The increasing participation of women in the labor force has generated research concerning how employed women are perceived by others. Less research has been done concerning how working mothers, particularly those with very young children, are perceived. This study examined how adults viewed working mothers or young children and investigated…

Mothers' behavioral intentions about using physical punishment were examined to reveal influences on their selection of responses to child misbehaviors. Participants were 55 middle-class, mostly college-educated mothers of 3-to-4-year-old children. A total of 31 children were girls. Mothers operated a computer program which presented, in a random…

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…

A topic of increasing interest in social cognition is the manner in which individuals organize information about others in their memories and then access the information when making a decision. In the first study, subjects made both negatively and positively phrased judgments; trait set size was then varied as a within-subjects factor while…

In 1976, Jamaican government officals claimed that their island had received an especially negative press in the United States during 1975 and 1976 with serious consequences for the economy and tourist trade. This accusation was not made about Canadian coverage, with one major exception, and Canadian tourism to Jamaica increased during those years…

This theoretical paper is concerned with the evaluation and preference responses of preschool children to light- and dark-skinned human figures. The paper examines the hypothesis that in children the frequently observed bias favoring light-skinned persons over dark-skinned persons is not a racial bias but is related to early learning experiences…

A critical assumption of this study was that self-evaluations are determined largely by evaluations received from others. In two large national samples, although black females and males did not differ in self-evaluations of intelligence, white females rated themselves much lower than did white males. In the current study, white females evaluated…

In this communication we analyze a dichotomy that pervades research on attitude in mathematics education: the classification of attitude as positive/negative. After highlighting the ambiguity of the term "positive", and some problems related to it, we suggest that the positive/negative dichotomy is too simplistic to take into account the deep…

Method effects associated with item wording have been explored in a variety of instruments and found that the practice of using positively- and negatively- worded items may introduce systematic measurement errors that disrupt analyses and interpretations of the results. Therefore, the first purpose in the present study was to explore if method…

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…

Job stress among institutional researchers and approaches to managing or coping with stress are considered. In considering different types of stressors and stress reactions, it is noted that stress from all sources is cumulative and cannot be ignored during the workday, and that both pleasant and unpleasant happenings can result in stress. One…

This study was conducted to assess secondary teacher perceptions of staff development. Participants were 250 teachers selected randomly from secondary schools in Indiana. Survey questions pertained to six basic areas in staff development: (1) program intent; (2) planning; (3) organization; (4) finance; (5) evaluation; and (6) follow-up and…

As black children are portrayed too often in literature with negative images, it is understandable why they suffer from low self-esteem. In addition to being described as impoverished, black children are shown to be ugly (according to European standards), semiliterate or illiterate, poorly dressed, and malnourished. Northern settings also…

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…

The cognitive theory of depression advanced by Beck proposes that a negative view of the self, the world and the future is a condition that is responsible for depression. Recent data, however, have suggested that the relationship between cognition and affect is a reciprocal one in which each influences the other. Temporary mood states were induced…