Interpersonal touching and orality.

Sixty-five undergraduates were assigned to guide a blindfolded confederate through a floor maze. The frequency of touching the confederate's skin and the length of time required to complete the trip through the maze were recorded. Each subject was also given a self-administered Rorschach test; an independent count was made of the number of oral responses given. Orality was positively related to touching behavior (r=.39, p=.001) and with speed of guiding the confederate through the maze (r=.31, p=.01).     

Transforming psychological practice and society. Policies that reflect the new paradigm

As people with disabilities challenge psychology to acknowledge the sociopolitical foundations of their marginalization, they urge psychologists to help improve disability policy within and beyond the borders of the discipline. Understanding disability through a social paradigm offers opportunities to reframe the way psychologists define problems related to disability, to develop more collaborative relationships between psychologists and people with disabilities, and to adopt new professional responsibilities with respect to the disability community. The authors address the impact of the social paradigm on policies within psychology that guide consulting, advocacy, and training. The impact of national policy decisions, such as those associated with reimbursement, on practice and training is also discussed. Highlighted throughout are points of controversy prompted by new disability frameworks that remain open to illumination from the field.     

Serial expertise of rhesus macaques

Here we describe the development of serial expertise in 4 experimentally naive rhesus monkeys that learned, by trial and error, the correct order in which to respond to 3-, 4-, and 7-item lists of arbitrarily selected photographs. The probabilities of guessing the correct sequence on 3-, 4-, and 7-item lists were, respectively, 1/6, 1/24, and 1/5040. Each monkey became progressively more efficient at determining the correct order in which to respond on new lists. During subsequent testing, the subjects were presented with all possible pairs of the 28 items used to construct the four 7-item lists (excluding pairs of items that occupied the same ordinal position in different lists). Subjects responded to pairs from different lists in the correct order 91% of the time on the first trials on which these pairs were presented. These features of subjects' performance, which cannot be attributed to procedural memory, satisfy two criteria of declarative memory: rapid acquisition of new knowledge and flexible application of existing knowledge to a new problem.     

Timeless demonstrations of Parkinson's first law

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," Parkinson's law, is an explanation classic that has survived without an artifact-free demonstration at the individual level. To evaluate Parkinson's law, undergraduate subjects expected to judge four sets of photos of faces with reference to a subjective criterion. The experimental subjects, who were told that the fourth set was canceled before they began work on the third set, dallied on the third set; that is, as compared with controls, they prolonged work. The cancellation-dalliance effect was reobtained in two exact replications. It was obtained again in a fourth study, a conceptual replication wherein subjects processed negatively toned phrases against an objective criterion. The generalizability of the effect and explanations for it are discussed.     

Identity Fusion,Extreme Pro‐Group Behavior,and the Path to Defusion

Identity fusion refers to a visceral sense of oneness with an ingroup. For fused individuals, group membership is not a means to an end (e.g., a positive social identity). Rather, membership is an all‐absorbing goal in itself; little other than the group matters. Group membership is also seen as enduring, sustained by chronically activated psychological structures as well as features of the context. Fellow group members are likewise seen as permanent members of the group, as they are members of the ingroup “family”. And just as family members are compelled to make extreme sacrifices for their family, so too are highly fused individuals – including even the ultimate sacrifice. These efforts to protect the ingroup can have negative consequences when, for example, people become strongly fused to groups that are devoted to extreme, anti‐social behaviors. In such instances, it may be prudent to encourage “defusion” from the group, but the emotional investment associated with fusion may thwart such efforts. We discuss the implications of these and related considerations.     

Increasing Awareness of Potentially Helpful Motivations and Techniques for Forgiveness

The authors examined 3 motives and 3 techniques for forgiveness to assess differences between people high or low in dispositional forgiveness (HDF and LDF, respectively). HDF participants rated all motives as more compelling and familiar than did LDF participants. Forgiveness being the right thing to do was rated as more persuasive and familiar; however, mental and physical health benefits were rated as compelling but less familiar forgiveness motives. LDF participants rated the various techniques as less familiar and more difficult compared with HDF participants. Overall, participants rated forgive and forget as the most familiar but most difficult technique to implement.     

A common representational system governed by Weber's law: nonverbal numerical similarity judgments in 6-year-olds and rhesus macaques

This study compared nonverbal numerical processing in 6-year-olds with that in nonhuman animals using a numerical bisection task. In the study, 16 children were trained on a delayed match-to-sample paradigm to match exemplars of two anchor numerosities. Children were then required to indicate whether a sample intermediate to the anchor values was closer to the small anchor value or the large anchor value. For two sets of anchor values with the same ratio, the probability of choosing the larger anchor value increased systematically with sample number, and the psychometric functions superimposed when plotted on a logarithmic scale. The psychometric functions produced by the children also superimposed with the psychometric functions produced by rhesus monkeys in an analogous previous experiment. These examples of superimposition demonstrate that nonverbal number representations, even in children who have acquired the verbal counting system, are modulated by Weber's law.     

The Prediction of Students' Satisfaction with Community College Vocational Training

The present study was conducted with 1,632 college vocational students in North Carolina to test the job satisfaction postulate of Rusbult's (1980a) investment model. The model postulate, that satisfaction is a function of perceived positive and negative outcomes, received support and proved to be defensible even after controlling for a broad array of situational variables. This postulate has also received empirical support from studies of satisfaction with business relationships, friendships, and romantic associations. The present study also introduced a new measure of outcomes: the Perceived Outcomes of College Life measure.