Reflex modification by acoustic signals in newborn infants and in adults

This research asked whether the reflexive eyeblink elicited by a tap to the glabella (the flat region of skin between the eyebrows) is modified by acoustic signals which either precede or accompany the tap. Five experiments employing identical reflex modification procedures on neonates and adults suggest developmental differences in processing auditory stimuli. Neonates failed to exhibit reflex inhibition by either prior acoustic or tactile stimuli. Adults exhibited robust reflex inhibition to these same stimuli. Neonates, however, exhibited reliable reflex augmentation when mild (70 dB re: 0.0002 dyne/cm2) tones were presented simultaneously with the tap. For adults, tone intensities of at least 90 dB were necessary to obtain reliable reflex augmentation. The developmental processes implied by these findings are discussed.     

Sex differences in the frequency and functions of fantasies during sexual activity

A questionnaire about the frequency and effects of different thoughts during heterosexual activity was returned by 66 females and 75 males in a random sample of college undergraduates and graduate students. A high response rate (91%) was obtained, and the male and female respondents were shown to be generally similar in sexual experience. Frequency data confirmed an earlier study of the same population in finding that, during sexual activity, males think more about past sexual experiences and ongoing behavior, while females think more about imaginary experiences. Effects data indicated that these frequency differences occur because females use fantasy more than males to increase arousal, to decrease anxiety about sexual activity, to compensate for less-than-ideal sexual experience, and to enhance even a satisfactory experience. Males, in contrast, use thoughts of real experience more often than females to increase arousal and to control and direct sexual activity.     

Married women's work status: The influence of parents and husbands

The working or nonworking status of married women free of the financial need to work was studied in relation to the balance between their instrumental and expressive needs and in relation to their own and their husbands' attitudes towards women's roles. Also studied were women's needs and attitudes towards women's roles in relation to their parents' child-rearing practices, needs, and attitudes towards women's roles. These variables were rated by 67 working and 48 nonworking women on three sets of scales, each set composed of items reflecting instrumental (I) and expressive (E) orientations. A single score for each set of scales reflected the balance between the sum of the I and E ratings, or (I-E). In 10 of 13 possible correlations, the subjects' I-E needs and attitudes towards women's roles were significantly related to their parents' I-E child-rearing practices, needs, and attitudes towards women's roles. The work status of the subjects was significantly related to their own I-E needs, to their own and their husbands' attitudes towards women's roles, and to whether their mothers worked.     

Children's perception of sibilants: the relation between articulation and perceptual development

When synthetic fricative noises from an [s] continuum are followed by [a] and [u], adult listeners perceive fewer instances of in the context of the rounded vowel [u] (Mann & Repp, 1980). This perceptual context effect presumably reflects adjustment for certain coarticulatory effects and implies tacit knowledge of coarticulation and its consequences. To clarify the role of articulatory experience in the ontogeny of such knowledge and the consequent perceptual adjustment, the present study examined the effect of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of [s] and by adults, 5-, and 7-year-old children who produce and [s] and 7-year-old children who misarticulate these phonemes. All three groups of children showed a context effect equivalent to that of adults and independent of age and articulation ability. Therefore, productive mastery of [s] and is not critically responsible for perception of the [s] distinction, nor for perceptual sensitivity to the consequences of sibilant-vowel coarticulation.     

An opponent-process theory of motivation: III. Some affective dynamics in imprinting

The theory suggests that for immature precocial birds, the stimulation from an appropriate imprinting object innately arouses a primary effective process that is hedonically pleasant. The occurrence of this process automatically generates (via an opponent loop system) an opponent-process which is hedonically unpleasant. When the imprinting object is withdrawn, the primary process rapidly terminates, but the opponent-process persists, unopposed, for some time. By assuming that the opponent-process becomes stronger with its repeated (or prolonged) arousal, it is possible to account for many of the motivational factors in imprinting. These include: (1) the pattern of distress vocalization that occurs when an imprinting object is first presented to and then withdrawn from newly hatched ducklings, (2) the reinforcement and punishment effects that characterize imprinting, and (3) the priming effects that occur in the context of imprinting.     

Patients' perceptions of treatment for kidney failure: The impact of personal experience on population predictions

Estimates of the probability of various outcomes associated with treatment for kidney failure were made by chronic dialysis patients, dialysis patients awaiting transplant, successful transplant patients, and unsuccessful transplant patients back on dialysis. The latter two groups can be considered a natural experiment testing the impact of personal experience on population predictions. Consistent with the law of small numbers and the availability heuristic, successful transplant patients gave higher estimates of the population success rate for transplantation than unsuccessful transplant patients gave.     

Reading skill and language skill

To learn to read is to acquire a visual language skill which systematically maps onto extant spoken language skills. Some children perform this task quite adeptly while others encounter much difficulty, and it has become a question of both scientific and practical merit to ask why there exists such a range of success in learning to read. Obviously, learning to read places a complex burden on many emerging capacities, and in principle, at least, reading disability could arise at any level from visual perception to general cognition. Yet since reading is parasitic on spoken language, the possibility also exists that reading disability is derived from some subtle difficulty in the language domain. This article reviews some of the many studies which have explored the association between early reading skills and spoken language skills. The focus will be on findings which reveal that when the linguistic short-term memory skills of good and poor beginning readers are critically examined, considerably many, though perhaps not all, poor readers prove to possess subtle deficiencies which correlate with their problems in learning to read.     

Temporal stability and predictive validity of self-assessed hand preference with first and second graders

The test-retest reliability and predictive validity of a five-item hand preference questionnaire (writing, drawing, throwing a baseball, brushing teeth, and cutting with scissors) were investigated in a sample of 80 children attending first and second grade. After 1 month, 81% of the second choices were the same as the first choices. There were interitem differences in the reliabilities of the five items. Writing and drawing hand exhibited the greatest degree of temporal stability. Writing hand was the one task which was significantly related to visual field bias as indexed by a face perception task.     

Male-female differences in sexual fantasy

A questionnaire about thoughts and ideas during sexual activity was returned by 51 females and 50 males in a random sample of college undergraduates. A high response rate (91%) and the similar sexual experience of male and female respondents make possible a strong conclusion about the college population sampled: Males are thinking more about past experiences and current behavior, while females are thinking more of imaginary experiences. This difference occurs for thoughts during masturbation as well as for thoughts during heterosexual activity. It appears that females prefer a different kind of sexual fantasy than males, rather than being generally less interested in sexual fantasy as claimed by Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhart (Sexual behavior in the human female, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953).     

Modeling,praising, and collaborating: Effects of adult behavior on children of the same sex and opposite sex

The study assessed children's responsiveness to adults of both sexes as a function of the adults behavior. Paris of male and female adults administered games to 96 children. Each child was assigned to either the modeling, praise, or collaboration condition. Depending on the condition, each adult, in turn, (a) modeled selection of a specific set of play materials, (b) praised the child for playing with the materials, or (c) collaborated with the child while they played together with the materials. Results showed a greater responsiveness to the same-sex adult in the collaboration condition and to the cross-sex adult in the praise condition, as measured by the time spent playing with the materials previously associated with each adult and by comments to each adult. In the modeling condition, there was a nonsignificant same-sex effect for children's actual responsiveness, but a significant same-sex effect for self-reported responsiveness. Sex-typing scores, which were independently assessed, were related to same-sex responsiveness in the collaboration condition only. Different, and perhaps complementary, influences of same-sex and cross-sex adults on children's sex-typed preferences are considered.     

Individualized learning environments: Intra- and interpersonal consequences

This study examines the effects of individual goal structures on the intra- and interpersonal behavior of 120 fourth-grade children. Each group of four children was introduced to one of two individualized learning programs: (a) workbook materials color-coded according to level of difficulty (allowing implicit comparisons among children as to progress), and (b) materials not coded according to difficulty (discouraging comparisons). In both learning programs, children worked individually (at story writing) and were rewarded for the work. Results indicate that boys, but not girls, who were rewarded equally for doing good work in an individualized setting but who start and end at a lower step than other more frequently took away a toy from those peers with whom they compared themselves than did boys who were rewarded equally for good work and where there were no comparisons. Boys as a group, regardles of condition, gave more prize tickets to themselves than to others and gave more prize tickets to themselves than girls gave either to themselves or others. Both boys and girls appear to adopt the evaluations of their work given by the experimenter and appear to be influenced thereby in later prized-giving to themselves and to others.     

The nature of curiosity in children

This study examined several behaviors claimed to reflect curiosity in order to determine whether there are one or more types of curiosity. A secondary purpose was to examine the relations between the one or more types of curiosity and sex, social class, intelligence, achievement level, and ratings of personality traits. In two individual sessions 84 American first-grade boys and girls were administered five tasks which measured observation of complex and simple stimuli, preference of complex and simple stimuli, preference for the unknown, structure of meaning, and object exploration. A normalized Varimax factor analysis allowed the extraction of five factors: manipulatory curiosity, perceptual curiosity, conceptual curiosity, curiosity about the complex, and adjustive-reactive curiosity. Only the first factor was related to a demographic variable, sex. The nature of the factors and their theoretical and practical significance are discussed.     

II. The comparability of the WISC-R and WAIS among 16-year-old EMR children

Thirty 16-year-old EMR children were administered the WAIS and WISC-R in counterbalance order to determine the comparability of the two assessment instruments. The WAIS was found to yield significantly higher Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQ scores. The comparisons of corresponding subtests indicate that all WAIS subtests were significantly higher than the WISC-R except Picture Completion. Correlations between corresponding WAIS and WISC-R IQ scales and subtests, however, were significant. The results suggest differences between the two instruments among children of subnormal intelligence, thus presenting the possibility that a child may be differentially classified based on the selection of the intelligence test.     

Self-observation and behavior change: Applications to academic and adjustment problems through behavioral consultation

Self-observation as a behavior change technique was implemented through behavioral consultation in a public elementary school system. The self-observation procedures were introduced to two subjects with academic problems (assignment completion) and two subjects with behavioral problems (disruptive talk and interruptions, respectively). In each of the four cases, self-observation resulted in improvement in client behavior. Results are discussed within the context of previous methodological issues in the self-observation literature and the relevance of self-observation as a therapeutic tool in school settings.     

Social inhibition as a function of observation and recording of performance

In order to compare the relative effects of observation of performance and recording of information about performance on social facilitation/inhibition, 256 college students solved three concept-attainment problems in an orthogonal design. The variables were (a) number of observers (an additional observer or the experimenter alone), (b) videorecording (yes or no), (c) audiorecording (yes or no), (d) task complexity (four, six, eight, or ten total attributes in the problems). Each of videotaping, filming, and audiotaping resulted in poorer performance than the control condition, with no differences between these three recording conditions. The presence of an additional observer had no effect on performance. Pulse measures indicated that the presence of an additional observer increased arousal, but covariance analysis indicated no association between differences in performance and arousal.     

Objective self awareness and self esteem

Based on a theory of objective self awareness three experiments were conducted with undergraduates to test the hypothesis that self-focused attention can alter self esteem levels. In Experiments I and II subjects were exposed either to the sound of their own voices or to the sound of another's voice, and while listening to the tape-recording they filled out a self esteem measure. Consistent with the theory, subjects whose attention was focused upon themselves by means of exposure to their own tape-recorded voices showed lower self esteem than subjects who heard another's voice. The impact of the self awareness manipulation on self esteem was greatest when it was first introduced. In Experiment III the variable of positive-negative feedback on a fictitious personality trait was added to the self-focused attention variable. An interaction resulted such that self-focused attention lowered self esteem given negative feedback, while there was a tendency toward the opposite result given positive feedback.     

Facing up to the issues: Reply to Hellige (1983)

In a recent article in this journal, Hellige (Brain and Cognition, 2, 199-203, 1983) presented a critique of the chimeric-face technique that was used by us to validate a hand preference questionnaire. Data were presented by Hellige to show that the left visual field (LVF) bias that occurs on this task is due primarily to differences in detail in the features of the two faces and not because of right hemisphere dominance for face perception. In our rebuttal, we acknowledge that the two faces are not mirror-image duplicates of each other, but contend that this fact does not explain why differences between left-handers and right-handers have been observed on this task. Further data on the role of handedness as well as other variables impacting on this task are presented. A possible explanation is also offered for the rather small extent of LVF bias that Hellige obtained when he used corrected (i.e., true mirror-image) versions of Jaynes' chimeric faces.