. Twelve content subscales, each containing 10 true-false items, assess the consensual psychosocial environment. Several of these serve as indicators of group cohesion and conformity. The GAS makes feasible a comparison of…

Separate factor analyses of four large samples of respondents to Rotter's Interpersonal Trust Scale produced three orthogonal factors that cross-validated over all samples. Results indicate there may be relatively independent dimensions of trust and factor scores may yield greater prediction than the general scale in many research applications.…