This volume contains 20 essays on current research in representative areas of psychology. The authors are professors and researchers at universities in the United States, England, Colombia, Poland, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and Canada. A wide range of topics is discussed. Included among these are social psychology of intergroup…

A 1981 nationwide study of awareness of public broadcasting, viewing, and listening habits for public television and public radio, and reactions to on-air fund raising by public broadcasting stations are described in this report. Information on the survey and the analysis of the results have been organized into two sections, one presenting results…

This staff development module is part of one of three groups of career guidance modules developed, field-tested, and revised by a six-state consortium coordinated by the American Institutes for Research. This module is designed for guidance personnel who work in counseling and guidance at the secondary school level. The goal of this module is to…

A study charting the development of grade school children's analogic reasoning used 26 second, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students from lower middle class and higher middle class schools. The children were asked to explain concrete, interactive, and abstract concepts to an imaginary creature (a puppet). For half the items, an initial period of…

Parents of delinquents often display unconstructive behavioral patterns. The effects of behavior contracting with juvenile delinquents in response to these patterns was examined. Delinquent youth (N=72) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) controls, receiving normal court treatment; (2) a Family Contracting (FC) group, diverted…

Research strategies used to study human aggression include laboratory study, experimental simulation, field experiment, field study, judgment task, sample survey, and less empirical strategies such as computer simulations and formal theory. The context of these strategies can be classified as either contrived, natural, or irrelevant. Major issues…

Data were collected from 176 college students in a study of the effects of corporate advocacy advertising in crisis situations. The subjects read one of two sets of oil company advertisements, one set using a low advocacy and the other set using a high advocacy approach to explain company activities in relation to current events and social issues.…

The selective learning hypothesis holds that individuals' learning of prose passages will be affected in varying ways by the passages' threatening or unpleasant content. To test this hypothesis, 19 college students read six prose passages--three containing threatening material and three nonthreatening--and then completed a cloze test for each…

The study reported is a replication of Henry Mintzberg's study of five executives at work to determine the scope of their job-related activities. For this study superintendents in three suburbs contiguous to a large midwestern city were observed at work for one week, including evening meetings when they were scheduled. An attempt was made to…

This report examines the results of 3 studies on the effects of coping and mastery modeling on 106 pedodontic patients with and 30 patients without a prior filling or extraction. Before undergoing a filling, the 8-year-old subjects viewed a videotape depicting (a) a coping model receiving a filling; (b) a mastery model undergoing identical…

Classification of current group therapies by three main criteria provides a useful conceptualization of why therapy is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the NTL-model T-group. The appropriateness of sensitivity training based on the criteria of "client normality" identifies several perspectives, including the futility and inadvisability of…

The paper discusses literature which reports biological factors of criminal behavior and suggests how such biological characteristics might interact with the learning of moral behavior. The first three studies of predelinquent and prerecidivistic criminals measured autonomic nervous system responses to stress. Those who later became delinquent…

Commitment is a self-control technique to induce weight loss. Tow targets of commitment contingencies, completion of the study and behavior change, were examined among 42 female and 3 male subjects who made a monetary deposit to enroll in the 10-week program. The treatment consisted of self-monitoring of eating and exercise behavior. Subjects were…

An adaptation of "communication audit" procedures was used to evaluate the communication patterns at a mental health center (MHC). The evaluation included initial interviews with 28 MHC workers/administrators, a survey of 215 staff members for a communication network analysis, and followup interviews with another 28 persons. The data produced four…

Depression has been one of the last categories of psychopathology to be seriously investigated. A self-control behavior therapy program for depression was evaluated against a therapist-control behavior therapy program in an attempt to isolate the effects of control on alleviation of depression and to improve research designs. Clinically depressed…