According to Deikman (1966), meditation (defined as a training to sustain attention) has a deautomatizing effect. This ascertion was utilized in the present study as a departure point and explored within an information processing framework for classical conditioning. A sample of 48 college students was selected and randomly assigned to four conditions with different instructional sets involving allocation of attention during a classical conditioning background situation. The basic hypothesis of the study was that provided arousal factors were controlled, focusing of attention upon internal stimulation (i.e. breathing) could delay or attenuate the affect of conditioning, habituation and extinction as compared with instructions to externally allocate attention (on the CS and US). A secondary hypothesis predicted that for subjects under switching conditions changing from internal to external allocation and vice versa would produce a more pronounced extinction pattern as compared with subjects under non—switching conditions.

The development of measures of masculinity/femininity in psychology has reflected historical interest in categorizing gender differences. Recent measures have characterized masculinity as instrumental/agentic behavior. In this study, a traditional measure (the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Masculinity/femininity scale) was pitted against a more recent measure (the Personal Attributes Questionnaire) in predicting instrumental behavior of mixed sex dyads in laboratory sex stereotyped tasks. Neither measure effectively predicted instrumental behavior. Rather, females performed better on the more complex but feminine stereotyped task, and males performed better on the masculine stereotyped task. The outcome of this study supports the need to view gender differences as dynamic phenomena influenced by individual choice, situational pressures, and interactional characteristics.

A theoretical model of eleven antecedents of marital quality (education, family life cycle, sex, work status, sex role attitude, social network, role accumulation, role conflict, parental competence, parental strain, and marital strain) was developed and tested using Path Analysis. Subjects were 119 married couples (238 individuals) who had at least one child. They completed the Parental and Marital Interaction Questionnaire which had measures for each of the antecedent variables.

The purpose of the present study is to compare a "traditional" behavioral therapy approach (based on selfcontrol techniques) with a previously unresearched "contextual therapy" for the treatment of overweight. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of a variety of relevant behavioral techniques, an evaluation of them, and a discussion of a contextual model for the treatment of overweight.

The present investigation tested the prediction that effortless control processing, the deliberate activation of innate automatic encoding mechanisms, will enable nondepressed persons to accurately judge degree of control. Subjective judgment of control in nondepressed students was examined by a modification of the method developed by Jenkins and Ward (1965). The modification was based on Hasher and Zacks' (1979) version of the method. Several measures were used to assess students' representations of control. Students were asked to judge the degree of control their responses had over outcomes rather than the degree of contingency between responses and outcomes. To facilitate comparison of prior studies on the judgment of contingency with the present study, Jenkins and Ward's (1965) index of the actual degree of control was used. Their index used the magnitude of the difference between the conditional probability of an outcome given the occurrence of one response versus the conditional probability of the outcome given the occurrence of another response as representing degree of control or contingency. In this experiment, students instructed in effortful control processing and effortless control processing were presented with a series of problems in which there was no contingency between their responses and outcomes. The problems differed in …