Based on the assumption that differences in personal meaning and in the social significance of loss predispose widows and divorced individuals to different, specific vulnerabilities during grieving, 410 separated, divorced, and widowed women, aged 23 to 76 years, with at least one child, completed the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist, the…

Although marital dissatisfaction and social contact factors have been related to depression, the impact of these variables on a heterogeneous population is unclear. To determine risk for depression resulting from the absence of social support variables, 267 married adults (131 males, 136 females), with a mean age of 47 years, completed the Marital…

Two telephone surveys of adults living in North Carolina were conducted to determine the effects of various demographic and psychological characteristics on attitudes toward microcomputers. Results indicated that computer experience, income, education, and having children all predicted a positive attitude toward computers. In addition, findings…

Little evidence exists about either the short or long-term effects of coping strategies on the reduction of emotional distress or the lessening of problems. To examine the predictors and effectiveness of four marital coping efforts (negotiation, optimistic comparison, selective ignoring, and resignation), data derived from a panel study of 758…

The usefulness of L. Guttman's partial order scalogram analysis is investigated in this study of the structure of a set of items that measure attitudes toward legal abortion. These items, drawn from the National Opinion Research Center's "General Social Survey," have been the focus of considerable applied research investigating…

Findings of research seeking predictors of mature creative achievement in the early artistic development of the Swiss painter, Paul Klee; the French painter, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec; and the Spanish painter and sculptor, Pablo Picasso are presented. Discussion is organized into four sections. The first section offers an overview, rationale, and…

Values are a central concept in understanding and predicting human behavior. Value priority differences have been shown to predict important political, social, and economic attitudes and behaviors. The purpose of this study was to identify differences and similarities among the value hierarchies of adolescents who have never tried alcohol,…

A study was conducted to examine the usefulness of importance ratings in predicting the relationship between: (1) overall self-esteem and more specific subscale scores of self-esteem; and (2) domain-specific self-esteem scores and domain-specific self-concept scores. Subjects were 70 children attending third, fourth, and fifth grades of a public…

There is increasing acceptance of the premise that growth and development continue throughout adult life and, as life expectancy has lengthened, there is a much expanded mid-life period. Yet, middle adulthood has been neglected as an area of theoretical and empirical examination. Adults (N=251) in middle adulthood (age 35-55) completed instruments…

Defining interpersonal orientations as the characteristic and consistent ways in which individuals interact with others, this paper examines various conceptualizations and theories regarding such orientations in order to discover how they affect interpersonal communication. In particular, the paper (1) reviews work concerning psychological types;…

School psychologists may be asked to assess potentially violent adolescents. Research on predicting violence has demonstrated that: (1) most studies show poor predictive ability; (2) clinicians tend to overpredict violence; (3) prediction is difficult because the base rate is low; and (4) the best single predictor is past violent behavior. New…

Experimental research has firmly established the role of expectancies in determining the behavioral consequences of alcohol consumption. To ascertain whether these alcohol expectancies derive from direct pharmacological experience with alcohol or from nonpharmacological, social-learning factors, an adolescent expectancy questionnaire was…

This study attempts to identify relative contributions of certain attitudinal variables to mathematics avoidance. The primary objective was to discover the most salient predictors of mathematics avoidance (MA). Nine Fennema and Sherman Mathematics Attitude Scales (1960) were revised for use with a general population, and a similarly worded…

The study was conducted to provide formulae by which College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) General Examination scores may be predicted from scores earned on the American College Test (ACT) Assessment. Five basic areas of liberal arts achievement are measured by the CLEP General Examinations: English Composition, Humanities, Mathematics, Natural…

Levels of independent variable(s) are often mixed within each block of trials rather than each level being presented in a separate block in research of various types. Two experiments involving tasks of a visual nature were conducted to demonstrate that such mixing can easily obscure the effects of principal interest. A target circle was projected…