防御机制的年龄、性别与文化差异

本研究考察了生命全程中防御机制使用的年龄、性别和文化差异。被试年龄范围为１０～８６岁,其中美国被试为１６８人（男８５人,女８３人）,中国大陆被试为１５６人（男７６人,女８０人）。本研究运用测验法对被试的防御机制进行测查,结果表明：不同文化背景下个体使用的防御机制有明显的差异,中国被试比美国被试更多地使用指向自我与理智化两种防御机制,更少使用指向他人与投射;同时防御机制的使用表现出显著的年龄特征,中老年被试比年轻被试较多使用反向而较少使用指向他人与投射;防御机制的使用还表现出显著的性别差异,女性比男性更多使用指向自我而更少使用反向。     

Different defense mechanisms among men with different sex role orientations

Thirty male college students completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Defense Mechanism Inventory. Results demonstrated that sex role orientation moderates the use of defense mechanisms in men, so that men with different orientations differed in the defenses they used. Masculine men used externalizing defenses such as turning against object and rationalizing defenses such as principalization more often than feminine men. Feminine men used an internalizing mode of defense, such as turning against self, more often than masculine and androgynous men. Results were compared with similar studies and the implications were discussed.The order of the authors was alphabetically determined. The authors wish to thank Michal T. Lewy and Jacqueline Franko for their help in conducting the study.     

Choice-induced preferences in the absence of choice: Evidence from a blind two choice paradigm with young children and capuchin monkeys

In two studies, we provide a test of the revealed-preferences account of choice-induced preferences. To do so, we introduce a blind two-choice task in which preferences cannot guide choices. Children chose between two similar objects while ignorant of the objects’ identities, and then chose between the rejected alternative and a third similar object. Monkeys were given an illusion of choice between two similar objects, and then chose between the rejected object and a third similar object. Both children and monkeys preferred the third object, indicating that they devalued the rejected object. This response pattern did not occur when the children and monkeys were not given the opportunity to choose between the two initial items. These results provide evidence against a revealed-preferences account of choice-induced preferences and demonstrate that the process of making a choice itself induces preferences.     

Approval versus achievement motives in seventh-grade girls

Eighty seventh graders played a computer-programmed two-choice probability game in one of four conditions: with reinforcement for choosing the more probable response, with reinforcement for choosing the less probable response, with a silent experimenter, or alone. Children receiving reinforcement for the less probable response experienced a conflict between approval and achievement since choices which increased approval in this condition decreased success in the task. Across all conditions, girls chose the more probable response significantly more often than boys, indicating that girls did not sacrifice achievement for the sake of approval. Finally, girls did not reduce their efforts to achieve when working alone even though there was no opportunity for social approval, and did not express lower success expectancies than the boys even though these were measured anonymously.The authors wish to extend their appreciation to the teachers at Emerson School, Oak Park, Illinois, and to Ms. Glada O. Vaughn, principal, and Ms. Sandra Northrup Nowak, assistant principal, for their cooperation in carrying out this research.     

Early understanding of perception as a source of knowledge

Two studies investigated preschool children's ability to infer another person's knowledge or ignorance on the basis of that person's recent perceptual experience. In Experiment 1 children were questioned about their own and a puppet's knowledge of a hidden object's color and about their own and the puppet's ability to see the hidden object. Three- and 4-year-olds attributed knowledge and perceptual experience to the person (either themselves or the puppet) who had viewed the hidden object, but not to the person who did not view it. Experiment 2 further investigated 3-year-olds understanding of perception as a source of knowledge. Children were asked to indicate which of two puppets, one who had viewed a hidden object and one who had not, would be able to tell them the object's color. Children chose the correct puppet more often than would be predicted by chance. The results of these experiments suggest that understanding of perception as a source of knowledge is present by the age of 3 years.     

The Sense of Quality of Life and Religious Strategies of Coping with Stress in Prison Inmates

The aim of the presented research was to analyze differences in religious strategies of coping with stress in a group of prison inmates characterized by different levels of the sense of quality of life—general, psychophysical, psychosocial, personal, and metaphysical. The participants were 390 males, aged 19–68 years, serving sentences in prisons in Poland. The measures used were the Sense of Quality of Life Questionnaire by M. Stra?-Romanowska and K. I. Pargament’s RCOPE Questionnaire. As expected, individuals with a high sense of quality of life—both general and pertaining to specific dimensions—more often chose positive religious strategies, whereas participants with a low sense of quality of life more often chose negative strategies. The exception was the metaphysical aspect of the quality of life: individuals with a high intensity of this dimension more often chose some of the positive as well as negative religious strategies.     

Pink for Girls,Red for Boys,and Blue for Both Genders: Colour Preferences in Children and Adults

Colours carry social connotations like pink for girls and blue for boys. In a cross-sectional study, we investigated whether such early gender coding might be reflected in absolute colour preferences in children and adults of both genders. In two studies, participants selected their favourite (and least favourite, Study 2) colour from an unrestricted sample of colours. We tested 129 Swiss children (Study 1, 10–14 years-old, 68 boys) and 180 Swiss adults (Study 2, 17–48 years-old, 88 men). In children, we observed that girls chose pink/purple as their favourite hue more often than boys did, the most common favourite hue in girls and boys was blue, and boys chose red as their favourite more often than girls did. In adults, we observed that both genders almost never choose pink as their favourite, blue was a common favourite colour, and women were more likely to favour red than were men. In an additional study (n?=?183 Swiss participants, 47 men), we tested whether liking of pink, blue, and red was related to emotion associations with these colours. Pink was associated with positive emotions to the same extent as blue and red. Women further associated more positive emotions with pink than did men. We conclude that some commonalities (blue) and gender differences (pink and red) exist in absolute colour preferences. These differences, however, cannot be fully accounted by emotional associations. We speculate about these gendered colour preferences in relation to gender stereotypes and status differences between men and women.

     

Mirror reversal: Empirical tests of competing accounts

In a mirror, left and right are said to look reversed. Surprisingly, this very familiar phenomenon, mirror reversal, has still no agreed-upon account to date. This study compared a variety of accounts in the light of empirical data. In Experiment 1, 102 students judged whether the mirror image of a person or a character looked reversed or not in 15 settings and also judged the directional relation between its components. In Experiment 2, 52 students made the reversal judgements in 13 settings. It was found for the first time that a substantial proportion of people denied the left–right mirror reversal of a person, whereas virtually all of them did recognize that of a character. This discrepancy strongly suggested that these two kinds of mirror reversal are produced by different processes, respectively. A number of findings including this discrepancy clearly contradicted two accounts that are currently active: the one based on the priority of the up–down and front–back axes over the left–right axis, and the one based on the physical rotation of an object. All the findings were consistent with an account that considered mirror reversal a complex of three different phenomena produced by three different processes, respectively.     

Reversal learning in young children as a function of number of choice-alternatives

Discrimination learning and reversal problems were given to 128 children aged two and three years in which there were either two, three, six, or nine choice-alternatives per problem. The position of the correct object (either a toy car on the original problem and a ball on the reversal problem or vice versa) was varied randomly among all the possible positions, all other positions being occupied by duplicates of the incorrect object. It was found that two-choice reversal problems were much more difficult than all others. There was also a direct and monotonic relationship between ease of solution and number of choices present during reversal learning. Additional analysis inlicated that position response biases were probably responsible for this effect.     

Color change as a causal agent revisited

Michotte (1946/1963, p. 235) concluded that color "has no bearing whatever on the question of qualitative causality". Surprisingly, this claim has received little empirical investigation in the 60 years since its publication. In 2 experiments, 2 balls struck a cylinder and changed color (either continuously or in a stepped progression) for 2 s. After the 2-s interval, the cylinder disgorged a purple substance. Participants chose which of the 2 balls was most likely to have caused the disgorging effect. An object that changed color was favored as the cause much more often than one that did not, and participants generally preferred an object that reached its terminal color immediately before the effect over objects that reached their terminal colors earlier. When participants performed a causal ratings task, color change produced moderate judgments of causation, with little response differentiation as a function of color dynamics.     

Attentional inhibition has social-emotional consequences for unfamiliar faces

Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as "more trustworthy" and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as "less trustworthy." For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is "on a lighter background" vs. "on a darker background"). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.     

几何模块论的局限性——来自梯形实验的证据

以往研究表明幼儿主要依赖几何信息进行再定向,但这些研究大多使用矩形空间。在本研究中,幼儿所处的空间为几何信息更丰富,目标物体所在位置确定的梯形。结果发现,幼儿并不会利用新增的几何信息确定目标物体,仍然去正确位置的对角寻找,表现出的寻找模式与矩形空间一样,这说明幼儿在空间再定向任务中对几何信息的利用很有限。此外,录像分析的结果发现,幼儿在面向梯形两底边时会更多地且径直地走向正确位置或对角,这种寻找过程上的特点表明他们可能基于空间轴朝向结合左右方位感表征物体位置     

Less means more for pigeons but not always

When humans are asked to judge the value of a set of objects of excellent quality, they often give this set higher value than those same objects with the addition of some of lesser quality. This is an example of the affect heuristic, often referred to as the less-is-more effect. Monkeys and dogs, too, have shown this suboptimal effect. But in the present experiments, normally hungry pigeons chose optimally: a preferred food plus a less--preferred food over a more-preferred food alone. In Experiment 2, however, pigeons on a less-restricted diet showed the suboptimal less-is-more effect. Choice on control trials indicated that the effect did not result from the novelty of two food items versus one. The effect in the less-food-restricted pigeons appears to result from the devaluation of the combination of the food items by the presence of the less-preferred food item. The reversal of the effect under greater food restriction may occur because, as motivation increases, the value of the less-preferred food increases faster than the value of the more-preferred food, thus decreasing the difference in value between the two foods.     

Selection of vigilant and avoidant coping strategies among repressors, highly anxious and truly low anxious subjects

70 female graduate students from a western university were classified as to personality type: Highly Anxious, Truly Low Anxious, and Repressing, using a combination of scores from the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scales. Each subject's preference for monitor or blunter coping strategy was assessed via the Miller Behavioral Style Scale. Highly Anxious subjects chose significantly more monitor strategies than did Truly Low Anxious subjects or Repressors. The number of blunter strategies chosen did not differ across personality types. Chi-squared indicated that Highly Anxious subjects were more often classified as monitors than blunters whereas the proportions of monitors and blunters did not significantly differ between Truly Low Anxious subjects and Repressors. Results suggest that the repressor trait is distinct from avoidant and vigilant coping strategies.     

My owner,right or wrong: the effect of familiarity on the domestic dog’s behavior in a food-choice task

Dogs are strongly influenced by human behavior, and they readily form bonds with specific humans. Yet these lines of inquiry are not often combined. The goal of this study was to investigate whether such bonds would play a role in how dogs behave in response to human signals. Using various types of signals, we compared dogs’ use of information from a familiar human (their owner) versus an unfamiliar human when choosing between two food containers. In some conditions, the owner indicated a container that gave food and a stranger indicated a container that did not; in other conditions, this was reversed. Dogs more often chose the container indicated by or nearest to their owner, even when this container never yielded a food reward. In two conditions, dogs chose at chance: a control condition in which both pointers were strangers and a condition in which the owner and stranger sat reading books and provided no social signal. This is the first study to directly compare owners to strangers in a single food-choice situation. Our results suggest that dogs make decisions by attending preferentially to social signals from humans with whom they have become familiar.     

Changes with age and with exclusion of vision in performance at an aiming task

Forty industrial workers between 20 and 60 years of age took part in the experiment. Each sat facing a display in an enclosure. His task was to locate targets with a pointer, under two conditons: when he was able to make whatever use he chose of direct vision, and wearing a pair of red goggles through which only the diplay could be seen.

On the average, those over 40 years of age took more time than younger subjects over those portions of the task which were concerned with the initiation of a fresh action. V'hen unable t o make use of vision the older had far greater difficulty in locating the targets and attempted to supplement tactile and kinesthetic cues by making postural adjustments, turning their heads and often their bodies in the direction of the target at which they were aiming. These findings are discussed in relation to an earlier observation of the greater tendency for older people to look at what they are doing.     

The rich get richer: Students’ discounting of hypothetical delayed rewards and real effortful extra credit

The present research compared choices among students with higher or lower grades for rewards that were devalued by imposing a delay to their receipt (Study 1) or by requiring more work for a larger reward (Study 2). In Study 1, students chose between hypothetical and noncontingent smaller immediate or larger delayed monetary rewards. In Study 2, students chose from among different amounts of real, response-contingent academic rewards (extra credit) that required different amounts of work. The results of both studies were similar: The highest scoring students discounted the value of the delayed money less than did their lower scoring counterparts, and the highest scoring students also chose to do and actually did more extra-credit work than lower scoring students did. Differences in the discounting of devalued rewards might represent a fundamental difference between the highest and lower scoring students.     

The effect of instructions on the apparent reversal of rotary motion in depth

This study concerns experimental investigation of the effect of instructions on the apparent reversal of rotary motion in depth. It was found that subjects instructed to report apparent reversals of an elliptical shape signalled more reversals than subjects who were instructed to report the non-occurrence of reversals. This difference increased over four trials. When the stimulus object was a trapezium window instructions to report reversals led to a higher rate of reversals than did instructions to report non-occurrence, but this difference did not increase significantly over trials.     

Alexithymia,Defenses, and Ego Strength: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Relationships with Psychological Well-Being and Depression

Affect regulation is important to mental health. A deficit in one’s ability to identify and express emotions (alexithymia), cognitive styles of regulating emotional conflict (defenses), and the capacity for integrative and complex self-other understanding (ego strength or maturity) need to be studied to understand how they relate to each other as well as to mental health and well-being. A sample of 415 community-dwelling adults from a major metropolitan area in the Midwest U.S., stratified for gender, age, and ethnicity, completed three methodologically different measures of affect regulation along with measures of well-being and depression. Six years later, 49 % of the sample again reported their well-being and depression. At baseline, ego strength and the defenses of principalization and reversal correlated negatively with alexithymia and the other defenses (turning against self, turning against object and projection), even after controlling for negative affect. Cross-sectionally, relationships were largely as hypothesized, with low alexithymia, use of mature defenses, and greater ego strength correlating with less depression and greater well-being, although some of these relationships were attenuated after controlling for negative affect. Prospectively, each of the affect regulation measures predicted hypothesized changes in well-being after 6 years, after controlling for baseline well-being, but affect regulation did not predict changes in depression. These findings illuminate similarities and differences among these affect regulation constructs, suggest the importance of differentiating well-being from depression, and reveal that affect regulation uniquely predicts changes in long-term well-being.