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Causal modeling techniques were used to examine the relationships among social class, ability, educational achievement, and self-esteem for four samples of children (total N = 715) born in the years 1961-1964. Measures were collected when children were between the ages of 4 and 15. Social class and ability were found to be strongly interrelated and to "cause" both achievement and self-esteem, achievement was highly stable across the age range 9-15, and achievement and self-esteem were not "causally" related to each other.

The interaction of siblings within the home may require later-born children— those with less power than their older siblings—to develop more effective interpersonal skills. If so, their popularity should be appreciably affected; they should be better liked. To test this line of reasoning, the relationship between ordinal position of a child and his popularity among peers was examined by relating school setting measures of popularity in friendship, play, and schoolwork situations to ordinal position for a sample of 1,750 grade school children from Riverside, California. For friendship and play measures, later-born children were found to be more popular than their early-born peers. This finding held across racial/ethnic background (black, Mexican American, and white), age (kindergarten through sixth grade), and sex. In addition, teacher's ratings of children showed that later borns do possess greater social skills than their early-born peers. Finally, this study failed to confirm previous findings relating ordinal position to (a) measures of achievement and intelligence and (b) personality dimensions such as anxiety, self-concept, and dependence. Among the many characteristics that affect a child's popularity with peers, some undoubtedly stem from experiences prior to his school years. Since a preschool child spends most of his time at home, it must be the arena for a considerable portion of such influences. Further, given that the experiences of children within any individual home should vary, the home environment could produce individual differences that affect pop

The impact of performance outcome, task difficulty, and level of test anxiety on attributional accounts for performance and achievement-related affect was explored. Subjects high and low in test anxiety (Sarason, 1972) worked on tasks of varying difficulty, evaluated their own performance, and then responded to two types of attribution items, inventories of major affective reactions (Izard, 1972), and a measure of cognitive interference (Sarason and Stoops, 1978). Meaningful attributional accounts were uncovered; in particular, performance outcome and task difficulty had independent effects on subjects' attributional judgments. Cognitive interference was implicated as a factor contributing to the attributional predispositions of persons differing in test anxiety, and it was a major determinant of affective reactions. In addition, subjects' affective responses were predictably associated with their perceived performance outcome, their level of test anxiety, the difficulty of the task, and subjects' attributional accounts of the factors influencing their performance. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive components and phenomenological experience of test anxiety and the consequent impact anxiety may have on achievement-related behavior.

The relationship between speaking rate and attitude change was investigated in two field experiments. Manipulations of speech rate were crossed with (a) credibility of the speaker and (b) complexity of the spoken message. The results suggest that speech rate functions as a general cue that augments credibility; rapid speech enhances persuasion. No support was obtained for information-processing interpretations of the effects of a fast speaking rate. The increased persuasion produced by fast speech could not be attributed to disruption of effective counterarguing. These findings emphasize the importance of perceptual and evaluative factors in the persuasion process at the expense of a more rationalistic information-processing view of how man responds when confronted with an influence attempt. Although many of the persuasive communications received during daily life are orally presented, the characteristics of speech that affect persuasion are rarely studied. Moreover, studies that do examine delivery style typically treat it as a global variable. For instance, Dietrich (1946) studied the dynamism of a speaker's style, Bettinghaus (1961) assessed the effects of overall speaking effectiveness by comparing trained and uncoached students, and Bowers (1965) examined the effects of extroverted and introverted deliv^ ery using dramatic arts students to simulate style. The persuasive effects of more discrete characteristics of oral delivery, such as intensity, pitch, speed of presentation, or specific emotional qualities apparently more rarely elicit attention. Several considerations suggest that speech rate might be an important variable. Texts on speech (Allen, Anderson, & Hough, 1968; Monroe & Ehninger, 1974) have reported considerable individual variation in speaking rate with 120-180 words per minute as the lower and upper limits of normal speech. 1 It