Concentrating on television and social learning, this second volume in the series of technical reports to the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior consists of an overview and the reports of five investigations. The studies included are: Leifer and Roberts, "Children's Responses to Television Violence";…

This paper investigates particular aspects of the black person as client and therapist. It emphasizes the importance of heterogeneity within the black population in the understanding of the black client, the black therapist and their interaction. There are important differences between blacks due to urban vs. rural background; socioeconomic…

The study of Afro-American literature, a vast body of creative expression, can be a motivating force which leads black students to question, learn, and understand the history and culture of black people and, therefore, to understand themselves. This paper outlines and discusses several activities and intellectual exercises useful for promoting…

The purposes of the study were to determine the effects of relatively short term empathy training on prospective teacher's empathic abilities and self-concepts. The two experimental groups received empathy training. The findings indicated that empathy training resulted in increases in levels of empathic ability and changes in self-concept. (Author)

Examines the role of reference groups and promotional appeals in satisfying consumer motivations. Emphasizes three motivational reference group functions: informational, utilitarian, and value-expressive. (RL)

This paper presents a typology of direct and vicarious achievement orientations relevant to adult problems. Direct and vicarious achievement patterns are related to sex role socialization and sex-linked occupational choice. Recommendations are developed for reevaluating and redesigning adult occupational and interpersonal roles which would take…

Evidence from both normal and incongruous gender differentiation shows that a rehabilitative rather than a curative approach may be an effect form of treatment for some gender transpositions. The approach to gender disturbances is consonant with the American Psychiatric Association's discontinuance of defining all homosexuality as a disease.…

Some major consequences of doing fieldwork in schools over an extended period of time are described. Using Powdermaker's distinction of "stranger and friend," the balance between these two roles and perspectives in terms of role, reciprocity, and receptivity is traced through a description of the author's two year study of student life…

In a survey of 192 women medical students, first- and second-year students were acutely aware of an identity crisis as a woman and desired a fourth-year elective with a woman physician. Third- and fourth-year students had little interest in working with a woman physician, but were concerned only with the physician's competence. (Editor/LBH)

Reviews and partially reformulates the sociological literature on the persistence of ethnicity in American society. Ethnicity, it is concluded, is basically a manifestattion of the way populations are organized in terms of interaction patterns, institutions, personal values, attitudes, life styles, and presumed consciousness of kind: it is the…

Specifically focuses upon the ways in which role models are selected and rendered useful by black adolescents in their various attempts to cultivate features of their personal and social identities. (Author/AM)

Discusses the lack of reliable instruments for studying African American behavior and psychological functioning as a technical and philosophical flaw in Western psychology. Surveys the development of Africentric theory-based assessment instruments and presents the African Self-Consciousness Scale, a 42-item personalilty questionnaire designed to…

Discusses a study of 403 White, middle-class college females and their fathers, who were given questionnaires assessing their own personalities and drug use. Results indicate that daughters who highly identified with their fathers had similar characteristics and suggest that paternal identificatory processes are as important for daughters as for…

Investigates how social reality effects are determined by exposure to black-oriented television, to the black press, and by social structural variables (i.e., income, age, education, and parental training). (PD)

Reviews the oral tradition and suggests that by drawing on the long tradition of stories in all cultures, fiction can be crucial in the extension of understanding of imaginative experience, of values and attitudes, and of real learning for all children. (HOD)