Spatial summation and the dynamics of warmth sensation

Various areal extents of the forehead and back were thermally irradiated at various levels of intensity. For any areal extent, the degree of apparent warmth grows approximately as a power function of intensity level; the larger the area, the smaller the exponent of the power function. Two families of psychophysical functions, one for the forehead, the other for the back, both show that the power functions extrapolate to a point of convergence in the neighborhood of the threshold for pain and tissue impairment. The rules that govern spatial summation of warmth reveal themselvesin the two families. Intensity and area trade one for the other to preserve the same level of warmth. At faint sensation levels, reciprocity is the rule of trading; but with increasing sensation level, area makes a weaker and weaker relative contribution to warmth, and, as a result, it takes a larger and larger percentage change in area to offset a given percentage change in intensity.     

Spatial localization in children after changes in position

Five experiments investigated the young child's ability to retrieve a target after a change in the position of the child or the target. In Experiments I–IV 2- to 4-year-old children were rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° about a stationary square table containing four identical hiding locations at each of the cardinal locations. The children tested performed this task significantly better than chance, but their errors reflected either their response biases in the absence of any information as to the location of the target, or the repetition of a response which had been successful in retrieving the target prior to the change in position. When the children were forced to respond rapidly, these errors increased significantly. In Experiment V a table top was rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° in front of 3- to 10-year-old children. There were two cue situations. The child saw the rotation, or the child had to infer the rotation. Young children made errors of the types observed in Experiments I–IV. The ability to inhibit these errors increased with age. By 7 years of age performance was virtually perfect when the child could observe the change in position of the hidden object. The ability to infer the positional change developed more slowly and was good but not perfect at 10 years of age.     

Temporal summation at the warmth threshold

Threshold levels for warmth aroused by infrared irradiation were measured in sLx Ss at durations between 0.05 and 10 sec. Beyond a critical duration of about a second, the threshold does not depend on duration. Below critical duration time t trades for irradiance ? by the formula ? = kt^?0.82. That these properties do not depend much on areal extent of stimulation was demonstrated by a study that compared temporal summation for two different areas of the same S’s skin. Individual differences in apparent absolute sensitivity were explored under the rubric of the theory of signal detection.     

Spatial localization does not require the presence of local cues

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that rats can rapidly learn to locate an object that they can never see, hear, or smell provided it remains in a fixed spatial location relative to distal room cues. Four groups of rats were permitted to escape from opaque water onto a platform which was either just above or just below the water surface, and in either a fixed or varied location. Learning occurred rapidly except for the group for whom the escape platform was below the water surface and moved about from place to place. Transfer tests revealed that a spatial location search strategy was employed by the group for whom the platform was below water but in a fixed location. A second experiment investigated this learning further, revealing instantaneous transfer when the rats were required to approach the platform from a novel starting position. The data of both studies are discussed in relation to recent work on spatial memory in the rat. The concept of the “acuity” of spatial memory is introduced and the procedures used may provide a new approach to comparing spatial memory with classical and instrumental conditioning.     

Personal warmth and psychological health at midlife

Personal warmth, arguably a strong trait in the makeup of psychological health, seems to fade in conceptual importance at midlife. In contrast, ideas of interiority and androgyny appear to gain conceptual importance at midlife. The present study sought to rebalance these foci by determining the predictive power of personal warmth for psychological health of men and women at age 50: first, by developing separate California Psychological Inventory (CPI) scales to assess personal warmth; next, by joining these warmth scales with the 20 standard CPI scales to predict psychological health. Without the personal warmth scale, the standard CPI scales do not significantly predict psychological health for men; for women, the standard scales do. For both genders, the personal warmth scales add significantly to the predictability of psychological health. The results point to an amendment of current theoretical formulations of interiority and androgyny to better understand optimal psychological development in men and women at midlife.     

Apparent warmth as a function of thermal irradiation

The skin of the back was periodically exposed to a source of radiant heat. In Experiment 1, 20 Ss matched numbers to the apparent warmth aroused by various levels of irradiant flux (method of magnitude estimation). In Experiment 2, 15 Ss matched the loudness of a white noise to the apparent uwmth aroused by the same levels used in Experiment I (method of cross-modality matching). Both experiments showed that apparent warmth is related to absorbed irradiance by a power function whose exponent is approximately 0.7.     

Spatial localization discrepancies: a visual deficiency in poor readers

In two studies, we compared the size of the spatial discrepancies made by young, good and poor readers when locating patterns in space. In the first study, each child was asked to point to the location of a briefly displayed pattern in a 7 x 7 matrix, and the discrepancy between the target's location and the child's response was recorded. The pattern was either a shape or a letter, and the target appeared at nine distances from the middle of the display. The discrepancies made by both groups of children increased with eccentricity, but the rate of increase was significantly greater for the poor readers. The second study required that two temporally and spatially separated target patterns be located on each trial. The discrepancies between their positions and the positions specified by the children were recorded for each target as a function of its eccentricity, and the results for both targets were similar to those obtained in the first study. That is, the discrepancies made by both groups of children increased with eccentricity, but the rate of increase was significantly greater for the poor readers. It was argued that the results of both studies are consistent with the hypothesis that poor readers are handicapped by a low-level processing or perceptual deficiency in the visual encoding system.     

Reaction time as a measure of summation of warmth

Reaction time (RT) to radiant heat applied to the forehead and to the back was found to decrease monotonically as a function of two variables: intensity (flux density) and areal extent of stimulation. Intensity and area can thus be traded one for the other to preserve a constant RT. It has previously been shown that intensity and area can be traded to preserve a constant degree of apparent warmth, as determined by magnitude estimation. RT and magnitude estimation therefore agree in showing that the warmth sense displays spatial summation, and both show that summation is very great. They also agree in showing that the foreheadés sensitivity greatly exceeds the backés, and the exact trading rules revealed by magnitude estimation and RT agree well at low and moderate intensities.     

Magnitude estimation of warmth: intra- and intersubject variability

Fifty-two subjects, both male and female, 18 to 62 years old, were asked to hold a metal bar maintained at different temperatures (33 degrees to 42 degrees C), and to estimate the magnitude of the resulting thermal sensation. On the average, the estimates were linearly related to the stimulus temperature, although most individual subjects either under- or overestimated middle-range values. Intersubject variability, which was twice as large as intrasubject variability, could not be accounted for by gender, age, or body-temperature differences.     

Universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence

Like all perception, social perception reflects evolutionary pressures. In encounters with conspecifics, social animals must determine, immediately, whether the "other" is friend or foe (i.e. intends good or ill) and, then, whether the "other" has the ability to enact those intentions. New data confirm these two universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence. Promoting survival, these dimensions provide fundamental social structural answers about competition and status. People perceived as warm and competent elicit uniformly positive emotions and behavior, whereas those perceived as lacking warmth and competence elicit uniform negativity. People classified as high on one dimension and low on the other elicit predictable, ambivalent affective and behavioral reactions. These universal dimensions explain both interpersonal and intergroup social cognition.     

Perceived parental warmth and adjustment among Ethiopian adolescents

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between adolescents’ perception of parental warmth and their self-esteem, school adjustment and depression symptoms. Data were collected from 809 adolescents (female=47%; mean age=16.8 years; SD=1.58) from four different high schools in Ethiopia. The data were analysed for differences in perceived parental warmth and adjustment by gender. Results suggest higher levels of parental warmth to be associated with comparatively lower school adjustment and depressive symptoms as well as higher self-esteem in girls rather than boys. A gendered effect seems to explain parent warmth influences of the personal and school adjustment of Ethiopian adolescents.     

The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life

Classic and contemporary research on person perception has demonstrated the paramount importance of interpersonal warmth. Recent research on embodied cognition has shown that feelings of social warmth or coldness can be induced by experiences of physical warmth or coldness, and vice versa. Here we show that people tend to self-regulate their feelings of social warmth through applications of physical warmth, apparently without explicit awareness of doing so. In Study 1, higher scores on a measure of chronic loneliness (social coldness) were associated with an increased tendency to take warm baths or showers. In Study 2, a physical coldness manipulation significantly increased feelings of loneliness. In Study 3, needs for social affiliation and for emotion regulation, triggered by recall of a past rejection experience, were subsequently eliminated by an interpolated physical warmth experience. Study 4 provided evidence that people are not explicitly aware of the relationship between physical and social warmth (coldness), as they do not consider a target person who often bathes to be any lonelier than one who does not, with all else being equal. Together, these findings suggest that physical and social warmth are to some extent substitutable in daily life and that this substitution reflects an unconscious self-regulatory mechanism.