No description available.

No description available.

This thesis employed secondary analysis of data compiled by the National Opinion Research Center. The sample consisted of 1,530 respondents which were selected by full probability sampling techniques from the universe of the total non-institutionalized English speaking population of the continental United States, eighteen years of age or older.In order to research sex-role attitudes two dependent variables were chosen, FEFAM and FEPRESCH. On the FEFAM questions respondents were asked to agree or disagree with the statement "It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family." On the FEPRESCH item respondents were asked to agree or disagree with the statement "A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works." Two models were created one with selected characteristics for the total sample, the other with selected characteristics for the total sample, the other with selected characteristics for women only. The log-linear technique was employed to estimate these models. Through the use of this statistical procedure the magnitude and the nature of the effects of the independent variables on the dependent variables was calculated.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

This thesis has described an experimental study of the "motive to avoid success", as described by Matina Horner (1968), using sex, age, and sex of cues as independent variables. One-hundred-eighty-nine school-aged subjects wrote stories in response to one of two written thematic apperceptive cues. The dependent measure was the presence or absence of negative imagery written in response to the verbal cue. A 2x2x4 completely randomized factorial design was used to analyze the data. A highly significant main effect for sex of cue was found. Both males and females recorded significantly more negative responses towards the female cue than towards the male cue.The "motive to avoid success" as an intrapsychic feminine phenomenon is questioned. An alternative explanation of response to traditional learned role-stereotypes is posited. The "motive to avoid success" appears to be less of an internal mechanism and more of a cue dependent response than previously indicated in the literature.

I developed a framework to support the maintenance of teams of heterogeneous robots operating in complex and dynamic environments such as disaster zones. Given an established team, my work also facilitates the discovery of work to be done during the team's mission and its subsequent assignment to members of the team in a distributed fashion. I evaluated my framework through the development of an example implementation where robots perform exploration in order to locate victims in a simulated disaster environment.

No description available.

This thesis is about the role played by story telling in a Metropolitan Police Probationer Classroom in South London in the early 1990s. The method used is one of discourse analysis of the type advocated by Potter and Wetherall, 1987):The form and function of themes, role-plays, case studies, anecdotes and hypothetical accounts are considered in this setting. The central argument here is that all these types of story are used to introduce an element of work place practice into the classroom context. This serves to motivate the students to learn by emphasising the relevance of the lesson material. Such motivation gives rise to student involvement in the classroom activity. In this way, the pedagogical goals of experiential learning and student involvement are achieved and a broader cultural value favouring practice over theory is realised. As with all stories, themes, role-plays, case studies and hypothetical accounts are subject to the constraint of verisimilitude. This thesis suggests that the way in which verisimilitude is defined and applied in any given setting is highly context dependent. In this setting, verisimilitude focuses on the cognitive and task oriented elements of experiences that the students are thought to be likely to encounter in their work place. Stories that deviate from this focus might result in the students becoming bored or distracted; this may result in a situation in which the objectives of the curriculum are not met. For these reasons, trainers endeavour to control the use of stories by influencing every aspect of their telling. The rigour with which this definition of verisimilitude is applied in this setting varies according to the type of the story to be told and the lesson material in which it is to be used. Judgements of verisimilitude are more rigorous when stories that are likely to exert high attentional or emotional demands on the students are used.

No description available.

The present research addressed three major role-taking issues: (1) its developmental nature; (2) its underlying variables; and (3) its status within social cognition. Children between 6 and 11 years were tested. Study 1 examined the development of 3 role-taking tasks. Study 2 compared role taking to nonsocial word-pair comparison to determine whether the self's involvement demanded additional skills. Using original tasks, Studies 3 and 4 related role taking and comparison to referential communication. Study 4 also examined (a) the effects on these behaviours of a direct attentional decentration manipulation and (b) their relation to integration as measured by a modified Gergen-Morse Perceived Self-Consistency Scale. Major results indicated that: most children developed role taking around age 6 and mastered it by 11; nonsocial decentration (comparison) was related to role taking, with comparison developing first; and integration related to role taking but not to comparison. Finally, comparison and role taking were necessary but insufficient for referential communication; integration was also related to communication. The implications of these findings for a theory of role taking were discussed.