An investigation was designed to test the proposition that people who are apprehensive about crime will exhibit a greater preference for crime drama that features the restoration of justice than will those people who are less apprehensive about crime. Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory mass communications course served as subjects.…

Research has found that elderly widows are alienated, disengaged, and depressed. However, there is little consensus across theories as to the inter-relationship of these variables. The social interactionist theory that disengagement leads to chronic depression and alienation was tested for a group of widows (N=32) and married women (N=28) over the…

Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that precipitating and individual susceptibility factors are involved in the development of depression. This etiological issue was reexamined within a college population. A comprehensive assessment technique, the behavioral-analytic methodology, was used to collect over 1,000 written descriptions of…

This report focuses on the evidence about the health consequences of smoking for women, and is intended to serve the public health and medical communities as a unified source of existing scientific research. The major issues about tobacco use and women's health are examined, including trends in consumption, biomedical evidence, and determinants of…

Piaget's egocentrism and Witkin's psychological differentiation are important constructs in theories of cognitive development. A comparison of these concepts could lead to an increased understanding of cognitive development in the older adult. In a test of Witkin's revised model of psychological differentiation, the Portable Rod and Frame Test…

Running is a popular form of exercise which people do for different reasons. Competitive runners (N=99) and noncompetitive runners (N=28) responded to a survey of 10 reasons for running by choosing their most important reasons for running. Subjects also indicated their age, sex, how long they had been running, their average weekly mileage, how…

Socialization into sport has been viewed as a social learning process through which significant others teach, demonstrate, and reinforce sport roles and behaviors. This social learning paradigm has been synthesized into a social role-social systems approach which combines psychological and sociological indicators (family, peers, school,…

The role of affect in information processing has recently received attention, and several possible influences of affect have been suggested. The informational and directive effects of affect were investigated with subjects (N=61) who either described events in their recent past that made them feel good, described events that made them feel bad, or…

Although fear of death is recorded in the writings of the oldest major religions, the study of death and the fear of death have only occurred for the last few decades. Death education courses have grown in number since the early 1970's. College students participated in an investigation of the effects of death education on death anxiety by…

A typical assumption has been that women and men possess distinct power orientations: women have expressive characteristics, such as interdependence and cooperativeness, while men have instrumental characteristics, such as self reliance and competitiveness. An inventory assessing expressive and instrumental power orientations (PVO's) was developed…

With the increase of violence and aggression affecting more people, this compilation of materials focused on anger and aggression consists of three parts: (1) a general list of articles; (2) an annotated review of selected articles from the general list; and (3) a bibliography of books. The topics range from suggested causes of aggressive behavior…

Nine questions about child abuse and neglect are answered in the booklet which is available in English and Spanish. Among facts revealed are the following: there are about 1 million cases of abuse yearly; there are four types of abuse and neglect (physical abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse); abuse can be recognized by certain…

Care-givers, as a group, generally fare physically and emotionally as well or better than the population at large, at least in the early stages of their elderly relative's convalescent period. Fifty-one care-givers discussed their physical and emotional symptoms just as their relative was being discharged from a health facility and two months…

Empathy as a personality variable and as related to social behavior in young children has not been examined for its specificity with regard to various affect classes but has generally been treated as a global response to all affect classes. Three kinds of evidence relative to the specificity of empathic responses are analyzed: (1) correlations…

The determinants of interpersonal attraction were examined in 10 dyadic situations involving an actor's behavior toward a perceiver. For each situation, the intentionality of the actor's behavior was varied at three levels (intentional, nonintentional, no information), and the affective implications of the behavior for the actor were also varied…