This paper discusses the concept of stress by drawing from social-psychological, occupational, family, and medical perspectives. A model of stress based on an integration of these perspectives is developed and then applied to the family relationship over time. The components of the model consist of: (1) a stressor stimulus, any situation that may…

One means of making undergraduate instruction more relevant to students' needs and interests has been to use popular media to illustrate concepts in psychology courses. College students (N=54) in a theories of personality course wrote brief essays explaining the behavior of television characters in terms of theories taught in the course. The…

Much of the concern with juvenile delinquency has been based on the premise that delinquent behavior leads to adult crime. Police and court records of three cohorts comprised of 6,127 persons were analyzed. The most prevalent pattern of delinquent behavior was one of declining seriousness and discontinuation after the teenage period. With few…

Social science perspectives on black maternal childrearing practices have traditionally ignored the cultural-historical, socio-political, and economic realities. Interviews were conducted with 62 black mothers to study their perceptions of racism and its effects on their childrearing practices. Results indicated that educational status alone did…

Sexual harassment is widespread on college campuses across the United States and is a subject that merits sensitive and sensible discussion. Once they acknowledge the problem, speech communication professionals can become better informed about sexual harassment and ways of dealing with it, and commit themselves to responsible communicative action.…

Peak performance in the death crisis as a critical incident of creative response to the awareness of one's own or another person's death is the concern of this report. The topology of peak performance in the death crisis was examined in an investigation of retrospective self-reports of 20 adult respondents and a factor structure of peak…

Current data on youth substance abuse behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes are important in addressing social and health issues. To obtain these data, students in grades 6, 8, 10, and 12 from 144 Iowa school districts completed a 105-item survey assessing demographics, peer influence, parent influence, school influence, personal preferences, and…

A 328-item checklist, suitable for the self-reporting of responses to any stimulus event, was administered to 107 upper division college students in an attempt to investigate the physiological-cognitive-emotional responses to defense arousing communication and to discover a greater range of the key features of the phenomena of…

An analysis is presented of data on participation in leisure time and physical activities by such groups as the general population, employees, and students. Studies were made of community sponsored programs, employee fitness programs, and student physical activities. Leisure time physical activity findings are described within the categories of:…

This training manual presents an outline of a time management program for college students, to be led by a counselor or faculty member. The manual provides leader instructions and program goals for a group of 5 to 25 students and intended for a 1 1/2- to 2-hour session. Instructions for the program are given in seven steps which cover: (1) an…

Drawing upon the processing, distancing, and affective streams of writing research, a study examined the relationships among key variables in the writing of sixth through twelfth grade students: grade level, writing ability, knowledge of appropriate and inappropriate writing behaviors, and writing apprehension. Subjects, 496 students from an urban…

A wide range of interesting observations of the past decade, which may now cast their shadow as the health communication paradigm of the forthcoming decade, can be clarified and correlated. One example of effective communication therapy was Norman Cousins's hospitalization with the crippling disease, "ankylosing spondylitis." Using large doses of…

This paper briefly reviews studies pertaining to the imitation of facial gestures in early infancy. It is suggested that imitation provides for the initiation of a reciprocal exchange between mother and infant, but does not sustain such an interaction, since this requires a continually varied and changing pattern of gestures. Thus there is an…

With the intent of integrating partial theories that have developed in the area of mate selection, this paper presents propositions extracted from the research literature (1950-1976). A logical ordering of these propositions is suggested and new propositions are derived by interrelating selected propositions. These conclusions are reached: first,…

Recent investigations of gender are fostering structurally deterministic explanations by focusing exclusively on social processes. A balanced understanding of femininity involves considering psychic forces in conjunction with social factors. An interpretation of Freud currently being articulated in Europe delineates unconscious forces fruitfully…