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This experiment compared a weighted-average model from information integration theory with McGuire's inoculation theory as explanations of the "paper tiger" effect. Ss were 24 male and 24 female American college students. Procedure and design were similar to that used by McGuire, and his messages were used verbatim. Each S indicated his attitude on each of four health issues and also made direct estimates of the weight and scale value of each piece of information upon his attitude. An apparent paper tiger effect was observed for some issues, but the opposite effect was observed for other issues. The predictions of the averaging model were quite good in six of eight cases. The two discrepancies seemed to reflect an underestimation of the importance of attacking message. Overall, the results were interpreted as supportive of the informational interpretation. No need was found for the motivational concepts of belief threat and refutational practice used in inoculation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the American personality tests in cross-cultural research. In a large number of cross-cultural studies, paper-and-pencil personality tests originally developed in the United States have been translated and administered within some other culture. Translations developed solely in this manner and not further evaluated may not be usable for making valid cross-cultural comparisons. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss certain problems associated with the translation of personality tests for use in cross-cultural research, and with the interpretation of cross-cultural findings obtained through the use of such translations. Personality tests most appropriately and widely used in cross-cultural research are those that measure particular constructs. The items in such tests represent samplings from a universe of items that help define the constructs, and test results are interpreted in terms of the constructs rather than the specific items that happen to be used. Thus, before a translation is undertaken there should be good reason to believe that the construct, as measured by the items in the American instrument, is meaningful within the second culture.

The article cites a study which presents a partial analysis of student reaction to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. The written reactions of undergraduate sociology students to President Roosevelt's death, produced en lieu of a regular class meeting on the day following the death are evaluated. Evaluation of their attitudes toward the late president took the form of an arrow whose position along a continuum ranging from very negative to very positive symbolized the position of the writer's attitude. Only a minor portion of their contents met two conditions, those of, first relevance, and second, tabulatability without, or with a checkable amount of, interpretation. The portions or aspects which were found to meet these two conditions were distribution of documents along the negative-neutral-positive continuum, length of documents, time, place and source of news of the death of President Roosevelt and distribution of designations of the deceased and of the new president. The criterion of relevance was envisaged on a mere commonsense level.

The article reports on attitude content and agreement set in autonomy-authoritarianism items for the United States, African, and Philippine university students. For the past 10 years, the relationship between attitude content and agreement set in a variety of scales has been discussed in the social-psychological literature. The problem is that when a person is asked to agree or disagree with a statement from a scale, he may or may not have a relevant attitude, so his response may indicate either attitude content or a response tendency to agree or disagree. One method for dealing with this problem is to use balanced scales where half the items are scored in each direction. Thus, in developing a 36-item Autonomy-Authoritarianism scale for cross-cultural comparison, an equal number of autonomy and authoritarian items were included. The present paper will consider the implications of these findings for the problem of attitude content and agreement set. These results have the advantage of extending the problem to several non-European groups and to a new set of items.

The article discusses evaluation and cross-cultural application of a Japanese form of the survey of interpersonal values. There is a growing literature reporting studies in which American paper and- pencil personality tests have been translated and then used in cross-cultural research. The present paper reports such an evaluation of a Japanese translation of the Survey of Interpersonal Values (SIV) prior to cross-cultural application. The scales in the SIV originally had been identified by means of an item factor analysis. A similar analysis was proposed for the translated items in order to determine whether the same constructs would emerge as factors in the Japanese culture. The results of the factor analysis indicated that the constructs incorporated in the SIV do emerge as factors in the Japanese culture, and that the large majority of the items in translation have their principle loadings on the same factors as did the corresponding original items. Data were gathered at five Japanese universities for samples of 258 males and 505 females selected so as to be comparable in educational and socioeconomic level to the individuals comprising the American normative group. In addition, 249 male and 227 female students were similarly selected and tested at three different Japanese urban high schools. The latter two groups were to be compared with an American sample made up of students from five Southern California high schools, of similar age and grade level.

The article presents a paper that reports the successful prediction of attitudes toward an international incident on the basis of scores on the California F scale. Some 20 minutes after leaving Miami, Florida, one morning late in July 1961, the pilot of a commercial airplane was forced at gunpoint to alter course and fly to Havana, Cuba, with his crew and 32 passengers. News media reported the hijacking and indicated that a fully armed U.S. Air Force plane had intercepted the hijacked plane and had followed it but had turned back as the commercial plane approached Havana. The evening reports of news media in Miami headlined this story and featured a call by Florida's Senator for U.S. Military forces to be sent into Havana to recover the airplane. At this point it was predicted that persons favorable to this view would score higher on the California F scale than those unfavorable to it. It was hypothesized that an individual's attitude toward authoritarianism would play an important role in shaping his reaction to the recommendation that military force be used.

The article analyzes quantitative evidence for the alleged patriotic revival in the United States in the 1980s. A recent article provided a review of several statistical trends in economics, demographics, and other areas that occurred during Ronald Reagan's presidency in the U.S. Hard data aside, that article pointed out that "many of the most important shifts of the 1980's fell in softer categories, loosely organized under the topic 'cultural attitudes.' These included a religious revival and a turn toward traditionalism and conservatism. This paper reports an inquiry into and an empirical documentation of one of these presumed attitudinal shifts. At a concrete level, our research for this report led us to three sources of information. If these three sources are not entirely independent, at least they are not entirely redundant. We felt that they can reasonably be thought of as converging measures on the issue at hand. The order in which they are reported merely reflects the chronology in which they were processed.

The article presents a paper that attempts to summarize briefly and appraise the available information on educational achievement and family stability, with particular attention to divorce, and in addition offers some new findings drawn from a study of 4,648 divorces recorded in Atlanta and Macon, Georgia. The idea of family stability fundamentally refers to the unity of the family as a going concern. Although population census data have been widely used to show a relationship between family stability and education, very few researchers and textbook writers have inquired into the serious limitations and deficiencies of census data in this regard. The events themselves--namely divorce and desertion--have not been studied directly from official registrations. In line with the pattern of birth and death registration, the practice is not to ask for educational background in marriage and divorce registration in the United States. Academicians and other professional persons favor getting such information, but the state and local registrars are opposed to the idea because of anticipated resistance and resentment from the parties concerned.

This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of judgments of social desirability. The 140 personality items were judged for social desirability by 165 male and 33 female students at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Details of the method of obtaining judgments, including a reproduction of the face sheet containing the instructions, can be found in Edwards. The median age of the subjects, almost all of whom were freshmen and sophomores, was 19, which is comparable to that of university students in the United States. However, in most other respects, they were in marked contrast to an American college population, e.g., only about half listed themselves as Christian. The majority of the students were from Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria. These students, hereafter referred to as the Near East group, together with those of Fujita, Nisei and Lovaas, Norwegian, comprise the cultural groups to be contrasted in this paper. The scale values of these groups were evaluated in terms of three reference groups: Edwards' college group, a high school group, and a hospital group.

The article presents a content analysis of the treatment of Marshall Plan in certain representative American newspapers. The purposes of this paper are four in number. The first purpose is to examine and interpret the nature and direction of the content which enters into the discussion of a public issue by means of certain recurrent themes. Another purpose is that by analysis of these themes to interpret certain aspects of public opinion formation through time. To discover the relations, if any, between editorial policy of the newspapers and the kind and amount of news presented on the particular issue is another purpose. To contribute to the method of analyzing the content of public opinions in process is also a purpose. The issue selected for study was the so-called Marshall Plan to aid European recovery. From midsummer of 1947 through Alarch of 1948 the proposal to aid European recovery was a topic of much public discussion. There was strong opposition as well as strong support for the measure, expressed in the usual media of mass communication: newspapers, radio, and the public platform. Newspapers like the New York Times gave strong editorial support to the proposal in terms of sound economics, humanitarianism, and especially as a bulwark against communism in Europe.

The article presents a comparative study of the names of white and Negro women college students. That names are of much importance can be easily appreciated when one thinks of the fact that many people are known only by their names. Appearance, habits, attitudes, and other traits may not be available for judging a person; and in such instances as these, one's name is the only basis for forming an opinion about him. The particular problem in this study is a comparative one. It is designed to compare the first, middle, and last names of 1,804 white college women and 1,222 Negro college women. Each group was selected from a women's college for its race. In order to carry out this study, the students' names listed in the catalogs of the two colleges for a period of 10 years (1931-32 to 1940-41) were used. The procedure was to study all of the names in the Catalogs for 1931-32, but for the subsequent catalogs only the names of the members of the freshmen class were considered. In comparing the findings of this paper with other reports, it may be seen that the name Mary, which was found most frequently in two lists occurred more times than any other name for the white students and fourth in the list of names of Negro students. As for the surnames, the three most frequent last names for both racial groups are listed by Mencken among the five most common names in the United States.

This study was initially set up to ascertain what personality differences exist across geographic regions of the United States. Three main components, replicated across males and females, appear to be of greatest consequence in accounting for differences that exist. At the risk of oversimplifying, they might be briefly identified as creative productivity, tough-minded independence, and interpersonal isolation. The first distinguished Northeast, West Coast, and Midwest regions on the one hand from Southeast, Southwest, and Western Mountain regions on the other. The second distinguished Midwest from the West Coast and Southwest regions. The third appears most useful in describing differences between Western Mountain and Midwest regions. While many of these findings are generally congruent with commonly prevailing attitudes, they suggest that there is no single trait which appears to be distinctive of a particular region of the country. Instead, a rather complex pattern of differences emerges which makes traditional stereotypic conceptions inadequate and provides substantially richer ground for generating hypotheses as to the origin of these differences. Although this research was not designed to evaluate differentially the two etiological hypotheses outlined in Section A of this paper, it is interesting to note that the operation of at least two functions can be closely identified with regional demographic characteristics, as would be required by the second hypothesis. Thus, the first function can be thought to identify a psychological dimension which is related to degree of industrialization. The third function might define a psychological dimension which is related to population density. Whatever their origin, however, it is clear that practically significant personality differences do exist across the country in a measurable and quantifiable way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred and twenty-nine subjects judged the importance of 10 Civil War figures in one of three contextual conditions: the Civil War Period, the history of the U.S., and the entire history of man. It was found that as the specified context increased in scope, the judgments of importance decreased. The comparability of this experiment to an earlier one dealing with psycho- physical stimuli was discussed in relation to the similarities and differences between psychophysical and psychosocial judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article cites a study which was done in order to make a cross-cultural comparison between Persians and Americans, under relaxed and aroused conditions of presentation of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) as a measure of achievement motivation. The results of the present study indicate that a measure of the need for achievement, which is based on American norms and was devised to study the differences among American college male subjects under differential instructions, failed to substantiate the claim of its authors, but was found to be valid for a comparable group of foreign nationals residing in the United States. The results show that Americans and Persians are not significantly different in strength of the need for achievement as assessed by the TAT either in the relaxed or the aroused conditions of presentation. The arousal condition increased mean achievement scores for the Persians over the relaxed conditions of presentation of the TAT. No significant difference between the relaxed and aroused conditions for the American subjects was obtained although theirs was a trend for higher achievement scores under aroused conditions. There was no difference among American and Persian groups in terms of relaxed and aroused conditions.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the attitudes of foreign students toward American democratic ideals as carried out by most people in the United States, and to examine the conditions under which they develop their attitudes. The subjects were 304 foreign students who attended Purdue University during the second semester of the academic year 1959-60. Data were gathered by mailed questionnaires. The statistical analysis showed that almost all foreign students felt that most people in the United States were less democratically oriented than the students themselves. The only exceptions were Arab, Greek, and Siamese students. Democratic orientation scores of subjects from six countries, namely, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Iran, India, Japan, and Nigeria differed significantly from the scores attributed to most people in the United States. Favorable attitudes toward American democratic orientation were found to be related significantly to two intervening variables, namely, favorable experiences encountered by foreign students in the United States, and adjustment to the academic and social life on American campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, prospective adoptive parents often express preferences related to race. In two studies, we examined whether implicit racial bias against Black people may contribute to disparities in much less willingness to adopt Black children. The first study (N = 510) assessed individuals' implicit racial bias and their willingness to adopt a Black child. The second study (N = 2,001,652) used U.S. state-level implicit racial bias to predict adoption rates of Black foster children in each U.S. state. Greater implicit racial bias predicted less willingness to adopt Black children and less frequent adoptions of Black foster children. Implicit bias contributed to these disparities above and beyond explicit bias, with implicit bias having a 43% larger effect size than explicit bias on willingness to adopt a Black child. These are the first findings to demonstrate the role implicit bias plays in explaining large disparities between Americans' willingness to adopt Black and White children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The author investigated the manner in which individuals with different identity styles evaluate information relevant to a trait hypothesis-testing task. Identity style refers to how individuals seek, process, evaluate, and use self-relevant information. In a sample of U.S. college students, the participants with normative identity styles displayed confirmatory biases that served to protect and preserve the hypothesis being evaluated. The students with informational identity styles also used confirmation-biased hypothesis-testing strategies. The participants with diffuse-avoidant styles did not discriminate between confirmatory and disconfirmatory information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women managers in the United States are often confronted with conflicting expectations of compliance and assertiveness. The present study focused on one aspect of this double-bind-men's and women's perceptions of the assertive woman. To investigate this question, source credibility scales were employed with open-end questions. In a laboratory setting, 93 mixed-sex subjects observed a target assertive woman and responded on a paper and pencil survey. Men reported positive perceptions of assertive communication in women. Women, however, reported negative perceptions of assertive women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the responses of Hispanic and non-Hispanic U.S. Navy recruits on the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) as part of a larger investigation of response effects on organizational surveys. Attitude surveys are a popular method for gathering information on employee perceptions and measuring organizational change. Although all socially desirable responding involves presenting oneself in a positive light, several studies have reported empirical evidence that distinguishes two types of socially desirable responding, impression management (IM) and self-deceptive enhancement (SDE). Studies of IM and SDE in organizational settings have typically not considered the impact that cultural differences may have on survey responses. Some evidence suggests that Hispanics may be more likely than non-Hispanic Whites to engage in socially desirable responding. Some sociologists have suggested that care needs to be taken when analyzing and interpreting Hispanic data because of concerns that Hispanics may often provide inaccurate and socially desirable responses.

This paper examines perceptions of the threat posed by a volcano in Washington State. In particular, interest is focused upon the level of perceived risk, the sources and frequency of information receipt and the level of confidence of the affected population in the adequacy of the information received. A probability sample of 230 citizens was taken from seven communities situated near Mt. St. Helens, Washington, which resumed volcanic activity in March 1980 after a 123-year dormant period. The data analyses indicate that intensive dissemination of hazard information during a short period of imminent threat of disaster sensitized people to the pending event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the purported superiority of the high-Consideration, high-Initiating Structure leadership style, where it is claimed that American leaders with this style have more satisfied subordinates than leaders with other Consideration-Structure combinations. For two different versions of the Ohio State leadership scales, regressions were calculated with the use of data collected from four different U.S. samples: (a) university maintenance workers (N = 230), (b) employed students (N = 178), (c) middle managers in an air-sea transport company (N = 96), and (d) employees in the operations division of a large public utility (N = 258). On the basis of the regression results, it was concluded that the superiority of the high-high leadership style is indeed a myth, and that Consideration alone explains almost all of the variance in subordinate satisfaction. The implications for testing complex leadership models are briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents national survey evidence from the 1970 Michigan Working Conditions Survey and the 1973 Michigan Quality of Employment Survey. The relationship between work values and perceived support for work values is examined by discrepancy rankings. This analysis extends the findings of White and Fein and bolsters their reservations in regard to several central claims of the quality of work movement. Evidence on unionized and non-unionized workers is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of cultural background on reported assertiveness was investigated in two samples of male college students matched on age and education level. The Anglo sample (n = 34) scored significantly higher on a paper/pencil measure than the Mexican-American sample (n = 34) on overall level of assertiveness with significant differences being found for assertiveness with parents, same-sexed peers, and business relations. These lower assertiveness scores were explained in terms of the situationally tied assertive behavior as a function of the needs and cultural experience of Mexican-Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on experimental investigation of the pull effect. A comparison of the supporters of U.S. senators Joseph McCarthy, Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower has been done. Anti-McCarthy subjects when compared to pro-McCarthy subjects will tend to give a lower estimate of the strength of McCarthy's support in a perceptually ambiguous situation, and Pro-Stevenson subjects when compared to pro-Eisenhower subjects will tend to give a higher estimate of Stevenson's support in a perceptually ambiguous situation. Attitudes toward McCarthy may involve much more strong feeling titan attitudes relating to Eisenhower and Stevenson. The question relating to Eisenhower and Stevenson was retrospective in nature while that relating to McCarthy demanded awareness of the immediate status of the Senator, and in this respect, exposure to many polls, to the actual election results, and to post-election analyses may have operated to reduce the ambiguity of the Eisenhower-Stevenson issue.

The article reports on a preliminary study of the relative standing, in both schooling and ready knowledge, of groups of liberal and conservative U. S. adults. The article states that the findings of the study provide a new perspective on the "attitudes-enlightenment" problem, and seem to afford some clews as to where certain types of education and information campaigns might make headway and where they might encounter important psychological barriers. The article provides information about the procedures or methods taken for arranging the data for the study. One of the techniques employed in the study was "Contrasted Groups" in which people in the survey who approved or agreed with a criterion attitude question were compared on information and education with people who disapproved or disagreed with the proposition. The result or the findings were summarized in form of tables. The 16 attitude areas were indicated in the first column together with the approximate date or dates when the questions were asked, and with the putatively liberal answers in capital letters. The most obvious conclusion is, apparently, that no consistent superiority obtains for either liberals or conservatives.

This article focuses on the American and British attitudes toward Soviet Union. The problem is also a challenging one theoretically, because of the more basic character of some of the deeper attitudes or values that may be involved, such as the attitudes toward economic justice, economic stability, racial equality, religion, freedom of speech, independence of small nations, and solidarity of the United Nations. Any systematic approach to these underlying, value-systems should throw some light upon basic elements of attitude-determination in both national and International affairs. The United Nations was a fighting alliance, with the Soviet Union carrying the heaviest burden of the actual fighting. Most of the information about the Soviet Union in the American newspapers, films, and radio programs was favorable. Books like Mission to Moscow and One World were being widely read.

The following hypotheses were tested in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design in which Performance Outcome and Mode of Comparison were manipulated: (a) Subjects evaluated with reference to social comparison display a greater preference for their mode of comparison (grading system) than subjects evaluated by self-comparison of grades, and (b) Machiavellian subjects show a greater preference for social comparison of grades than for self-comparison of grade. An analysis of variance of scores of preferred mode of comparison yielded support for both hypotheses, suggesting that the preference for explicit interpersonal comparisons between students may be an outgrowth of the competitive nature of American education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleven nonverbal tests from French's Nit (2) were administered to 82 Vietnamese and 31 American helicopter mechanics at the end of a 16-week training program in the United States. Six pictures from Hudson's series were administered to 18 Ss from each group. The instructions and administration were in Vietnamese for the former group; otherwise, similar testing conditions prevailed. The Vietnamese equalled or exceeded the Americans on numerical, visualization, perceptual speed, length estimation, arid flexibility of closure tests, but were significantly lower on spatial and mechanical knowledge tests. The results suggest that, as testing conditions are equated, most differences in nonverbal abilities are reduced or disappear. The persistence of differences in spatial abilities, and to sonic extent mechanical knowledge, appears to be due to a failure to learn Western conventions for the representation of three dimensions. That this deficit exists and can probably he overcome by special training is a matter of considerable significance to those concerned with the technical skills of citizens of developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of elementary school children in São Paulo, Brazil, showed that social status (as indicated by educational level of parents), sociometric status, intelligence, and academic success are positively and significantly intercorrelated, just as they are in similar studies in the United States. A similar study, of secondary school students showed that social status (as indicated by educational level of parents), intelligence, and academic success are positively intercorrelated, but that social status does not correlate as highly with these variables as it does in the elementary sample. This finding may be accounted for by the selective nature of the school and the consequent restriction in range of ability. An unexpected finding was the fact that sociometric leadership ratings and intelligence test scores were negatively correlated, although each of these ratings was positively correlated with school marks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined Anderson and Anderson's cross-national data, which are in the form of conclusions written by seventh grade children to the Anderson Incomplete Stories, a projective device. Rating scales were employed to assess story content on interpersonal conflict and the degree of emphasis on material versus interpersonal aspects. Stories from the United States, Norway, and Germany were examined first for gross sample differences, and then by a non-orthogonal multifactorial analysis of variance to determine differences ascribable to nationality, sex, religion, and socio-economic status. The multifactorial analysis revealed that the three demographic variables all had associated differences on one or other of the scales, but these did not seem to affect the overall variations among the samples. Finally, the value of the non-orthogonal multivariate method for providing further information about the effects of nationality and demographic variables on personality was discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the casualties in the event of a limited nuclear war to American citizens. The aftermath of thermonuclear war has been well documented in its physical, medical, environmental, and psychological aspects. Yet denial and inaction seem to be United States citizens' major reactions to the nuclear threat. Apparently only those who have concrete and vivid conceptions of nuclear war's aftermath are able to cut through denial and take positive action. Discovering information that is so concrete, vivid, and personally relevant that it cannot be denied was the goal of the present re- search. Typical perceptions of thermonuclear war are so vague that people have not come to grips with what they would lose if a war occurred. In the event of a limited nuclear war, personal demise is not the most likely dire event; research on the "small world problem" suggests that most United States citizens would experience the injury or death of someone close to them who was living in a targeted city. Thus, it was hypothesized that someone close to research subjects would be in jeopardy in the event of a limited nuclear war, because each subject would have at least one such person or more living in one or more of eight likely metropolitan targets for nuclear missiles.

Exposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup's perspective. Research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants' perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speaker. The credibility makes it possible for the speaker to be viewed as open-minded, which subsequently inspires greater hope. This process culminates in an increased openness to the outgroup. These findings have been restricted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but here we examine their generalizability to racial conflict in the United States. Results reveal that White Americans exposed to internal criticism expressed by a Black authority figure express greater openness to African-American perspectives on race relations and are more willing to support policies of racial equality. Replicating past research, this effect is serially mediated by risk, credibility, and hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All people share a need for safety. Yet people’s pursuit of safety can conflict when it comes to guns, with some people perceiving guns as a means to safety and others perceiving guns as a threat to safety. We examined this conflict on a U.S. college campus that prohibits guns. We distinguished between people (N = 11,390) who (1) own a gun for protection, (2) own a gun exclusively for reasons other than protection (e.g., collecting, sports), and (3) do not own a gun. Protection owners felt less safe on campus and supported allowing guns on campus. They also reported that they and others would feel safer and that gun violence would decrease if they carried a gun on campus. Non-owners and non-protection owners felt the reverse. The findings suggest that protection concerns, rather than gun-ownership per se, account for diverging perceptions and attitudes about guns and gun control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In earlier survey research with Scottish and African adolescents, respectively, McElroy and Jahoda affirmed the Freudian proposition that males should prefer rounded "feminine" shapes, and females angular "masculine" shapes. Most recently, however, replicative survey work by Eysenck and Soueif with Egyptian university students and experimental data from 4- to 12-year-old Americans reported by Munroe, Munroe, and Lansky contrarily suggest that just the opposite is true. The present study re-examines this issue with the responses of 675 white American grade school, high school, and university students to a paper-and-pencil measure comprised of 20 pairs of angular and curvilinear line drawings: e.g., a square and a circle. The Spearman-Brown reliability coefficients for this measure were .73 and .80 for the grammar school and high school/university students, respectively. Additional data collected from the high school and university students related to such family background characteristics as sex and age of Ss' siblings, whether it was the mother rather than the father who was emotionally warmer to the Ss as children, and whether the Ss would presently prefer to be more like the mother or more like the father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there have been many studies of the social and personal determinants of helping behavior among Americans. While these studies have greatly increased our understanding of helpful behavior, very few have attempted to demonstrate simple ways of increasing helpfulness in the natural environment. Isen and Levine reported that the fortuitous discovery of a dime in the coin return of a pay telephone greatly increased helpfulness. They reported that 88% of the subjects finding a dime later assisted an unknown stranger who dropped an armload of papers, while only 4% of the control subjects (those who did not find a dime), assisted the stranger. Their results suggested that even a trivial fortuitous event may produce a massive increase in helpfulness. In a society in which the lack of interpersonal helpfulness appears to be one of the major problems of the times, Isen and Levine's results, if replicated, have important theoretical and social implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among 342 white college students, we examined the effects of social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and racial color-blindness on modern racism attitudes. Structural equation modeling was used to test the indirect effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism attitudes through color-blind racial attitudes. We found strong indirect effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism through racial color-blindness. We did not find support for an alternative model, in which we tested racial color-blindness as a moderator of the effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism. Findings suggest that highly dominant and authoritarian white students endorse color-blind racial attitudes, although likely for different reasons. In turn, this predicts their modern racism attitudes. These findings indicate racial color-blindness is important to address as part of anti-racism education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Participants were 57 U.S. college students and 56 Polish university students and copper mine workers who judged the intimacy of 9 hypothetical relationships and also rated the intensity of their relationships with a best friend, a friend, and an acquaintance on the Friendship Intensity Measurement Scale (FIMS; T. S. Arunkumar & B. Dharmangadan, 2001). The present results confirmed that people perceive (a) relationships with best friends as more intense and intimate than other friendships and (b) other friendships as more intense and intimate than acquaintanceships. The results also indicated that Americans perceive all of their relationships, ranging from mere acquaintanceships to intimate friendships, as more intense and intimate than do Poles. It was somewhat surprising that there were no sex differences in either country in the perception of relationships. The authors discussed the research in the context of the difficulty of defining what friendship is and how an individual's cultural background might interact with person variables such as age and sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants were 80 elected public officials in the United States and 3-6 direct-report staffers for each leader. Together they composed 388 leader-member dyads. The authors surveyed them to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership. The authors considered the 80 officials as leaders and the staffers as members. The present results showed that the emotional intelligence of the leaders shared significant variance with self-perceptions and rater-perceptions of transformational leadership. The present results also somewhat support the predictive value of emotional intelligence in antecedent leadership field research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors used terror management theory (TMT; T. Pyszczynski, S. Solomon. & J. Greenberg, 2003) to investigate people's reactions to the terrorist attacks of (Y911 1/01. According to the theory, people have a primary need to eliminate or reduce existential terror in response to such horrific events as 9/11. The authors obtained people's reactions to 9/11, an event in which the threat to one's existence was more authentic than those of previous events that were imagined. The authors of the present study collected data two weeks after 9/11 from young adults on a large university campus in the U.S. Mid- west. The authors asked participants about their proximal and distal reactions to 9/11 and their reasons or motives for those reactions. The results indicated that the vast majority of participants' proximal reactions to 9/1 1 were shock and/or disbelief whereas their distal reactions included performing altruistic or prosocial behavior. searching for meaning or value in life, seeking or sharing information, spending time in talking to others, and making bigoted remarks about Arab Muslims. The main finding was that interpersonal communication is an important means of eliminating or reducing existential terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined the links between two dimensions that have been useful in understanding cross-cultural differences and similarities, namely, individual- ism-collectivism (1-C) and value orientations. The authors examined the relations and parallels between the two variables by directly relating them and examining the patterns of relations that both have with a third variable, religiosity. Participants were 475 college students from the Philippines, the United States, and Turkey who responded to measures of horizontal and vertical I-C, value orientations, and religiosity. The authors found partial support for the parallels between 1-C and value types, particularly for collectivism and conservative values. Moreover, religiosity was associated positively with conservative values and collectivism, across all three cultures. The authors found individualism to also relate to openness-to-change values, though the patterns were not as consistent as those that they found between collectivism and conservation. Differences and similarities emerged in links of 1-C-values to religiosity across the three samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors measured Internal State Awareness (ISA) and Self-Reflectiveness (SR) factors from the Private Self-Consciousness Scale in Iranian (N = 325) and U.S. (N = 401) university students. In both societies, positive correlations with Need for Cognition and Internal Control and negative correlations with external control and obsessive thinking confirmed ISA as an adaptive form of self-consciousness. In partial correlations in which the authors controlled for ISA, SR was associated cross-culturally with greater Obsessive Thinking. This outcome conformed with the authors' expectations that SR would have negative mental health implications, but other data revealed complexities in the SR association with adjustment. Differences between samples failed to yield any simple support for F. Fukuyama's (1992) suggestion that Iranians might be more "alienated" (pp. 236-237) in their psychological functioning. The present study most importantly offered cross-cultural evidence in favor of the claim that better measures of an introspective self-awareness need to be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the scores that were obtained from the Personal Attributes Questionnaire using an multitrait-multimethod (MTMM). The PAQ and the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) are two popular measures of sex role orientation in psychology and related disciplines. Appropriate to the popularity of the PAQ and the BSRI, many empirical researchers have investigated their psychometric properties. Researchers can assess both reliability and validity by using an MTMM because reliability is the agreement between two efforts to measure the same trait through maximally similar methods and validity is represented in the agreement between two attempts to measure the same trait through maximally different methods. Participants were 112 undergraduate students who have enrolled in two introductory sociology and educational psychology courses at a southeastern university in the U.S. The two major ethnic groups were Caucasian and African American. The sample was approximately 36 percent male and 64 percent female. The mean age of the sample was 20.5 years with a standard deviation of 4.7 years. The participants voluntarily completed the PAQ and an accompanying demographic information form.

ABSTRACT. The father-son dyad might be the most socially significant male-male relationship in the life course, yet its negative qualities have been the sole focus in most research on the relationship. One communicative aspect that has received little scholarly attention is the expression of affection between fathers and sons, despite the strong correlation of affectionate communication with positive involvement, closeness, and relational satisfaction for fathers and sons. In 2 studies, the authors tested hypotheses about father-son affection that were derived from affection exchange theory (K. Floyd, in press). Results indicated that U.S. men are more affectionate with biological sons than with stepsons or adopted sons and that they are more affectionate with their biological sons than their biological sons are with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The authors investigated how emotions are labeled and conceptualized by individuals representing widely varying ages and educational backgrounds, who live in rural areas of Japan and the United States. The authors gathered data in 2 phases: 30 participants in each country first produced emotion terms, and another 2 groups of 28 (I group from each country) sorted out those emotion terms by similarities. Results indicated that these laypersons' emotion vocabularies were larger than those typically studied in psychological research; both American and Japanese participants produced many terms referring to physical sensations or evaluative reactions. Also, the authors found both similarities and differences in how speakers of American English and Japanese conceptualized emotions, bringing into question the often simplistic notions of cultural differences reported in the previous literature (P. Ekman, 1994; P. Ekman & W. V. Friesen, 1971; P. Ekman et al., 1987). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined the effectiveness of conflict resolution and peer mediation training among California high school students. The authors randomly assigned 2 of 4 classes to receive 5 weeks of conflict resolution and peer mediation training integrated into the required social studies curriculum. The remaining 2 classes studied the same social studies curriculum for an identical amount of time (105 min every other day) without conflict resolution and peer mediation training. The authors investigated 2 issues. The 1st was the effectiveness of the conflict resolution and peer mediation training. The trained students, compared with the untrained students, learned the integrative negotiation and peer mediation procedures better, applied the procedures more completely, chose an integrative over a distributive approach to negotiation, and developed more positive attitudes toward conflict. The 2nd issue was the impact of the training program on academic achievement. Integrating conflict resolution and peer mediation training into an academic course promoted higher achievement, greater long-term retention of the academic learning, and greater transfer of academic learning in social studies to language arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. Among a sample of 176 low-income mothers from 3 ethnic groups in the United States, the authors investigated ethnic differences in attitudes toward preferred parenting strategies, or styles; ethnic differences in the potential for child abuse; and the relationship between parenting strategies, the potential for child abuse, and parental satisfaction. They distributed the Maternal Reactions to Child's Deviant Behavior subscale (K. M. Rickard, W. Graziano, & R. Forehand, 1984), a shortened version of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAPI; J. S. Milner & R. C. Wimberley, 1979), and a Parental Satisfaction Scale (N. P. Medora, S. M. Wilson, & J. Larson, 1996) to the participants. The results indicated no significant ethnic differences in preferred parenting styles. Mothers from all 3 ethnic groups ranked praise and reasoning as the 1st and 2nd preferred parenting strategies. There were no ethnic differences in the perceived potential for child abuse. Parental satisfaction was negatively related to 2 of the CAPI subscales-Loneliness and Problems. The parenting strategy reasoning was positively correlated with parental satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The authors explored self-reported experiences of interpersonal sexist discrimination and responses to such incidents in a heterogeneous sample of 262 women in the northeastern United States. They divided the sample into 2 categories for age (< 30 years, > 30 years) and for ethnicity (women of color, European American women). Across categories of age and ethnicity, the participants (a) commonly experienced sexist discrimination and (b) viewed men as the primary perpetrators of the discrimination. Although the women's reports of sexist experiences were similar for the most part, the authors found significant age differences in the frequency of categories of sexist events and in specific events, as well as in some general responses to such incidents. Ethnicity, operationalized here as women of color and European American women, did not have a significant influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. For more than 2 decades, researchers have tried to identify the variables that predict the overall performance of U.S. presidents. In 1986, there emerged a 6-variable prediction equation (D. K. Simonton, 1986c, 1987b) that has been replicated repeatedly. The predictors are years in office, war years, scandal, assassination, heroism in war, and intellectual brilliance. The author again replicated the equation on recent rankings of all presidents from George Washington through William Jefferson Clinton according to a survey of 719 experts (W. R. Ridings, Jr., & S. B. McIver, 1997). The original 6-variable equation successfully predicted both the overall rankings as well as the 5 core components of the rankings (leadership qualities, accomplishment, political skill, appointments, character and integrity). The predictive value of the equation was illustrated for the presidencies of Ronald W. Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. In Born to Rebel, F. Sulloway (1996) argued that, throughout history, later-borns have been more likely than first-borns to challenge the status quo. The authors tested Sulloway's hypothesis among a group of U.S. college students who had participated in civil disobedience as part of a labor dispute. The authors predicted that there would be a higher percentage of later-borns among those who had been arrested than among a group of their friends who had not participated in civil disobedience or among a control group of students drawn from classes at the college. The findings, in fact, revealed a significant relationship between the number of times the students had been arrested and birth order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The authors explored attitudes of young women in the United Kingdom (n = 108) and the United States (n = 91) toward (a) the possession and use of guns through the Attitude to Guns Scale (N. R. Branscombe, J. A. Weir, & P. Crosby, 1992) and (b) guns' perceived functional and symbolic significance through the Symbolic Nature of Guns Scale (C. A. Cooke & J. E. Puddifoot, 1997). There were significant differences in beliefs concerning the fight to own a gun and the protective effect of guns but not in the perceived contribution of guns to crime. Although neither group strongly equated guns symbolically with power or control, the U.S. women were more likely to perceive guns as expressions of freedom or independence, and the U.K. women were more likely to view guns as expressions of danger and violence. The findings were contextualized by comparison with samples of male control participants of similar ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]