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Letters of recommendation on 40 candidates for admission to graduate school were examined as naturally occurring instances of person perception. This context permitted the examination of the influences of the perceiver and the perceived on the process of perception, where the purposes of the descriptions and the audience for whom they were intended were clear. The analysis focused on the levels of agreement found among descriptions organized to reveal the presence of discriminative, consensual, and differentiating patterns of perception. The results generally revealed a pattern of nondiscriminative, nonconsensual, and nondifferentiating descriptions. Internal analyses of a subsample of the letters suggested that this pattern probably did not arise as a result of differential acquaintance on the part of the writers. The discussion emphasizes the importance of focusing on the attribute-selection processes of the perceiver as a promising avenue of further investigation.Requests for reprints should be sent to James C. Baxter,

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Much attention has been paid to the amount of time Americans spend watching television. Cultivation theory has been important in exploring behavioral effects of television viewing for many years. However, psychosocial health has received much less scrutiny in relation to television viewing time. This investigation examined the hypotheses that television-free individuals and viewers adhering to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations (up to 2 hr of viewing per day) would display a more positive psychosocial health profile when compared with more frequent television viewers. Results confirmed the hypothesis for women, but not for men. Our analysis showed that moderate television viewing, as defined by the AAP, provides a similar relation with psychosocial health as being television-free. Results are discussed in a cultivation theory framework.

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