This study investigated the relationship between test anxiety and academic performance in 4,000 undergraduate and 1,414 graduate students and found a significant but small inverse relationship between test anxiety and grade point average (GPA) in both groups. Low-test-anxious undergraduates averaged a Bϩ, whereas high-test-anxious students averaged a B. Low-test-anxious female graduate students had significantly higher GPAs than high-test-anxious female graduate students, but there were no significant GPA differences between low-and high-test-anxious male graduate students. Female undergraduates had significantly higher test anxiety and higher GPAs than male undergraduates, and female graduate students had significantly higher test anxiety and higher GPAs than male graduate students.

This study explored the deductive reasoning and school performance of 330 African American adolescents and the relation of reasoning and school performance to socioeconomic status (SES), ethnic identity, and self-esteem. As expected, there was a systematic increase in selection task reasoning performance across adolescence, and high SES students outscored low SES students in reasoning performance and school grades. Ogbu’s cultural-ecological theory, which predicts an inverse relationship between cognitive performance and ethnic idfentity strength, was not supported because better reasoning performance was associated instead with stronger ethnic identity. Steele’s stereotype-threat theory, which predicts that there will be an association between global self-esteem and school grades in early adolescent African Americans that subsequently decreases across adolescence, was partially supported. Self-esteem and grades were strongly related in 6th graders, not significantly related in 10th and 12th graders, yet strongly related in college students.

This study of the frequency of public smiling in a sample of 15,824 children, adolescents, young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults yielded a significant decrease in public smiling across age groups. Females smiled significantly more than males.

This cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between different lighting conditions experienced during sleep in the first -two years of life and development of myopia after age two as reported retrospectively by parents in a total of 469 individuals, including 252 children aged 2-16 yr., and 217 adults aged 17-40 yr. There were no significant differences in incidence of myopia in children who had slept from 0-2 yr. in darkness, with a night light, room light, or hall light. Adults who were reported by their parents to have slept with a night light on from 0-2 yr. were significantly more likely to be myopic than those who were reported to have slept from 0-2 yr. in any other lighting condition.