The present study, based on the work of Dweck (2000) and her description of helpless and mastery-orientated children, was designed to find a new, simple and economic way of assessing helplessness while testing a child's intelligence. Two hundred and thirty-two Austrian grammar-school children, previously classified as either helpless or…

Collective traumas can negatively affect large numbers of people who ostensibly did not experience events directly, making it particularly important to identify which people are most vulnerable to developing mental and physical health problems as a result of such events. It is commonly believed that successful coping with a traumatic event…

Recent advances in testing mediation have found that certain resampling methods and tests based on the mathematical distribution of 2 normal random variables substantially outperform the traditional "z" test. However, these studies have primarily focused only on models with a single mediator and 2 component paths. To address this limitation, a…

College instructors are increasingly relying on wireless clicker systems as instructional tools in the classroom. Instructors commonly use clicker systems for such classroom activities as taking attendance, giving quizzes, and taking opinion polls. However, these systems are uniquely well suited for the teaching of psychology and other courses…

Conclusions about secondary control have been hindered by researchers' disparate interpretations of the construct. The current review offers a definition that reflects commonality among researchers and the spirit of the original article (F. Rothbaum, J. R. Weisz, & S. S. Snyder, 1982): Secondary control refers to the process by which people adjust…

The relation between reinforcer magnitude and timing behavior was studied using a peak procedure. Four rats received multiple consecutive sessions with both low and high levels of brain stimulation reward (BSR). Rats paused longer and had later start times during sessions when their responses were reinforced with low-magnitude BSR. When estimated…

For much of his career, B. F. Skinner displayed the optimism that is often attributed to behaviorists. With time, however, he became less and less sanguine about the power of behavior science to solve the major problems facing humanity. Near the end of his life he concluded that a fair consideration of principles revealed by the scientific…

Success in any organization may depend on changing the behavior of stakeholders to meet new challenges. But humans have brains designed to register change as threat, and thus they often cling to old habits and mindsets. Recent breakthroughs in brain research provide a fresh alternative to both behavioral and humanistic approaches to organizational…

The gap between scientific knowledge and real world practice continues to be a major conundrum for the behavioral sciences. This paper briefly reviews the development of behavioral research and describes problems that have arisen in meeting the goal of improving behavioral interventions through science. Based on published literature and personal…

A model of memory retrieval is described. The model embodies four main claims: (a) temporal memory--traces of items are represented in memory partly in terms of their temporal distance from the present; (b) scale-similarity--similar mechanisms govern retrieval from memory over many different timescales; (c) local distinctiveness--performance on a…

References to ultimate reality commonly turn up in the behavioral literature as references to determinism. However, this determinism is often difficult to interpret. There are different kinds of determinisms as well as different kinds of ultimate realities for a behaviorist to consider. To clarify some of the issues involved, the views of ultimate…

A didactic discussion of a latent variable modeling approach is presented that addresses frequent empirical concerns of social, behavioral, and educational researchers involved in longitudinal studies. The method is suitable when the purpose is to analyze repeated measure data along several interrelated dimensions and to explain some of the…

Correlation is one of the most widely used analytic procedures in the behavioral sciences. The bivariate correlation is implicit in all classical analyses ranging from t-tests to canonical correlation analysis. The most common correlation coefficient used in statistics is the Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation, which is represented…

The evaluation of gross human behavior, its measurement and assessment are discussed. The four-stage approach to behavioral analysis (specification, intervention, assessment, and prevention) is described, using criminal behavior as a case in point. An example is given of assessment-intervention reciprocity, and the three levels of behavioral…

The paper reviews research in early education, early intervention, applied behavior analysis and parent/child interaction to illustrate how methods and findings might suggest a model for ecobehavioral research in child development. An ongoing program of research is described to demonstrate application of the model. (Author/CL)