Male perpetrated sexual aggression has long been recognized as a serious problem on college campuses. The purpose of this multiple regression correlation study was to assess the relationship between levels of moral development (measured by the Defining Issues Test) and the degree to which first-year college men (N = 161) ascribed to rape…

Abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. It was concluded that increasing ability to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation…

The ability to identify six facial expressions was studied in 48 nondisabled children and 76 children with learning disabilities (LD) ages 9 through 12. Overall, the nondisabled group had better interpretive ability. Among LD children, those with verbal deficits had better ability than either those with nonverbal deficits and or those with both…

Assessed construct validity of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) as measure of general achievement in 208 children, aged 6-12. Results indicated that PPVT-R had substantial loadings on factors resembling Kaufman's (1975) Verbal Comprehension factor, while it consistently failed to load significantly on achievement-related factors.…

Although the accuracy of the diagnosis of cognitive impairment in the elderly depends on the appropriateness of the norms for the neuropsychological tests used, the importance of examining health status, native intelligence, and gender when attempting to describe cognitive changes of aging has received little attention. The Rey Auditory Verbal…

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)

This investigation, part of an on-going research program examining social learning theory applications to career development, tested several hypotheses derived from A. Bandura's self-efficacy theory in the career-related domain of mathematics. Specifically, the effects of failure on a mathematics task and on a task irrelevant to mathematics were…

In the area of cognitive skills, the actual differences between males and females are relatively small. Females score slightly higher on verbal tasks and males score slightly higher on mathematical tasks. According to the cognitive approach to stereotypes, people should perceive these differences to be quite large. To determine whether subjects…

Children 6- to ll-years-old heard concrete sentences which they were asked to learn. Half the children received imagery instruction. Greater short-term memory and verbal competence predicted better sentence learning in the imagery condition, but not in the control condition. (Author/NH)

Three groups of 10 children matched on verbal mental age (either with autism, with Down syndrome, or normally developing) attempted to imitate single pretend acts and a series of pretend acts that formed a script. Although children with autism were best on the single-act imitation, they demonstrated specific difficulties on the script imitation.…

Comparison of the mental status of 30 subjects with Down's Syndrome mosaicism and 30 matched subjects with trisomy 21 Down's Syndrome found that the mean intelligent quotient of the mosaic Down's Syndrome group was significantly higher and that this group showed better verbal abilities and more normal visual-perceptual skills. (Author/DB)

Comparison of area and subtest scores on the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale (Fourth Edition) for 15 autistic retarded children and 15 nonautistic retarded children found that the children with autism scored substantially lower in the verbal reasoning area and on the subtests of Comprehension and Absurdities than did the nonautistic children.…

Factors associated with arithmetic-and-reading disability and specific arithmetic disability were investigated in over 850 representative New Zealand children. Reverse patterns of strengths and weaknesses with regard to verbal and nonverbal skills for these two types of arithmetic disability were found for boys but not for girls. (Author/DB)

The reading comprehension of hyperlexic children, mentally retarded children who can read aloud written words better than one would expect from their Mental Age, was investigated in four experiments involving both autistic and nonautistic children. (Author/NH)

Relates the development of theories concerning gender differences in mental ability and reexamines them using meta-analysis. Finds that the greatest difference is in one type of spatial ability, mental rotation. There is only a small difference in mathematical performance, and no difference in verbal ability. (DM)