Long-range course planning by college students

A group of 633 college students at a large midwestern public university was asked fifteen questions pertaining to personal long-term course planning. The results indicated that only 48% of the students sketched out a tentative listing of at least two courses per term for one or more subsequent semesters when first planning courses for the current semester. Long-range planning was positively correlated with the number of years students had already spent in college and with students' perception of the following factors: course planning utility, degree of certainty about pursuing one's current first choice of career, and degree of commitment in using college coursework as a means of achieving a career goal (all p < 0.001). Long-range planning was negatively correlated with the anticipation of a possible change in academic interests. Such planning was not significantly correlated with students' entrance examination aptitude scores or grade point averages. Thus, students' long-range planning of courses was associated more strongly with career commitment than with recent academic performance or aptitude.     

Behavioral medicine and health psychology in a changing world

Despite long-established roots in experimental psychophysiology and psychosomatic medicine, behavioral medicine and health psychology have only recently emerged as recognized, highly visible disciplines within medicine and the behavioral sciences. The rapid development of these fields has resulted partly from important scientific advances in the biomedical and behavioral sciences and partly from changing societal concerns and values. The latter include a greater preoccupation with individual self-expression and self-fulfillment, a decline in respect for authority per se, and an increased skepticism about social institutions. Coupled with these changes has been an increasing desire to take responsibility for one's own life and, in matters of health, of one's own body. The ways in which scientific advances and social changes have influenced the shape of contemporary behavioral medicine and health psychology are explored with the aid of two illustrations: the growth of a developmental perspective in behavioral medicine and health psychology; and work and health, including the effects of job stress and unemployment. Finally, the author stresses the need for a greater sense of community and concern for others, if we are to succeed in creating a growth-enhancing, health-producing climate for society as a whole and for each of us as individuals.     

A new look at learning-disabled and normal-achieving children's word-pair memorization ability

An 11-parameter Markov model of stages of learning, which was developed by Brainerd et al., will be presented. The focus will be on parameter interpretation in terms of long-term memory (LTM) processes. Next the model will be used to examine the contribution of these various LTM processes to Schooltype and Age differences in a word-pair memorization experiment. Subjects were 8 and 11-year-old normal-achieving (NA) children from regular elementary schools and 8 and 11-year-old children from special schools for learning disabled (LD) children. One of the main conclusions is that the Schooltype × Age interaction which was demonstrated for traditional performance measures, can be explained by LD children's little developmental progress in storage processes and deviations from normal development in aspects of the acquisition of retrieval algorithms. No deficiences were, however, detected in the LD children's rerention ability early in the task, and in the so-called heuristic retrieval operations.     

Mechanisms of the relation between perinatal problems, early childhood illness, and psychopathology in late childhood and adolescence

Data on perinatal and early childhood somatic and psychological risk factors of a random sample of children were gathered in early to middle childhood and employed to examine the long-term risk of emotional and behavioral problems of late childhood and adolescence. 3 issues were addressed: First, can syndromic specificity of such effects be identified on scaled and diagnostic measures of syndromes? Second, are these effects attributable to excess risk of low-income children for both perinatal and later childhood problems? Third, are the intervening mechanisms identifiable as intellectual impairment, vulnerability to poor health, poor maternal caretaking, maternal rejection, or maternal stress associated with marital problems? Findings indicated that elevated risk was present for all syndromes, both at the scale level and at the diagnostic level. None of the examined intervening mechanisms fully accounted for the effects of early risks.     

Depressed mothers' judgments about their children: an examination of the depression-distortion hypothesis

The belief that depressed mothers have distorted perceptions of their children's problems has gained considerable currency in recent years. The empirical basis for this belief at present amounts to little more than reliable demonstrations that depressed mothers tend to report more behavior problems in their children than do nondepressed mothers. An obvious alternative to the distortion interpretation is that depressed mothers are accurate about their children's behavior problems. We examined these competing models by comparing teachers' ratings of children with ratings provided by their mothers, who varied on the dimensions of depressed mood, depressed clinical state, and history of depression. Mothers' and teachers' ratings yielded substantially similar portraits of child behavior problems at the group level, with children of in-remission and in-episode mothers manifesting significantly higher levels of behavior problems than children of control mothers. Moreover, agreement between mothers and teachers was in the moderate range for all index groups and did not differ significantly from the mean level of mother-teacher agreement reported by other investigators based on unselected samples. The limitations of these findings and of earlier reports for assessing a depression----distortion influence on mothers' ratings of their children are considered.