Tests of two hypotheses on extraversion

Three samples give mixed results on a hypothesis that higher extraversion is associated with greater tendency to assume similarity between oneself and others. Results consistently support a second hypothesis that group judgements of the socially desirable personality on an American college campus will show that personality to be highly extraverted. The average actual student is in fact substantially less extraverted than what is considered desirable. These findings are discussed in terms of possible tensions produced by the discrepancy between the ideal and the real.     

Male-Oriented vs. Balanced-as-to-Sex Thematic Apperception Tests

Measures of need Achievement, need Affiliation, and need Power were obtained for 124 working managers (62 female, 62 male) using both McClelland's traditional male-oriented thematic apperception test(TAT) and a set of picture cues balanced-as-to-sex. Two-way analysis of variance was performed in a 2 × 2 factorial design (sex by version of TAT). F tests were conducted to test significance at the .05 level. Results indicate both sets are interchangeable in determining need Achievement and need Power distinctions between managerial women and men, Absolute scores are also comparable. For need Affiliation, however, motivation scores are not comparable and interchangeability is clouded, suggesting cue modification may be needed.     

Tests of three hypotheses regarding the predictors of delinquency

Three hypotheses regarding the predictors of criminal activity in children and adolescents were assessed. These dealt with family, peer, and attitudinal variables, and they were explored in relation to indices based on seriousness of criminal activity and reoffending. The data were based on a sample of 338 youths who had been convicted of crimes and received probation or custody dispositions. The results provided general support for a model implicating family, peer, and attitudinal variables in youthful criminal activity. They did not, however, provide support for hypothesized interactions between family relationship and family structuring dimensions or between family relationship and peer association variables. The results did support an hypothesis regarding the independent contribution of an antisocial attitudes variable to the prediction of criminal activity.Funding to support this research was provided by the Children's Services Branch of the Ministry of Community and Social Services (Ontario), Carleton University, and the London Family Court Clinic. Thanks are extended to Penny Faulkner, Mary Ann Robblee, Suzanne Bell, and Natalie Gabora for their assistance on the project. Members of the Ministry Research Advisory Committee are also thanked for their contribution.     

The within-list distributed practice effect: Tests of the varied context and varied encoding hypotheses

The present studies provided separate tests of the varied context and varied encoding hypotheses of the MP-DP effect. The investigation of varied encoding used an incidental learning procedure in which the nature of the orienting task was manipulated such that the subject attended to different attributes of words (varied encoding) or only one attribute (same encoding). While the prediction that the recall of MP-DP items should be comparable under comparable levels of encoding was not supported, differences were obtained in recall of items under same and variable orienting task conditions. An MP-DP effect was obtained under the incidental learning procedure. Tests of varied context involved the presentation of target items in list contexts which were the same or different from list contexts on previous occurrences of the item. The prediction that recall of items surrounded by different context should exceed that of items surrounded by the same context was not supported.     

Motivation,ability, and exam performance: Tests of hypotheses of cultural difference and task difficulty

In a series of three experiments, prediction of exam performance from information about motivation and ability of students was studied. The factorial plot of the Motivation × Ability effect on predicted performance always yielded the parallelism pattern with subjects from both the student and nonstudent populations. Results agreed with the hypothesis of cultural difference between America and India. Manipulation of difficulty of exam did not alter the parallelism pattern, contrary to the specification of the hypothesis of task difficulty. Difficulty of exam affected only the origin of the response scale. Implications of results were discussed for the two tested hypotheses as well as for a new hypothesis of nature of task.     

Suicide in France: some hypotheses.

The relatively high suicide rate in France is investigated and a number of influences are hypothesized as causative. These include, on a societal and demographic level, a history of high immigration, low emigration, a high proportion of old people, high urbanization, extraordinarily high alcoholism, and the extreme gap in income between upper and lower classes. The rigid bureaucracy of the state can leave the individual feeling infuriated and defeated. The legal system produces many injustices, such as long imprisonment without charges. The Church is liberal and supplies little prophylaxis against suicide. Overall, social integration must be judged to be low. Culturally, French values include an underlying pessimism, no strong fear of death, strong pressures to behave correctly and much malice toward neighbors. The modal personality structure contains defensive, constricted elements producing a vulnerable pseudo-autonomy. French child-rearing practices are effective in producing such personalities.     

Attack priming and satiation in female golden hamsters: Tests of some alternatives to the aggression arousal interpretation

“Priming” a female hamster by allowing it a single attack on an intruder placed into its home cage transiently decreases the latency and increases the probability of attack on a second trial. Although we have previously argued that this priming effect reflects an increase in aggressive arousal, an alternative interpretation is that the fear elicited by placing a foreign object into the subject's home cage is reduced when it happens again on the second trial. Another interpretation is that priming is an effect of intruder novelty, i.e., the subject perceives a difference between the first and second intruders which causes it to attack the second more quickly. Experiment 1 compared the standard two trial paradigm with different intruders to trials in which (1) the first intruder was withdrawn and used again in the second trial, and (2) the intruder remained in the cage following the first attack. All intruders were pretreated with the analgesic-sedative methotrimeprazine to reduce the variability of their behavior. Neither hypothesis tested in Experiment 1 was supported, strengthening the interpretation of attack priming as a manipulation that affects primarily internal motivational mechanisms specific to aggression. Allowing a hamster to carry out a protracted series of attacks produces a “satiation” effect that is the reverse of priming, i.e., the latency of a subsequent attack is increased and its probability reduced. It is possible that the attack satiation observed in our earlier studies was not the result of processes internal to the subject, but could have been due to habituation to a particular intruder or to certain stimuli emitted by it during the protracted interaction. In Experiment 2 subjects were given three sessions of 10 successive trials using either 1 intruder presented repeatedly, 2 intruders presented alternately, or 10 different intruders presented once each. No difference among conditions was found in this study either suggesting that subject's aggressive behavior is insensitive to whatever changes may occur in intruders' behavior or other stimulus characteristics when they have been treated with methotrimeprazine. The lack of differences among test conditions in both experiments is most likely due to the efficacy of the drug in “standardizing” intruder behavior. Experiment 2 also revealed an interesting difference in two measures of attack latency. The time elapsing between intruder presentation and attack, i.e., the standard measure of latency, decreased from the first to the fourth trail; it then increased steadily over the remaining trials. The cumulative time that the subject remained in contact with the intruder prior to attack, a measure more indicative of attention to the intruder, dropped to an asymptotic value by the second trial. This difference suggests that the satiation effect may be accounted for by subjects' increasing avoidance of the intruders over trails, perhaps as a way of regualting their level of aggressive arousal.     

Identification of letters in words and of single letters with pre- and postknowledge vs. postknowledge of the alternatives

Two experiments were conducted to test how the “word letter phenomenon” (WLP)—a letter is better identified when embedded in a word than when presented alone—is affected by prior knowledge of the alternatives in a forced choice paradigm with tachistoscopic exposures. In Experiment 1, one group of subjects, who were given knowledge of the alternatives after the display, showed the usual WLP. The WLP was eliminated in a second group of subjects who were given knowledge of the alternatives both before and after the display. In Experiment 2, the same subjects were either precued or not precued on alternating trials of each block. It appeared that the WLP suppression with precuing resulted from a decrease in word performance whereas letter performance was unaffected by precuing. It is suggested that precuing exerts a detrimental effect, because, instead of attending to the word as a whole, subjects search for where in the word the forced choice would be plausible.     

Tests of statistical hypotheses in the case of unequal or disproportionate numbers of observations in the subclasses

General solutions of the analysis of variance in the case of unequal numbers of observations in the subclasses are presented. If we havek criteria for the classification, there will bek! solutions in making a complete analysis and 2^k–1 answers, bearing different meanings, for the sum of squares between subclasses of each criterion. The sum of squares for the interaction of any order, however, will be identical in different solutions of same problem.     

Embarrassment: Actual vs. typical cases,classical vs. prototypical representations

Abstract

Theories of embarrassment were investigated by having subjects either recall an occasion when they were embarrassed or describe their idea of a typical instance of embarrassment. Subjects then rated their account on a questionnaire designed to measure five theoretical approaches to embarrassment: dramaturgic theory, social anxiety theory, and three decreased self-esteem theories. Patterns of means and of covariation for actual embarrassment best supported the dramaturgic theory. In contrast, subjects' accounts of typical embarrassment contained elements of all five theories. The written accounts were analysed to produce a prototype of embarrassment, which consisted mostly of elements of the dramaturgic and social anxiety theories. We propose that the concept of embarrassment is necessarily linked to dramaturgic difficulties, whereas it is contingently linked to social anxiety and decreased self-esteem.     

Food and amphetamine self-administration by baboons: effects of alternatives.

The effects of the availability of an alternative reinforcer on responding maintained by food pellets or fluid solutions were examined in 6 adult male baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis). During daily 23-hr experimental sessions, baboons had concurrent access to both food pellets and fluid, with responding maintained under fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement that varied between the two commodities. The fixed-ratio requirement, or cost, for pellets was increased when (a) no fluid, (b) a dilute dextrose vehicle, (c) 0.002 mg/kg d-amphetamine, or (d) 0.004 mg/kg d-amphetamine was available. When given nonrestricted concurrent access to food pellets and amphetamine at minimal cost (FR 2), baboons self-administered sufficient amphetamine to decrease pellet intake. Increasing the response requirement for pellets decreased pellet intake at a similar rate regardless of the available fluid and increased fluid intake in a variable manner among baboons such that there were no statistically significant increases in fluid intake. In contrast, when access to pellets was restricted to 70% of maximal intake under nonrestricted conditions, increasing pellet cost decreased pellet intake and increased fluid intake more rapidly when the high amphetamine dose was available. Thus, amphetamine was more effective as an economic substitute for pellets when access to pellets was restricted. The response cost for vehicle and both amphetamine concentrations was increased when baboons had nonrestricted and restricted access to pellets. Increasing the response requirement for fluid delivery decreased intake of all three fluids similarly under both pellet-access conditions. The results indicate that substitution between commodities with minimal commonalities can be studied under controlled laboratory conditions and is dependent upon reinforcement schedule and commodity restrictions.     

Food and cocaine self-administration by baboons: effects of alternatives.

The effects of the availability of an alternative reinforcer on responding maintained by food pellets or drug solutions were examined in 8 adult male baboons (Papio hamadrayas anubis). During daily 23-hr experimental sessions, baboons had access to both food pellets and fluid under a two-choice procedure, in which the response requirement, under a fixed-ratio schedule, differed for the two commodities. There were no restrictions on access to water, which was continuously available from a spout at the rear of each cage. In Experiment 1, the fixed-ratio requirement, or cost, for fluid delivery remained constant while the fixed-ratio requirement for pellets was changed every 2 or 3 days when (a) no fluid, (b) a dilute dextrose vehicle, (c) 0.008 mg/kg per delivery cocaine, (d) 0.016 mg/kg per delivery cocaine, or (e) 0.032 mg/kg per delivery cocaine was available concurrently. In Experiment 1, progressively increasing the response requirement for pellets decreased pellet intake, but for 4 baboons pellet intake at maximum pellet cost was lower when cocaine, compared to the vehicle, was available. Increasing the response requirement for pellets had variable effects on vehicle intake. However, increasing the response requirement for pellets increased intake of at least one dose of cocaine to a greater extent than vehicle in all 8 baboons. Thus, cocaine could be considered a more effective economic substitute than vehicle for pellets. Experiment 2 systematically varied the order in which the response requirements for a pellet delivery were presented and added a control condition in which cocaine doses, yoked to the amount self-administered, were given three times during the session by the experimenter. Again, pellet intake at maximal pellet cost was lower when cocaine, compared to the vehicle, was available. In contrast, experimenter-given cocaine doses did not alter responding maintained by pellets. Thus, the effects of self-administered cocaine on responding maintained by food pellets differed from the effects of experimenter-given cocaine on responding maintained by food pellets.     

Using epistemic ratios to evaluate hypotheses: an imprecision penalty for imprecise hypotheses

According to Bayesians, the null hypothesis significance-testing procedure is not deductively valid because it involves the retention or rejection of the null hypothesis under conditions where the posterior probability of that hypothesis is not known. Other criticisms are that this procedure is pointless and encourages imprecise hypotheses. However, according to non-Bayesians, there is no way of assigning a prior probability to the null hypothesis, and so Bayesian statistics do not work either. Consequently, no procedure has been accepted by both groups as providing a compelling reason to accept or reject hypotheses. The author aims to provide such a method. In the process, the author distinguishes between probability and epistemic estimation and argues that, although both are important in a science that is not completely deterministic, epistemic estimation is most relevant for hypothesis testing. Based on this analysis, the author proposes that hypotheses be evaluated via epistemic ratios and explores the implications of this proposal. One implication is that it is possible to encourage precise theorizing by imposing a penalty for imprecise hypotheses.