Suggestibility and type of interpersonal relationship: Special implications for the patient-practitioner relationship

Suggestibility was assessed in five conditions by the subject's response to suggestions falsely labeled as matters of fact. These misrepresentations of fact, or virtual suggestions, denoted a variety of hallucinations, an anesthesia, and an amnesia. They were administered as incidental intrusions while the subject was involved in the primary experimental task. In three of these conditions, the subject either observed his own spontaneous visual imagery, observed visual scenes provided by the experimenter, or simply waited with closed eyes for the presentation of the virtual stimuli. These conditions were characterized by a passive-receptive, interpersonal relationship in which the subject remained silent. Suggestibility was expected to be high. In a fourth condition the subjects described spontaneous visual imagery. This was characterized as an active-receptive relationship in which speech was maintained throughout. The suggestibility of the three passive-receptive conditions was comparable, and none of them differed from a baseline condition involving the formal induction of hypnosis. However, the fourth, active-receptive condition was significantly lower, and this difference survived a replication. Of special interest was the induction of an anesthesia in the majority of subjects in the three passive-receptive conditions.     

Building theories of reading ability: On the relation between individual differences in cognitive skills and reading comprehension

To date most theories of reading ability have emphasized a single factor as the major source of individual differences in performance. However there has been little agreement on what that factor is. However, candidates have included visual discrimination, phonological and semantic recoding, short-term memory, and utilization of linguistic knowledge and context. The single- factor theories are summarized. Literature is then reviewed to show that no single-factor theory is likely to be right, because a very wide range of component skills and abilities has in fact been shown to correlate with reading success. Among them are discrimination of letter location and letter order during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid to visual code formation, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological recoding, memory for word order, spontaneous identification of syntactic relations, flexibility in prediction from syntactic and semantic context, and context-specificity in semantic encoding. It is concluded that more complex, multifactor models of reading ability are required, and some recent attempts to collect data conducive to such a model are described. In the process, three different approaches to identifying factors relevant to reading success are delineated. These are general abilities assessment, learning potential assessment, and component skills analysis. Two methods of conducting component skills analysis are presented, and it is recommended that they be used as converging operations. Finally, the results of a component skills analysis are used to construct a tentative example of a class of hierarchical models of reading ability that can be pursued developmentally.     

Belief discrepant behavior and the bogus pipeline: Impression management or arousal attribution

Based on recent studies impression management theorists conclude that following belief discrepant behavior, persons will feign attitude change on paper measures, but report their “true” beliefs when attached to a lie detector (the bogus pipeline). A dissonance arousal explanation of these bogus pipeline results suggests that subjects may attribute their arousal to the bogus pipeline equipment instead of to dissonance and therefore may not be motivated to change their attitudes. The present study examined these competing interpretations and yielded results which support the dissonance arousal attribution explanation. Subjects who were attached to a (bogus pipeline) lie detector exhibited attitude change if given the opportunity to get accustomed to the equipment (which made attribution of arousal to the equipment less plausible), but showed no attitude change if no habituation experience was provided.     

The influence of incentive-aroused ambivalence on overjustification effects in attitude change

Rewarding people to advocate a position with which they already agree can undermine their attitudinal positivity. This research tests a novel explanation of this example of the overjustification phenomenon. The hypothesis holds that the provision of an unnecessary incentive gives rise to an ambivalent response: the positive reaction to the reinforcement is accompanied by a sense of uneasiness, or apprehension, regarding the legitimacy of the induced behaviors. Attitude change is expected only in circumstances that confirm the apprehension. Results consistent with this expectation were discovered. In Study 1, respondents asked to play the role of a subject in an overjustification experiment reported greater levels of ambivalence regarding their (role-played) proattitudinal action as a function of payment. Contrary to alternative interpretations of the phenomenon, no incentive-related differences were found in subjects' ratings of the reprehensibility of the requested action, or in their beliefs that future activities of the type requested be undertaken only for payment. In Study 2, subjects paid to read a proattitudinal speech were found subsequently to be less in favor of their original positions only if they also had been given a counterattitudinal communication. The presence or absence of the countercommunication had no influence on the attitudes of unpaid respondents. Subjects for whom the payment was made to appear incidental to the experiment did not demonstrate the usual overjustification effect. These results supported the incentive-aroused ambivalence hypothesis. Psychological mechanisms that might underlie the effect were discussed.     

Effects of stimulus ear presentation on the voice reaction time of adult stutterers and nonstutterers

The initial and optimum voice reaction times (VRT) to auditory stimuli presented separately to the left and right ears of ten adult stutterers and ten nonstutterers was investigated. Subjects initiated the neutral vowel sound /Λ/ in response to one hundred 4000 Hz tones of 2.5 sec in duration. The silent intervals between the tones varied randomly. The stimulus cues were divided into five equal response sets of 20 tones each with 10 tones in each set being presented to the right ear and 10 tones to the left ear alternating back and forth. No significant differences were reported between the VRTs for cues presented to the left or right ears for either group. However, the stutterers exhibited voice reaction times which were significantly longer and more variable than those of the nonstutterers. The between- group differences were observed for what appeared to be the “optimum” level of voice initiation for the experimental task. These results lend to the speculative hypothesis that the observed difficulty for adult stutterers to promptly and consistently initiate vocalization may in part be attributable to inherent rather than learned factors.     

Motor perseverative behavior in adult stutterers and nonstutterers

The performances of 22 adult stutterers and 22 adult nonstutterers on motor tasks requiring the graphic reproduction of a sequence of alternating figures following the production of a series of nonalternating figures were studied. The finding that there were no differences in the performance of the two groups on the alternating motor tasks was interpreted as challenging the validity of previous observations that motor perseverative behavior exists in stutterers and is indicative of a central neurological deficit in that population.     

Life and job satisfaction: Is the job central?

The nature of the causal relationship between life and job satisfaction in a sample of males and females working in a variety of jobs was investigated. Results suggest that the life satisfaction causes job satisfaction hypothesis is more tenable than the reverse.     

A comparison of syntax in young stutterers and nonstutterers

This study compares the syntactic structure of the spontaneous speech of a small group of stutterers and nonstutterers, using a method of constituent analysis. Speech samples were taped during play sessions with subjects, and the tapes were then transcribed and analyzed according to preselected constituent criteria. The stutterers were in the early stages of stuttering and had been diagnosed as stutterers by experienced clinicians. The method of analysis proved to be highly reliable. Differences were found in the number of complete clauses, the number of complex sentences, and in clause types between the two groups.     

A comparison of LRT and VOT values between stutterers and nonstutterers

The experiment reported here found no significant group differences in laryngeal reaction time (LRT) and voice onset time (VOT) values. Rank-order correlations between the stutterers' LRT and VOT values were also nonsignificant. A model of the LRT paradigm is presented that (1) allows for systematic assessment of factors possibly contributing to the failure to replicate the often reported LRT group difference, and (2) is useful in examining the relationship between the LRT experimental condition and normal speaking conditions. We argue that two factors were particularly critical to our results. First, simple reaction time procedures included (1) a warning signal that preceded a response signal by a variable 1–3-sec foreperiod, and (2) a single response. We argue that foreperiod durations exceeded the stutterers' speech posture time for a known response. Second, the stuttering severity rating of our experimental group was less severe than ratings in other experiments.     

Pressures from work,self, and home in the life stages of married women

Following Lopata's (1966) model of the life cycle of the married woman's role, it was predicted and found that a woman's life stage would be related to her role pressures (work, home, self, and time), conflict, and satisfaction. Age and number of roles were not as strongly related to these variables as was life stage. Work activities and pressures declined through the peak child-rearing stage and then increased for women with older children, while pressures from home generally rose throughout the life cycle. The differential impact of various sources of conflict in different life stages was reported, and forms of organizational career support oriented toward particular life stages were suggested.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers when speaking to children

Within the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted to the possibility that the amelioration of stuttering in many novel speaking conditions is a function of vocal changes with or without accompanying modifications in prosodic expression. These formulations have made reference primarily to conditions in which stutterers were induced into one or another novel speech pattern by an external stimulus such as masking noise, a rhythmic cue, or by instructions to sing, or read in unison with another speaker. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to other ameliorative conditions that lack a novel external stimulus or special instructions that direct the stutterer to speak in some unique manner. Speaking or reading to a child is an example of this latter type of condition. The present study was conducted to see if nine adult stutterers and a matched group of nonstutterers would evince vocal changes as they read aloud to another adult, a child, and a child and adult together. There was also a fourth control condition wherein the subjects read to one of the experimenters. Dependent measures of disfluency and stuttering, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency deviation, fluent reading rate, and peak vocal sound pressure level were made and treated statistically. The major findings of this study indicated that, relative to the control condition, both subject groups exhibited several vocal changes when reading to a child alone and to a child and adult together. In addition, the stutterers experienced a reduction in disfluency, but only when reading to the child alone. The normal speakers exhibited too few disfluencies in the control condition for any meaningful change to occur in that dependent variable. The fact that the stutterers evinced vocal changes in both experimental conditions but a significant drop in disfluency in just one bears importantly on hypotheses that emphasize vocal changes in conditions that ameliorate stuttering.     

Reaction time for voiced and whispered /a/ in stutterers and nonstutterers

Recent research reviewed in this article suggests that stutterers' inability to initiate phonation promptly could be a significant factor in the occurence of stuttering. Since stuttering is either completely absent or markedly reduced in frequency during whisper, the present study tested the hypothesis that stutterers do not significantly differ from nonstutterers in reaction time (RT) for the initiation of whispered/a/, whereas the two groups differ significantly in RT for the initiation of voiced /a/. Ten adult stutterers and an equal number of comparable nonstutterers produced prolonged versions of the vowel /a/ using voice and whisper in response to tone stimuli. The results showed that stutteres and nonstutterers did not differ in RT for either voiced or whispered /a/. The stutterers, however, exhibited significantly longer RT to produce voiced /a/ than whispered /a/.     

Aversive properties of the negative stimulus during learning with and without errors

In a successive discrimination four groups of pigeons were trained to discriminate between red and green. The groups differed with respect to the procedure used to introduce S?: Early-Progressive, Early-Constant, Late-Progressive, and Late-Constant. The aversive properties of S? were measured by an escape response in which a single peck at a second key terminated S? for 10 sec and darkened the chamber. The correlation between the aversive and error-producing properties of extinction was zero. More errors occurred when S? was introduced abruptly at a constant intensity while more timeouts from S? occurred when S? was introduced late. The procedure for introducing S? rather than the number of responses to S? appears crucial in determining how aversive S? becomes.     

Brainstem auditory electrical response characteristics of stutterers and nonstutterers: A preliminary report

In the present study, eight adult male stutterers and nonstutterers showed no significant latency or amplitude differences in BSERs recorded in response to monaural and binaural clicks. However, significantly greater variance was found in the stutterers' group under the monaural stimulation condition at click rates of 12/sec and 5/sec. Left and right monaural waveforms were subtracted individually from the binaural waveform. The resultant binaural interaction difference traces were examined to determine auditory tract preference for binaural stimulation. While some subjects from both groups showed no auditory tract preference, it was found that the significant variance between groups for wave V latency was attributable to the subset of stutterers without auditory tract preference. This finding is interpreted as evidence of neurological differences in stutterers' auditory processing at the brainstem level.     

Rate reduction strategies used by stutterers and nonstutterers during high- and low-pitched speech

Groups of child and adult normal speakers and stutterers were tested in an habitual condition and in conditions where they were instructed to read aloud at pitches both higher than and lower than normal. Objective measures were made of subjects' fluent reading rate, and vowel and pause durations across conditions. Disfluencies were also counted. Findings revealed that all four subject groups reduced their frequency of disfluency from the habitual to both experimental conditions. These decrements in disfluency were attended by significant reductions in fluent reading rate. Spectrographic analyses revealed that most subjects, regardless of age and speaker characteristic, affected their rate reduction by extending both vowel and pause durations. These results are compatible with those obtained in recent studies and are discussed.     

Flooding as a function of shock level and length of confinement

In a one-way avoidance learning situation with rats, response prevention trials facilitated extinction as an increasing function of the duration of the prevention interval for shock levels below 1.8 mA. For 1.8 mA, extinction was a nonmonotonic function of the response prevention interval, with 15- and 210-sec durations showing the most facilitation of extinction. For all response prevention intervals except 15 sec, trials to extinction was a direct function of shock level. For 15 sec, it was an inverse function of shock level. The unexpected interaction of shock level with prevention interval was explained by invoking the concept of relief.     

Manual reaction time to linguistic stimuli in child stutterers and nonstutterers

Ten stuttering and ten nonstuttering children, ages 4–8 yr, served as subjects for a motor reaction task to simple and complex linguistic stimuli. The subjects reacted by pressing one of four panels on a touch-sensitive board that depicted the appropriate semantic relationship in response to 30 simple and complex linguistic stimuli. There was a significant increase in the reaction time of both groups with increasing linguistic complexity. No significant differences were found in the reaction time between the two groups, nor in the interaction between group and complexity. Implications regarding linguistic processing are discussed, and an “overload” hypothesis of stuttering is dispelled. It is concluded that stutterers and nonstutterers in this study did not differ in their reaction time nor in their processing time of linguistic material.