Conditioning of appetitive and consummatory sexual behavior in male Japanese quail.

Two different types of stimulus objects, a live female quail artificially adorned with bright orange feathers and an inanimate toy dog, served as conditioned stimuli. For subjects in experimental groups, the conditioned stimuli were presented shortly before access to a sexually receptive normal female quail. For subjects in control groups, exposure to the conditioned stimuli was unpaired with copulatory opportunity. Subjects in the experimental but not in the control groups quickly came to approach the location of the conditioned stimulus objects. When an adorned female quail served as the conditioned stimulus, the conditioned approach behavior was controlled by a combination of the presence of the orange adornments and the visual cues of the head and neck of the female bird, and the approach behavior persisted as the adorned female moved to new locations. When the toy dog served as the conditioned stimulus, the conditioned approach behavior was limited to the spatial cues that surrounded the toy dog during conditioning trials. Although both types of stimulus objects evoked conditioned approach behavior, only the adorned female stimulus supported copulatory behavior. This last finding indicates that copulatory behavior can become redirected toward novel stimuli as a result of conditioning, but only under special circumstances. The results are consistent with the suggestion that appetitive components of reproductive behavior are more susceptible to conditioning than consummatory components. Possible reasons for this are discussed, together with implications of the results for the contribution of conditioning processes to sexual selection.     

Of private talk and public print: General pre-trial publicity and juror decision-making

The term ‘general pre-trial publicity’ refers to trial-related information that is prominently in the news, and that affects jurors in wholly unrelated cases. Two experiments explored the impact of general pre-trial publicity on juror decision-making. In Experiment 1 mock jurors who earlier read a newspaper article about a defendant mistakenly identified and subsequently convicted of a crime he did not commit were less likely to convict the defendant in an unrelated case than were jurors who read instead about a series of heinous crimes or who had no pre-trial publicity. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect is somewhat stronger when the general pre-trial publicity concerns a case that closely resembles the one jurors must decide than when the two cases are dissimilar. These data are discussed in terms of the availability of relevant information in memory. People may evaluate the probability of a defendant's guilt by the ease with which similar or relevant examples come to mind.     

A cross-validation of MMPI-2 substance abuse scales.

We evaluated the efficacy of the Addiction Potential Scale (APS) and the Addiction Acknowledgement Scale (AAS), two new scales designed to assess substance abuse problems with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), in samples from settings different from those used in their development. Results replicate earlier findings that both scales discriminate between psychiatric and substance abuse samples and do so more effectively than other substance abuse scales designed for use with the MMPI and carried over to the MMPI-2. Results also suggest that APS may be more resistant than AAS to response distortion.     

The effects of perceived parental rearing style on the development of Type A pattern

The aetiological antecedents of the Type A pattern have not been studied widely. In the present study the effects of parental rearing practices on the development of Type A pattern were evaluated. Perceived parental rearing style was assessed by the EMBU and Type A pattern by the JAS. Subjects were drawn from a random sample of residents (older than 21 years) of a Dutch community. Results suggested that a significant amount of variance of Type A behaviour can be accounted for by perceived parental characteristics, especially rejection and lack of emotional warmth. It is suggested that lack of emotional warmth and negative evaluation of children by their parents may lead to an internalized maladaptive cognitive set in the children which may be a developmental antecedent for eliciting the competitiveness, achievement striving, and sense of time urgency characteristic of Type A adults.     

Discriminating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic blacks and whites on the MMPI

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of race (black, white) on the MMPI performance of alcoholic and nonalcoholic inpatients. Subjects were 73 (27 black, 46 white) male alcoholic inpatients and 73 (27 black, 46 white) male nonalcoholic psychiatric inpatients. While black and white alcoholics failed to differ on the MMPI, white alcoholics presented as less disturbed and black alcoholics as less defensive and distressed, compared to their respective nonalcoholic counterparts. Furthermore, only white alcoholics were accurately identified by the MMPI 2-4/4-2 high-point pair combination and only white alcoholics achieved more high-point pairs containing Scale 4 relative to nonalcoholic controls.     

Self-image,perception of peers' risk acceptance and risky shift

Twelve four-person female groups of subjects displaying the typical underestimation of their peers' (relative to their own) risk acceptance were compared with twelve groups of subjects who (slightly) overestimated their peers' risk acceptance. Risk level was measured by responses to a set of hypothetical decision situations known to elicit risky shift on the basis of previous research. Risky shift following group discussion was not found to be different for the two types of groups, casting doubt on the widely suggested role of peer underestimation in risky shift. Nor was risky shift affected by whether or not group members stated their individual decisions publicly at the close of discussion. Larger group risky shifts were accompanied by higher self-ratings given by group members on a number of polarity scales. In discussing the findings, we outline an explanation of group-induced shifts in risk taking, emphasizing the motivational and informational inducements provided by group discussion whereby group members come to discard their prior positions in favor of more aspired ones.