Women''s yielding to social group pressure as a function of alcohol and type of pressure

Thirty-six women participated in an experiment exploring whether alcohol intoxication facilitates yielding to social persuasive information. Subjects were randomly assigned to either an Alcohol, a Placebo, or a Control Group. The alcohol dose was 1.0 ml of 100% alcohol/kg body weight. Subjects first estimated the length of a line and were then given faked feedback from either a male or a female peer reference group. This procedure was repeated 60 times. Analyses indicated that the Placebo group yielded more often than the Alcohol group irrespective of type of feedback. A measure of locus of control indicated no significant mean differences as a function of alcohol group but correlations between externality and yielding were strong for placebo subjects, that is, externally oriented placebo subjects yielded more than internally oriented placebo subjects. This was discussed in terms of feelings uneasiness caused by the discrepancy between feelings of intoxication and information about drink content.     

Transfer of a memorization strategy in 10-year-old children: study of individual differences]

The spontaneous or induced use of an organization strategy is examined on free recall tasks with 10-year-old children classified as rather global or rather analytical at the Group Embedded Figures test. The experimental procedure include three successive and identical tests followed by two deffered tasks, one requiring a transfer of maintenance and the other a transfer of generalization. The experimental group, who attended a simple illustration of the organization strategy before the second test, applied the strategy quickly and successfully: for these subjects, one does not note differences between global or analytical subjects in the recall performance; however, the global subjects modify their study strategy of the material on the generalization task. For the control group, global or analytical subjects have a different evolution for the performance and the strategic attitude according to the procedure. The analytical subjects are different from global subjects on the generalization task.     

Catheterization of the lumbar subarachnoid space for long-term CSF collection in unanesthetized nonhuman primates

Chronic indwelling spinal catheters facilitate administration of drugs and serial sampling of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Most catheters used in primates enter the ventricles or rostral subarachnoid space. This paper describes a procedure for catheterizing the lumbar subarachnoid space. Although the technique is invasive, maintenance and utilization of the catheter do not disturb the subject. The preparation remains patent for up to 21 days and permits both intrathecal drug administration and collection of CSF samples from unanesthetized subjects.     

Short-term memory for colors and color names in the absence of vocalization

In a previous experiment, Allen found no release from proactive inhibition using the Brown-Peterson procedure in a group who were shifted from recalling colors to recalling the names of colors. The lack of release suggests that colors and color names are encoded in similar ways. It was argued that the similarity of encoding might have been caused by the procedure of requiring the subjects to say out loud the names of the colors at the time of stimulus presentation and recall. In the present experiment, a procedure was devised that eliminated the need for verbalization of the colors. The same pattern of results was obtained, namely, release from proactive inhibition in the group shifted from recalling color names to colors but not in the group shifted in the opposite direction. It was concluded that if subjects encode colors as a verbal label, then this encoding strategy is not caused by the procedure of requiring the subjects to verbalize the colors.     

Context effects in judging taste intensity: A comparison of variable line and category rating methods

The effect of stimulus range and stimulus spacing was examinedwhen subjects registered the perceived intensity of sweet liquids using either a matching procedure (Experiment 1) or category rating (Experiment 2). The matching procedure is conceptually similar to absolute magnitude estimation, whereby subjects match their impression of number size to their impression of the subjective magnitude of a stimulus. In Experiment 1, subjects matched their impression of the stimulus to their impression of the magnitude of the length of a continuously variable line under their control. In Experiment 2, subjects rated perceived sweetness on a vertical 13-point scale with five equally spaced verbal labels. In both experiments, three sets of four sucrose concentrations were employed. In two of these sets, a set of weaker solutions and a set of stronger solutions, concentrations were separated by 0.25 log units. In a third set, which spanned the range of concentrations used in the other two sets (0.87 to 27.36% w/v), solutions were separated by 0.5 log units. An examination ofboth individual and group data showed the matching procedure to be less susceptible to a range bias than the rating procedure. In particular, a single intensity function accommodated data from individual ranges better when the matching procedure was used than when the rating procedure was used. No effect of stimulus spacing was evident in the data from either procedure.     

Increasing purposeful activity of severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults

A time-series reversal design was used to evaluate the effect of a ‘room manager’ procedure on the level of purposeful activity of severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped people in a residential home. The room manager procedure consisted of systematic prompts to participate in recreational activity and social reinforcement contingent on engagement. Data were collected on group and individual client behaviour and two measures of staff performance were taken to assess whether the procedure was implemented consistently across subjects and in line with the experimental design. The results showed that, as well as a group of subjects who engaged at a higher level during the room manager condition, there were consistently ‘high-engaging’ and ‘low-engaging’ groups, reflecting in part the general level of ability of the subjects. However, data on the independent variables show that the the contingency of staff contact did not vary across conditions and it cannot therefore be assumed that these subjects would not respond to the intervention. Some limitations of the procedure as used are discussed, and areas where further work is needed are indicated.     

Fading procedures and conditional discrimination in children

A discrimination reversal task followed by a conditional discrimination problem was administered to children (age range 36 to 107 months). A fading procedure was used during the discrimination reversal training of some subjects and other subjects were trained by a traditional procedure. More subjects trained by the fading procedure performed without errors during training and more subjects in the traditional group solved the conditional discrimination problem.     

Effectiveness of negative-thought-reduction, meditation, and placebo training treatment in reducing anger

Twenty-nine highly angry subjects who obtained high scores on Spielberger's Trait component of State-Trait Anger Scale went through a thought-listing procedure to determine their negative self-statements in response to high, medium, and low anger-arousing situations. It was found that subjects made more negative self-statements in response to a high anger-arousing situation compared to the medium and low anger-arousing situations. The subjects were divided into four groups. Subjects in one group were trained to reduce their negative thoughts, subjects in a second group were trained to meditate, subjects in the third group were asked to imagine the high anger-arousing situations (placebo procedure), and subjects in the fourth group were given no treatment. It was found that the subjects in the Negative-thought-reduction, Meditation and Placebo groups showed improvement in trait anger, anger aroused through high-anger situations, anger scores across a wide variety of situations, unconstructive coping, and anger measured through physiological symptoms. The gains made through intervention were maintained at a 6-week follow-up. The No-treatment Group showed no significant change in anger scores across a wide variety of situations, unconstructive coping, and physiological symptom scores but showed a small but significant improvement in trait anger and in anger aroused by high-anger situations.     

Bladder training and enuresis: A controlled trial

This study was designed to test the effectiveness of a short bladder training procedure to increase bladder capacity and to improve enuresis. Eighteen enuretic children, aged 5–13 years, were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group. Pre- and post-treatment measures of bladder capacity and frequency of bedwetting were obtained from subjects in both groups. The experimental group received 35 days of bladder training administered at first by the experimenter and then by the parents. The training consisted of required drinking, practice in holding and rewards for retaining progressively larger volumes of fluid before voiding. The control group received no training during the duration of the experiment. The results showed that the mean bladder capacity of the experimental subjects increased significantly with bladder training compared to controls. However, the frequency of bedwetting of the experimental subjects did not decrease significantly with training. Consequently, the efficacy of a bladder training procedure in the treatment of enuresis is questioned     

Probability matching: encouraging optimal responding in humans.

Two hundred undergraduate students participated in a repeated-trials binary choice procedure in which choice of one outcome was correct on 75% of trials. Subjects received 192 trials and were divided into five conditions: (1) control; (2) subjects were given the actual probabilities; (3) subjects were told if they did well they could leave early; (4) competition condition; (5) midway through the task subjects were asked to recommend a strategy for another subject. Half of the subjects in each group were told that the best they could do was to be correct on 75% of the trials. This manipulation permitted assessment of the hypothesis that subjects in probability-matching tasks are seeking a strategy that will be correct on 100% of the trials. The results partially confirmed this hypothesis. In addition, two of the variables improved performance significantly (giving probabilities and asking subjects to recommend a strategy). However, while subjects in all groups improved significantly over trials, optimal choice did not occur in this task.     

Temporal ordering deficits following anterior temporal lobectomy

Subjects were required to report the pitch sequence of two 10-msec tones of different frequency presented monaurally while the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tones was varied. The value of the SOA at which the subjects achieved an 80% correct sequence report was determined by an adaptive procedure without feedback. This measure was compared in the right and left ears, on subjects with a right or left anterior temporal lobectomy and on a normal control group. The results reveal an elevated threshold for performing temporal order judgments in the ear contralateral to the surgical lesion.     

The visual world behind the head

After a 5-minute inspection of 7 objects laid out on a shelf, subjects were seated with the objects behind them and answered questions about the locations and orientations of objects by throwing a switch left or right. The "visual image" subjects were told to imagine that the objects were still in front of them and to respond accordingly. The "real space" (RS) subjects were told to respond in terms of the positions of the objects in real space behind them. Thus correct responses (left vs. right) were completely opposite for the 2 groups. A control group responded while facing a curtain concealing the objects. The task was harder, by time and error criteria, for group RS than for the other 2 groups, but not dramatically so. All RS subjects denied using a response-reversal strategy. Some reported translating the objects from back to front and thus responding as to a mirror-image of the array. When this evasion was discouraged, RS subjects typically reported responding in terms of visual images located behind them and viewed as if by "eyes in the back of the head." The paradox of a visual image that corresponds to no possible visual input is discussed.     

Empirical validation of a procedure to correct position and stimulus biases in matching-to-sample

The development of position and stimulus biases often occurs during initial training on matching-to-sample tasks. Furthermore, without intervention, these biases can be maintained via intermittent reinforcement provided by matching-to-sample contingencies. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a correction procedure designed to eliminate both position and stimulus biases. Following key-peck training, a group of 6 pigeons had extended exposure to matching-to-sample contingencies without a correction procedure, a group of 4 pigeons was briefly exposed to a simultaneous matching-to-sample procedure to assess biases prior to exposure to the correction procedure, and a group of 5 pigeons was exposed directly to the correction procedure. The correction procedure arranged that every time an incorrect match was made, the trial configuration was repeated on the subsequent trial until a correct match was made. Extended exposure to matching-to-sample contingencies without a correction procedure was associated with reduced biases eventually for most subjects, but rapid development of near-perfect accuracy and bias-free performance was observed upon the implementation of the correction procedure regardless of the type of bias. Bias-free performance was maintained following subsequent exposure to a zero-delay MTS procedure.     

Contextualizing Procedural Fairness: Factors Mediating the Effect of Process Control on Leadership Evaluation in Organizations

Two studies were conducted to examine contextual mediators of the relationship between process control and evaluations of authority in organizations. Specifically, the studies investigated the role in this relationship of intragroup conflict, the necessity for future cooperation, and group members' level of experience. In Study 1, subjects with current experience working in schools were led to believe that future cooperation among teachers in a hypothetical school was important, and thus were more likely to give a favorable evaluation to a leader who used a decision-making procedure lacking in process control than were subjects who had not worked in a school. The experienced subjects in the future cooperation condition also judged that cooperation among group members would more likely be saved by this procedure. In Study 2 -- a survey conducted in several elementary and high schools -- experienced teachers who perceived considerable need for future cooperation in their schools placed less emphasis on process control when they evaluated their supervisors. Results suggest the need for further examination of group and individual factors as mediators of the procedural fairness effect in organizations.     

Use of Control Groups in Studies of Guidance

Problems in the interpretation of results of studies in which control groups are used are illustrated in a follow-up study. Subjects who had been counseled over a four-year period at the Research and Guidance Laboratory for Superior Students at the University of Wisconsin were followed up four years after high school graduation and their performances were compared with those of the members of a control or comparison group. The results are presented and the adequacy of the control group technique is discussed. The validity is questioned of the commonly accepted procedure of selecting control group subjects on the basis of their current comparability with experimental subjects without adequate history of their development toward that status.     

The pretreatment weighting technique

A common procedure that is frequently used in perceptual studies interested in group differences (e.g., young vs. aged) involves initially equating all subjects in a pretreatment condition by differentially weighting the subjects on a particular stimulus dimension. The experimental treatment of interest is then introduced to these equal-baseline groups. The present article questions the general validity of this procedure by focusing on the critical assumption that the pretreatment weighting and the experimental treatment are independent. A research example is included demonstrating that differentially weighting individuals in order to produce equal-baseline performance may, in fact, provide the basis for later performance differences under the experimental treatment.     

Some statistical treatments compatible with individual organism methodology

Consider experimental treatments with consequences so irreversible that baseline performance cannot be recovered. The conventional method of assessing the effects of such treatments by statistical means involves separate experimental and control groups. An alternative proposed here is to administer the experimental treatment to each subject, one subject at a time and in a random order; whenever any subject receives the experimental treatment, those subjects which have not yet received it receive a control treatment. This procedure permits results significant at the one-tailed 0.05 level to be obtained with four subjects; if a two-group procedure evaluated by means of the U test is used, a minimum of six subjects is needed for the same significance level. More generally, the procedure permits equal sensitivity to any experimental effect with over 30% fewer subjects than a two-group procedure. Extensions of the basic method are made to a variety of levels of the experimental treatment and to treatments without irreversible effects, and limitations of the method are discussed.     

On the Affine Structure of Perceptual Space

Affine geometry is a generalization of Euclidean geometry in which distance can be scaled along parallel directions, though relative distances in different directions may be incommensurable. This article presents a new procedure for testing the intrinsic affine structure of a psychological space by having subjects perform bisection judgments over multiple directions. If those judgments are internally consistent with one another, they must satisfy a theorem first proved by Pierre Varignon around 300 years ago. In the experiment reported here, this procedure was employed to measure the perceived structure of a visual ground surface. The results revealed that observers' judgments were systematically distorted relative to the physical environment, but that the judged bisections in different directions had an internally consistent affine structure. Implications of these findings for other possible response tasks are considered.     

Should we rely on the Kenward–Roger approximation when using linear mixed models if the groups have different distributions?

The study explores the robustness to violations of normality and sphericity of linear mixed models when they are used with the Kenward–Roger procedure (KR) in split‐plot designs in which the groups have different distributions and sample sizes are small. The focus is on examining the effect of skewness and kurtosis. To this end, a Monte Carlo simulation study was carried out, involving a split‐plot design with three levels of the between‐subjects grouping factor and four levels of the within‐subjects factor. The results show that: (1) the violation of the sphericity assumption did not affect KR robustness when the assumption of normality was not fulfilled; (2) the robustness of the KR procedure decreased as skewness in the distributions increased, there being no strong effect of kurtosis; and (3) the type of pairing between kurtosis and group size was shown to be a relevant variable to consider when using this procedure, especially when pairing is positive (i.e., when the largest group is associated with the largest value of the kurtosis coefficient and the smallest group with its smallest value). The KR procedure can be a good option for analysing repeated‐measures data when the groups have different distributions, provided the total sample sizes are 45 or larger and the data are not highly or extremely skewed.