The replies to a survey of more than 1,000 undergraduates concerning childhood sexual encounters are reported. Linear structural equation modeling is employed to analyze which characteristics of the sexual encounters with other children were associated with more positive or negative responses by the subjects. Approximately 42% of the subjects…

In order to explore attitudes toward female and male suicidal behaviors, psychologists (N=38), social workers (N=45), registered nurses (N=44), and lay persons (N=41) were asked to complete the Suicide Opinion Questionnaire (Domino et al., 1982). Half of the questionnaires for each group referred to a female target person and half referred to a…

Previous research suggests that belief in the uncontrollability of a situation results in maladaptive attempts to control outcomes; perceptions of cancer's uncontrollability may result in negative attitudes toward the disease and toward patients. To test this theory 160 college students read and responded to a paragraph describing a disease…

Self-initiation of activities by individuals may have an affect on their mood. To study the relationship between the appraisal of self-initiated activities and dimensions of positive or negative affect 36 graduate students (22 female and 14 male) engaging in a total of 202 activities appraised dimensions of the activities and responded to a…

Most of the observational study of marriage has focused on relatively young and highly educated couples from professional backgrounds. Very little is known about the generality of this observational research to couples whose marital philosophies have been influenced by a different array of socioeconomic conditions and secular trends. Satisfied and…

Richards, Gaver, and Golicz (1984) found that, in contrast to peers whose grades were accurately predicted from performance on aptitude tests, both extremely underachieving and extremely overachieving fourth-graders had negative academic attitudes. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings. Subjects in the replication study…

Poor health has been implicated as a suppressor of the life satisfaction of older adults. To clarify the contribution of arthritis to this process, functional disability, negative affect, pain, current severity of the disease, self-esteem, perception of general health, and internal health locus of control, were placed within a causal model as…

This study of teacher characteristics investigated: (1) whether students construct a stereotype from the term "teacher" (a nonmodified concept); (2) the differences between this and a stereotype for "good teacher" (a modified concept); and (3) stereotype characteristics in the students' vocabulary. Three hundred high school…

Decision-making in dual-career families is a salient issue due to the lack of societal norms for this type of family unit. A process-oriented model of joint decision making served as the basis for questionnaires and interviews used to study the predictive value of communication style on the outcomes of the decision making process in dual-career…

Future developments in communication technology promise to have both positive and negative effects on information sources, messages, the media, and audiences. An increased tendency toward monopolistic control, for example, might accompany improvement in information management. A significant problem already in evidence among information…

The widespread incidence of depression has promoted many theories about what variables are involved in this disorder. Beck has theorized that a depressive's negative affect results from a schema of negative views toward oneself. Gotlib and McCann have concluded that depressives have greater accessibility than nondepressives to negative content…

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…

Social stereotypes appear to play a role in social cognition similar to the role proposed for prototypes in nonsocial information processing. To explore whether racial primes would differentially facilitate response to positive and negative evaluative words, 32 male and female white college students were presented with a black or white prime and…

Evidence is accumulating that experiences of children within the violent family are fundamental causes of the continuing problem of family and societal violence. To examine attitudes and values as a function of experience with family violence, 114 male undergraduate students completed a questionnaire assessing general demographics, and several…

Previous research has found that sympathetic arousal will cue information stored in memory with a similar level of arousal. To investigate the effect of arousal on the interpretation of other people's emotions, three studies were conducted. In the first study, 37 adult tennis players, who were either about to play tennis or who had just played,…