Marcia Mckinley

Advancing Inspired Minds, LLC

This study examined the effects of age on women’s mate preferences in a sample of 707 women. As hypothesized, women’s age affected their mate preferences, as reported in an online survey. In general, younger women were significantly more likely to report preferences for “bad boy” characteristics than were older women.

Female participants completed an Internet survey on which they rated their preferences in male partners and completed a modified version of the Parental Bonding Inventory, which measured fathers' care and control during women's childhoods. As hypothesized, results indicated that both paternal care and control during childhood predicted women's mate...

This study explored the relationship between leisure reading, as measured by participants’ reports of their reading and writing habits, and writing apprehension, as measured by the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test. The results confirmed the hypotheses, indicating that students who engage in more recreational reading experience less apprehensio...

Forty 4-year-olds and 39 6-year-olds participated in a modified misinformation-effects paradigm. At time 1 they reviewed a story and some of the children were asked questions about it in either recall or recognition format. Three weeks later they were given misinformation about some of the story events. The following week they were asked the origin...

It was predicted that social cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of young children's social development would predict stable peer ratings of their likability. Measures of likability, emotion knowledge, prosocial and aggressive behavior, peer competence, and expressed emotions (happy and angry) were obtained for 65 subjects (mean age = 44 m...

In this study, 439 participants completed an online survey about their television viewing habits, their familiarity with forensic investigation television shows, and their expectations about the evidence available in real-life court proceedings. Results indicated that participants who were familiar with forensic investigation programs expect more f...

Despite the fact that 1.5 to 2.1 million American children are home-schooled, there is limited research on the impact of home-schooling on children's social skills. This study compares 53 home-schooled, 49 private-schooled, and 48 public-schooled children between the ages of 8 and 12 both on social skills, as measured by the Parent and Student Form...

College students' eyewitness accuracy and suggestibility were assessed with two measures of suggestibility: (1) the non-forensic version of the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale [GSS 2; Gudjonsson, G. H. (1987). A parallel form of the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27, 185–187; Gudjonsson, G. H. (1997). The G...

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to fo...

There are two approaches to the study of suggestibility: the experimental approach and the individual differences approach. Despite voluminous research in both of these traditions, many questions remain unanswered, including whether suggestibility is caused by memory failures or the desire to comply. Unfortunately, the answer to this question may d...

King Solomon may have been the first judge to determine a child’s custody; the standard he verbalized focused on equity, the sharing by each of two women in the physical custody of the child. In reality, King Solomon was testing the two women in order to determine which woman was the true mother and what was in the best interests of the child. So t...

Undergraduates completed two tests of suggestibility: the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS) and a standard experimental paradigm. There were moderate positive correlations between suggestibility and some, but not all, aspects of suggestibility on the GSS. This supports the idea that suggestibility is a multidimensional phenomenon.

In two experiments children in grades 3 and 4 and college students were given an item-by-item cued intentional forgetting task (i.e., instructions were to remember some words and to forget others), either a direct (cued recall word-stem completion) or an indirect (repetition priming word-stem completion) test of memory for the words, and a final fr...

Paper presented as a part of a symposium on Directed Forgetting (K. K. Harnishfeger, Chair).

This study investigated the psychometric properties of sociometric nominations used with preschoolers, in order to assess their potential usefulness for convergent and predictive assessment of the behavioral and affective components of social competence. Stability, convergent validity, and moderators of sociometric nominations were investigated. Te...

It was predicted that social cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of young children's social development would predict stable peer ratings of their likability. Measures of likability, emotion knowledge, prosocial and aggressive behavior, peer competence, and expressed emotions (happy and angry) were obtained for 65 subjects (mean age = 44 m...