Sheila C. Ribordy

Recognition of emotional expression by abused children

This study compared 17 abused and 17 matched, nonabused children on their ability to identify six facial expressions of emotions and on teacher ratings of social competency. Abused children were less skilled in decoding facial expressions of emotions and were rated less socially competent than nonabused children. The findings suggest a strategy for studying the development of emotion recognition skills by abused and nonabused children.

An empirical investigation of emotional reactions to divorce

Administered three personality tests to four groups (N = 74): (1) individuals who subjectively defined their marriages as good; (2) individuals who were undergoing marriage counseling; (3) individuals who had filed for divorce, but had not yet been to court; and (4) individuals who had been divorced between 6 and 12 months. These groups were selected to represent the various stages of the divorce process and thus constituted a cross-sectional design. Results indicated intensified feelings of depression, anxiety, and hostility as one entered marriage counseling. These feelings were maintained through the period of attaining the divorce; however, by the sixth to twelfth month after the divorce most of these negative feelings had disappeared.

The effects of an attentional training procedure on the performance of high and low test-anxious children

Children, ages 9 through 12, who were either high or low in test anxiety were matched on sex and grade level, then randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1)attentional training, (2)placebo training, and (3)notraining control. The attentional training group was rewarded for successful inhibition of irrelevant responses and correct attending behavior on a task similar to the Stroop Color Word Test. The placebo training group experienced the same training task but received rewards that were not contingent on inhibition of the irrelevant responses. For the younger children, posttraining assessement on the Stroop test revealed that attentional training enabled high test-anxious children to perform as well as low test-anxious children, while high test-anxious children in the placebo and control groups continued to make more errors than low test-anxious children. This effect did not occur for the older subjects. A second test measuring central-incidental learning was included to test for generalization effects of training, but this task yielded nonsignificant results.

Approval versus achievement motives in seventh-grade girls

Eighty seventh graders played a computer-programmed two-choice probability game in one of four conditions: with reinforcement for choosing the more probable response, with reinforcement for choosing the less probable response, with a silent experimenter, or alone. Children receiving reinforcement for the less probable response experienced a conflict between approval and achievement since choices which increased approval in this condition decreased success in the task. Across all conditions, girls chose the more probable response significantly more often than boys, indicating that girls did not sacrifice achievement for the sake of approval. Finally, girls did not reduce their efforts to achieve when working alone even though there was no opportunity for social approval, and did not express lower success expectancies than the boys even though these were measured anonymously.