Maternal child-rearing experience and self-reinforcement effectiveness.

Abstract

Relationships between maternal child-rearing nurturance and control, as rated by late-adolescent offspring, and the influence of the child's selfreinforcement on achievement motivation were examined using 48 male and female subjects. The prediction that subjects with high-nurturant mothers would be more effective self-reinforcers than subjects with lownurturant mothers was confirmed. High-nurturant-low-control subjects were the most effective group, also as predicted. The expectation that lownurturant-high-control subjects would be the least effective self-reinforcers was not confirmed. These predicted relationships were not found in matched control groups (N = 48) exposed to equivalent extrinsic social reinforcement by the experimenter.

Effects of locus of control and type of feedback on the task performance of lower-class black children.

“…These results support our contention that self-discovery and unverifiable verbal praise provide differential motivational bases for the behavior of internals and externals. Consistent with this analysis, Heilbrun (Heilbrun, 1970;Heilbrun & Norbert, 1970) has recently found that antecedent conditions that optimize achievement motipresent model permitted directional hypotheses on an a priori basis. vation and effective self-reinforcement-noncontrolling, nurturant mothers-differ dramatically from the antecedent conditions associated with high responsiveness to external reinforcement-highly controlling, nonnurturant mothers.…”

Interaction of locus of control and type of performance feedback: Considerations of external validity.

“…The issue then shifts to specifying the conditions which might moderate these diverse patterns of effect. The work of Weiner et al (1971) and Heilbrun and Norbert (1970) suggest that internals are better self-reinforcers than are externals. Given this type of data, Crandall and McGhee's (1968) finding that internals perform better than externals in school may reflect the fact that in situations where reinforcement is normatively chaotic in terms of providing discriminable contingencies and variable in frequency, persons who more effectively mediate their own reinforcements (i.e., internals) can better compensate for impoverished conditions of extrinsic reinforcement.…”

A theory of the creativity-intelligence interaction: an environmental suppressor variable

“…The mothers of these sub jects have been generally described by him as Itoverprotective tt (Heilbrun and Waters, 1968). On the test of self-reinforcement effectiveness (Heilbrun and Norbert, 1970), these subjects showed themselves to be of intermediate degree of efficiency at self-reinforcement--theywers neither highly susceptible to external r~inforcement, nor were they highly responsive to self-reinforcement. Their idiosyncrasy shows up only in the achievement study (Heilbrun and Waters, 1968).…”