To test the hypothesis that residents of larger cities are less helpful to strangers than are residents of small towns, three New Zealand towns with varying population densities were studied for helping behavior. The research confirms that population density is a reliable predictor of non-helping behavior. (RE)

Summarizes the major research findings on the relationship between television violence and aggressive behavior; concludes that, while there is no definitive proof that such a relationship exists, the evidence points strongly in that direction. (GT)

Maintains that modern sociology has paid too little attention to the concepts of imitation and suggestion and presents new findings indicating that these concepts have a powerful impact on social behavior. Presents evidence that automobile fatalities increase several days after a publicized suicide and relates these and related findings to…

Presents a study demonstrating that aid-giving by children is predicated by nonverbal displays of submission emitted by the child under attack, and that although the children observing the episodes respond to the displays, the aggressor ignores them. (JMF)

Supports the tenet that American college students tend to make assertions that correspond to their sex-role stereotypes. (RL)

The study involving 12 severely retarded adults (five males and seven females) was conducted to determine the effect of music on the body-rocking manifested by Ss in their ward environments.(SBH)

Replicates an earlier study designed to determine specific meanings associated with various kinds of touch behavior in opposite-sex friends. (MH)

This article reviews literature on the responses of direct care staff to challenging behaviors of individuals with mental retardation. The paper constructs a behavior analytic description of the functions of care staff behavior in relation to their clients' challenging behaviors, draws a distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed…

Seizures can be debilitating across a number of physical, social, occupational, and personal variables. Given the deficits in all of these areas frequently present in persons with mental retardation, effective assessment and subsequent treatment of seizures is a primary goal for individuals with both mental retardation and epilepsy. To thoroughly…

Time-window sequential analyses test whether a target behavior occurs within a temporal window (e.g., within 2 seconds) after an antecedent behavior more than is expected by chance. This type of question is common when we need to know how one person or event may immediately affect another event or person in the natural environment. Theoretically,…

This paper describes a therapy analogue experiment in which an interviewer's interpretation of a client's presenting problem was systematically varied along dimensions suggested by causal attribution theory. Subjects were 64 undergraduate students with the same presenting problem of unassertiveness. They were given two different interpretations of…

In its original formulation, dissonance reduction was postulated as a mode for resolving behavior-attitude discrepancies. One mode of resolution has been demonstrated in the forced compliance paradigm, whereby a subject rectifies a counterattitudinal behavior with an actual belief, resulting in moderating beliefs. A forced compliance situation was…

This study was designed to evaluate the effects of both sex of subject and sex of partner with respect to a wide variety of nonverbal behaviors. The subjects were 44 men and 44 women graduate professional students at the University of Chicago. The behaviors were coded from videotapes of 88 dyadic conversations where each subject participated in…

The hypothesis that individual differences in psychological differentiation are related to the perceptions of the independence of leadership behaviors was tested. After viewing a supervisor-subordinate interaction sequence on closed circuit television tape, subjects responded to questionnaires measuring their perception/judgments of the…

Two cartoon strips were the vehicle for surveying perceptions of power use in everyday situations. A stratified cross-sectional sample of 430 adults in Los Angeles were interviewed. Their task was to choose a behavior, illustrated by a cartoon panel, most likely to be employed by a policeman in one instance and a nurse in another to secure…