Findings from a study of 47 children between 3.5 and 12 years of age who received tonsillectomies at a children's hospital are presented. During a home visit before hospitalization, the child's adjustment, cognition, temperament, and family characteristics were assessed. Tonsillectomies were followed by an overnight stay at the hospital, and…

Because research had indicated that there is a correlation between older fathers and Down's Syndrome, this study attempted to generalize that knowledge to other genetically attributable cases of mental retardation. Fathers (N=222) who had institutionalized offspring labeled as mentally retarded and a comparison group of 248 fathers were analyzed.…

To find predictive relations between measures taken in infancy and later scores on intelligence tests, a study was made that measured in the infant those cognitive processes examined later in life. Operant conditioning tasks were employed which required 3-, 7-, and 11-month-old infants to execute some response to produce an environmental…

Individual variability in response to behavioral weight loss programs remains an unresolved and perplexing issue for health psychologists. Determining in advance who will succeed or fail at losing weight would be useful in devising programs that produce a more homogeneous and dramatic response to treatment. In order to examine which responses to…

Health psychologists continue to have difficulty identifying prognostic indicators of weight loss success. Psychological, social, and demographic factors have been examined, but correlations with weight loss are disappointing. Actual behaviors or quantifications of specific actions and historical measures were examined for their validity in…

Nursing, as a profession dealing with the health care system, places considerable emphasis on empathy, i.e., responsiveness to the feelings of another. To investigate whether individual differences in empathy are reflected in freshmen nursing students' scores on the Paired Hands Test (PHT), which measures the construct of the "others'…

The relationship between achievement test performance and two variables associated with test taking were studied. The variables were the order in which the students completed the test and the time students required for completion. Recent research had been mixed concerning whether high achievers would complete tests faster. The study was conducted…

Described in the context of a computer simulation are highlights of a program of research focusing on the storage of mathematics problem solving information in young children's memory and the development of such knowledge structures in older children. Specifically discussed are the problem size effect, the network nature of the memory…

Criminologists and gerontologists have reported increases in crimes perpetrated by elderly persons, but arrest data do not necessarily reflect this trend, due to failure to prosecute. To explore the influence of age, sex, race, and offense type on arrest and prosecution outcomes, Detroit Police Department arrest and case disposition data (1981),…

The research described in this article reports the results of a study designed to evaluate the relationship among object-oriented (OO) computer programming task performance and a student's (1) theoretical value belief, (2) cognitive ability, and (3) personality. The results of this study do not support the assertion that cognitive ability is a…

Correlations between predicted averages and actual grades in four universities were compared with those based on current data. A loss on the average of .10 occured in the accuracy of the correlation. The author recommends that prediction studies should not be done every year but on an as-needed basis. (Author)

In an effort to enlarge the focus on teacher effectiveness to include environmental factors outside the classroom, this report investigated (1) the relationship between supervisors' ratings of teacher effectiveness and the ability of teacher interns to make instructional decisions conforming to the school's value and organizational structures and…

Path analysis was used on survey responses of 1106 persons age 50 or over. Stage one variables were recent retirement, recent widowhood or divorce, age, and sex. Stage two variables included self-rated health, functional health, health trend, and self-rated income adequacy. It was expected that these variables might directly affect morale or…

The capability of 14 interpersonal dimensions to predict dyadic communication contexts was investigated in this study. Friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and family contexts were examined. The interpersonal valence construct, based on a coactive or mutual-causal paradigm, encompasses traditional source-valence components (credibility, power,…

Looks at relationship between recovery (symptom reduction) from serious psychiatric disorder and patient-held and therapist-held expectations for recovery. Objective measures of prognostic expectations were taken from patients upon hospital admission and from therapists shortly thereafter. Found that therapists', but not patients', expectations…