Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Personnel Staff Attitudes Toward The Employment Of Persons With Physical Disability, Mental Retardation, Or Mental Illness, Karol Ruth Oldenburg

Student Work

This thesis describes a measurement of personnel staff attitudes and perceptions toward the employability of disabled job applicants. More specifically, direct comparisons among three types of disability categories were made using Osgood's Semantic Scaling Method.

Sixty employment professionals of the Lincoln Human Resources Management Association rated a job applicant with physical disability, with mental retardation, and one with mental illness on the basis of 15 paired opposite adjectives. These adjectives described a variety of attributes which could be grouped into evaluative, potency, and activity dimensions of semantic space.

Respondents completed a four-page questionnaire which rated physically disabled, mentally retarded, and …

The Effect Of Persuasion, Across Task Difficulties, On Self-Efficacy, Performance And Persistence A Thesis, Linda J. Kaiser

Student Work

Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977a, 1982, 1986) postulates that efficacy expectations can be modified by persuasion if it is perceived as being instilled by a credible source, it is realistic, and it is not in opposition to performance information. Subsequent research revealed equivocal results for the relationship between persuasion and self-efficacy. This study investigates the effects of persuasion, across task difficulties, on selfefficacy, performance, and persistence. A mathematical task was utilized. Six hypotheses were tested. Persuasion was found to be effective in a hardtask situation. Gender had a substantial impact on the results of this study; overall findings may have been …

The Dispositional Approach To Job Satisfaction: Trait Or State?, Sharlyn K. Whingham

Student Work

Job satisfaction has been one of the most extensively researched areas of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Although situational influences on job satisfaction have traditionally been the primary focus of research, staw and Ross (1985) asserted that job satisfaction may be determined as much by personal dispositions as situational factors. Specifically, they proposed that an individual's predisposition toward optimism or pessimism is a critical determinant of job satisfaction. However, subsequent empirical investigations purporting to test the influence of the trait-like predisposition of optimism/pessimism have employed measures of positive and negative affective states. This study attempted to disentangle the influence of temporary negative and …

Looking At Barbie: Social Comparison Processes And Body Esteem Among Women, Sally Elizabeth Ware

Student Work

In this thesis, three areas are described: the phenomenon of body dissatisfaction among apparently normal-sized women from a sociocultural perspective; social comparison theory, which is proposed to be the mechanism by which the phenomenon operates; and the results of an experiment designed not only to test the nature of the phenomenon itself, but also to test certain components of social comparison theory, such as selection of comparison targets and the role of derogation.

The study reports women’s responses to inescapable social comparison on the attribute of body size and shape with two groups of social comparison targets: photographs from popular …

Psychophysiological And Personality Correlates Of Repression And Sensitization, John Patrick Kline

Student Work

This study assessed relationships among indices of modulation of stimulus intensity by the autonomic and central nervous systems, perceptual defense, and repressive coping. Subjects were twenty female and nine male paid volunteers between the ages of 19 and 38. Perceptual defense, defined as the difference in recognition thresholds for unpleasant versus pleasant words, was assessed with a tachistoscopic masking paradigm. Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were obtained in an augmentation reduction paradigm that evaluated cortical responses to discrete tones of varying intensity. Cardiac responses to these same tones were also obtained. Amplitude/intensity slopes were determined for P2 amplitudes obtained from the …

Touch Avoidance And Eating Disorders: A Relational Study, Christine L. North

Student Work

This relational study had therapists from an eating disorder program distribute a touch avoidance questionnaire to patients currently in treatment for an eating disorder. This study looked at touch avoidance among three groups: subjects with an eating disorder and non-sexual abuse background, subjects with an eating disorder and sexual abuse background, and a control group. The questionnaire consisted of the 20 question Same-Sex Touching Scale (SSTS) (Larsen & LeRoux, 1984) and the Touch Avoidance Measure (TAM) (Andersen & Leibowitz, 1978). T-tests revealed a significant value of -2.19 on the TAM between eating disorder and eating disorder/sexual abuse, a score of …

Communication Attitudes And Job Effectiveness Of Debt Collectors, Robert S. Embrey

Student Work

This study investigates the relationship between rhetorical sensitivity attitude sets (rhetorical sensitive (RS), noble self (NS), and rhetorical reflector (RR)), effectiveness and debt collectors. The questions to be answered are: (1) do debt collectors hold predominantly one attitudinal set more than another, and (2) does collector effectiveness correlate with any specific attitudinal set held. The measurement of attitudinal sets was accomplished using the RHETSEN instrument operationalized by Hart, Carlson, and Eadie in 1980. Collector effectiveness was determined by the collectors' manager or supervisor rating them from 1 through 7 on a semantic differential scale (1 labeled Poor and 7 labeled …