The purpose of this research is to analyze whether university students would be willing to engage in distance foreign language (FL) course design, and if the knowledge of their preferences could be used to present guidelines for course designers. Student engagement is seen as crucial to graduates' achievement in HE, especially in online courses,…

Surface approaches to learning materials and tasks are a commonplace challenge to teachers, and they prove difficult to shift, even among students who are otherwise talented or motivated to learn. The present study investigates a theory that surface approaches are triggered by a suboptimal, aversive response to learning stimuli, which overrides…

Group counseling is an important treatment modality used to support clients in a variety of therapeutic settings. This article highlights the results of an exploratory study that examined site supervisory factors that predicted group leader self-efficacy for preservice school counselors. Results of multiple regression analyses suggest meaningful…

Emotional labour is a state that exists when there is a discrepancy between the emotional demeanour that an individual displays and the genuinely felt emotions that would be inappropriate to display (Mann 1999b).The study examined levels of emotional labour in university lecturers and compared these data to other occupations. Employing a mixed…

Response latency information has been used in the past to provide information for consideration along with response accuracy when obtaining trait level estimates, and more recently, to flag unusual response patterns, to establish appropriate time-to-test limits (Reese, 1993), and to determine predictors of the amount of time needed to administer a…

With increasing divorce rates, many studies have addressed the effect of divorce upon the offspring of divorced and divorcing parents. Most of this research, however, deals exclusively with young children who still reside with a parent. This study examined how divorce affects older offspring, specifically those enrolled in college or graduate…

Viewed within the general context of Selye's theory of environmentally induced stress, we tested the hypothesis that blood pressure levels would vary inversely with the degree of loving responses our subjects received from those with whom they interact on a frequent basis. Preliminary data support this hypothesis, especially among our older…

Although humor is an important phenomenon in human interactions, it has rarely been studied in the elderly. An understanding of responses to humor in aggressive cartoons as a function of advancing age would provide information regarding both the development of humor and the negative (aggressive) emotional experiences of the elderly. This study was…

Preschool, third-grade and sixth-grade children, and adults were shown vignettes depicting eight types of experiences and asked for their own (for children) or the children's (for adults) expected emotional reactions. Overall, adults showed an absence of developmental considerations in their implicit theories of children's emotional…

Tests two hypotheses concerning developmental change in the speed of cognitive processes: (1) age differences in processing time reflect changes that are specific to particular tasks, and (2) age differences in processing speed do not reflect task-specific change but are due instead to more general developmental change. (HOD)

A study examined similarities and differences between adults' and children's responses to the same children's book, and the role of discussion in shaping adults' perceptions about the book and their understanding of children's responses. Subjects, 129 students in five university children's literature classes, read and responded in writing to…

Results of a study examining how social work students view creativity, how various student characteristics correlate with creativity scores, and how social work students' scores compare with other undergraduate majors are discussed. (Author/KM)

Students' interest in comparing their work to their peers' work was studied at different grade levels and in different motivating situations. The importance of the situational variables differed in two experiments on social comparison interest; awareness of the situational influences on motivation appear to increase with age. (GDC)

Male and female subjects from three age groups completed questionnaires on sex roles and dating orientations. Males approached dating from both a psychoaffectional and psychobiological orientation, while females approached it from a psychoaffectional orientation. Significant differences were found in dating attitudes between male and female…

Students in first, third, and sixth grade and college heard scenarios in which a peer experienced an emotionally equivocal or unequivocal event. Neither prompting children to consider alternatives nor reminding them of peers' individual differences produced greater discrimination between equivocal and unequivocal situations. (BC)