Reflections on psychological perspectives of aging are focused around issues of biological changes and mental functioning, genetic factors in aging, psychological changes with aging, individual differences in mental functioning and the intellectual decline of the aged. (EH)

The study of literary art and the study of ourselves are ultimately the same thing. (JH)

Presents research relevant to developing an instrument to assess helping dispositions. Most robust scales appeared to be the motivation to help scales and the helping in group situations scale. (Author/DEP)

Condensed from "The Kiwanis Magazine, Volume 53 (September 1968), 22-25, 42.

Investigators assessing the effect of motivation on performance rarely report the effect of performance on motivation. College students (N=48), preselected by anxiety scores, were tested on adjective pairs lists; additionally, anxiety was measured before and after task performance. Results showed that anxiety had a marked effect on verbal learning…

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…