Suchergebnisse

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of age of benefactor, instrumental attractiveness of the prospective recipient, and the recipient's need for assistance on children's prosocial behavior. Children aged 5-6 years, 7-8 years, and 9-10 years were first
given an opportunity to share a valuable commodity with either an attractive or an unattractive peer. Moments later, the peer, who was in the next room, appeared to fall from a chair and to have either high or low need for assistance. The only significant result for the sharing index was age
of benefactor: Older children shared more of their resources than did their younger counterparts. In contrast, children's helpful responses to the peer's "emergency" were affected only by the peer's apparent need for assistance. Finally, children's sharing and
their responses to the emergency were positively correlated with the scores the children obtained on a test of empathic abilities. The implications of these results and the role played by empathy in children's prosocial behavior are discussed.

Female subjects who differed in public and private self-consciousness and in self-reported altruism were afforded an opportunity to assist a person in need. As anticipated, subjects high in private selfconsciousness provided more assistance to the recipient than did subjects low on
this attribute. However, there was a tendency for "high private" subjects to be somewhat less helpful if they were also high in public self-consciousness. Internal analyses revealed that Self-reported Altruism, a measure of one's altruistic inclinations, reliably predicted
the helping behavior of subjects high in private self-consciousness, but did not predict the prosocial actions of those low in private self-consciousness. The implications of these findings for self-consciousness theory and the issue of value-behavior correspondence are discussed.

Past research suggests that US stock market volatility was greater during the 1930s than in any other 10-year time period and the post-WWII era is a period of relative stability, despite slightly higher volatility levels during the 1970s and 1980s. More recent evidence suggests that volatility levels from 1998 to 2001 have more in common with 1930s levels than with any other time period. We extend this body of research to include the volatility experiences of seven equity markets in the US, Europe, and Asia. For each market, we compare the average monthly volatility of each five-year period, beginning with January 1923, with that for the most recent period in the study, January 1998 to August 2001. We find that when there are statistical differences between current and past levels of volatility, recent volatility is usually significantly greater than past volatility. In only a small number of cases do we find current volatility to be less than past volatility. This suggests that the 1998–2001 period was unusually volatile for most markets examined. We also find that volatility behavior tends to be country-specific and cannot be generalized on an aggregate basis.

The present experiment failed to replicate a widely-cited sexist bias in people's evaluations of occupations that was originally reported by Touhey (1974x; 1974b). Not only were contemporary college students unwilling to downgrade the prestige of masculine professions or to upgrade
that of feminine professions when told that the proportion of other-sex (i.e., minority) practitioners was increasing; they actually rated one traditionally masculine occupation (college professor) in more favorable terms if informed that women would be making greater contributions to this
profession in the future. Some present and future implications of these findings are discussed.