Four experiments investigated college students' judgments of inter-event contingency. Subjects were asked to judge the effect of a discrete response (tapping a wire) on the occurrence of a brief outcome (a radio's buzzing). Pairings of the possible event-state combinations were presented in a summary table, an unbroken time line, or a broken time…

A pertinent problem in the area of moral development is whether most people can distinguish moral from conventional issues. Some research has shown children and adolescents consider moral (intrinsic) transgressions more serious than violations of convention. To expand this research by examining in detail the role of intrinsicality in moral…

Social theories (beliefs about relationships between variables in the social environment) are often used in making judgments, predictions, or decisions. Three experiments on the role of explanation processes in the development and use of social theories were conducted. The first experiment assessed the effects of explaining a hypothetical…

Compares story character judgments of elementary school children to determine whether they would (1) attribute greater social anxiety to characters more motivated to create a desired impression on audience but were doubtful of ability to do so; (2) associate greater social anxiety with behaviors likely to impede behavioral performance; and (3)…

Two experiments examined the determinants of children's belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other children. In both, the personal characteristics of the child transmitting the message were varied against message type and age of child receiving the message; transmitter characteristics were relative age and social dominance. (RH)

Cognitive psychologists believe that knowledge is multifaceted and that people process more than just semantic content from a stimulus array. To investigate the implications of recall and impression formation processing objectives on the representation of serial order in memory and judgment, subjects participated in two recall and impression…

Individuals tend to hold on to initial impressions even after the data upon which they have formed the impression have been discredited. To partially replicate and extend a previous study (Ross et al., 1977) on belief perserverance, in which subjects were told they were to act as clinical psychologists attempting to understand and predict…

Female aging, compared to male aging, is associated with a greater decline in status and attractiveness. To investigate whether sex differences in the perception of aging function at both the cognitive and affective levels, 76 college students (38 male, 38 female), with a mean age of 22.8, viewed slides of a male and female adult. Subjects were…

In analyzing various moral and legal philosophies, two perspectives emerge, absolute moral rules/higher law, and situationally-specific moral rules/legal positivism. From these two perspectives, four types of individuals emerge in accordance with their degree of adherence to ideological tenets: (1) situationists (high on idealism and relativism);…

Examines the conceptual basis of preschoolers' judgments regarding cross-gender behavior, taking into consideration the type of sex-role regularity and whether it is male or female sex-role stereotype. (HOD)

Explores children's understanding of a variety of interpersonal events, focusing mainly on the question of whether, and in what way, their conceptions of these events were heterogeneous or undifferentiated. (HOD)

Examines children's understanding of what variables and relations are important in problem structures, and their use of these variables and relations in problem solving. (HOD)

This paper argues that judgment-based assessment of data from multiply replicated single-subject or small-N studies should replace normative-based (p=less than 0.05) assessment of large-N research in the clinical sciences, and asserts that inferential statistics should be abandoned as a method of evaluating clinical research data. (Author/JDD)

Fifty-six teachers of students with moderate/profound disabilities viewed task analytic data in one of three forms: graphed, ungraphed, or both. The data's form did not produce different teacher judgments of student progress or different program recommendations. Three factors (trend, variability, and frequency of data collection) had significant…

Research on self-concept has usually focused on neutral or positive personality characteristics. To determine if negative beliefs about the self have schematic properities, 55 college students, assigned to one of four groups (shy schematics, shy aschematics, independent schematics, independent aschematics), based on a prescreening self-rating on…