Although many studies have concluded that males are more aggressive than females in a variety of situations, significant variation exists among individuals in their willingness to respond to provocation with aggressive behavior. The pervasiveness of the sex role stereotyping of aggressiveness as a masculine trait and passivity as a feminine trait…

Children's tendency to answer attitude questions in a biased manner, favoring latter response alternatives when two alternatives are presented in a forced-choice format, was investigated. Using a forced-choice interview format, children were asked questions concerning their attitudes toward mathematics. Each question contained two evaluative…

This paper describes a systematic research program examining the remedial and preventive effects of coping skills training for the management of anxiety. The general conceptual/methodological frameworks guiding the project, the rationale behind selection of fears as the target problem, and the coping skills training as the preventive intervention…

A study exploring the effects of teacher comments on student compositions sought to identify specific, effective teacher responses in order to begin the development of a model of teacher intervention during the writing process. Because a review of the literature revealed that previous studies on the subject had been inconclusive regarding the…

Many factors affect the way in which others view the parents of a child who has committed suicide. A study of adult responses to newspaper accounts of a child's death revealed the parents were viewed more negatively when the child's death was due to suicide than when the child's death was a result of illness. In addition, the presence of…

A program designed to improve behaviors characteristic of impulsivity and inhibition by enhancing children's real-life problem solving thinking skills is provided for use by parents and teachers of four- and five-year-old children. Twenty minutes of daily lessons are administered in small groups (or to a single child at home), in combination with…

As part of an effort to provide more economical methods for job-skill evaluation in the Army Enlisted Personnel Management System, a study investigated the use of television as a means of presenting test items for a sample of tests from the job field of tank crewman. The television scene provided the job setting for each item and then posed a…

The influence of aversive conditions on interpersonal attraction was investigated using 60 female undergraduates as subjects. Dyads were formed and equally divided into aversive (loud-noise) and neutral (low-noise) conditions. After completing an attitude survey questionnaire subjects completed a short filler task while the experimenter…

This report presents a study designed to determine if 5-year-olds possess an understanding of causation that conforms to the Weiner et al (1971) achievement model. This paper also studies the similarities between the attributional explanations of 5-year-olds and their teachers. Twenty-eight kindergarten students, largely part-Hawaiian, were asked…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

This demonstration study examines the affective reactions of infants when they imitate or fail to imitate play behavior modeled by an adult. Subjects were twenty-four 18-month-old and twenty-four 24-month-old male and female infants. Each infant visited the laboratory twice with an inter-session interval of 48 hours. At each session, the infant…

Three studies tested the ability of children of different ages to comprehend spoken sentences while viewing pictures that differed from the sentences according to some plausible combinations of actor, action, and beneficiary. In the first two studies, involving a total of 140 subjects, nine contextual conditions were used, including sentence only,…

The S-R Inventory of Anxiousness was developed as an experimental design to demonstrate the relative contributions of persons, situations, modes of response, and their interactions to individual differences in anxiety. College students in three studies were asked to rate a total of 154 items, involving 14 modes of response (physiological or overt…

Case studies were conducted to assess the personal learning styles and behaviors of elementary school children to provide teachers the opportunity of using prescribed teaching techniques to match students' styles. Six groups of behaviors were identified: (1) students demonstrate little internal control and are likely to act out and create…

Two studies are described which were conducted at the University of Kansas Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children to evaluate the effects of form and content independently on the social behavior of young children. In both studies, preschool children were observed during an unstructured play session in a laboratory room…