Negative priming in same-different matching: further evidence for a central locus of inhibition

Responses to recently ignored information may be slower or less accurate than responses to information not recently encountered. Such negative priming effects imply that the mechanism of selective attention operates on unattended, as well as attended, information. In the present experiment, subjects judged the second and fourth letters of five-letter strings (e.g., BABAB) as "same" or "different." Responses were slower when a target letter was identical to the distractors presented in the immediately preceding trial. This effect did not depend on which response was required on the current or preceding trial. The results suggest that ignored information is functionally disconnected from the response system as a whole, rather than from a specific response.     

Negative priming without probe selection

Responses to an object may be slower or less accurate if that object shares attributes with a recently ignored object(negative priming). Some studies have found negative priming only if the probe trial required selection against a distractor stimulus. In the present experiment, subjects responded to the location of a target (O), ignoring a distractor (X) if it appeared in another location. Reaction time was slower to probe targets that appeared in the same location as the prime distractor, regardless of whether or not the probe target was accompanied by a distractor.     

The effects of life crisis on psychological adjustment

In this survey study the question was asked how "life crisis," social conditions, and ratings of quality of life are related to psychological adjustment. The survey included 454 residents, and data were collected on five social conditions: income, education, age, marital status, and religious participation; four ratings of life quality: family, personal life, income, and overall quality of life; the number of recent changes in the lives of the respondents; and two indicators of psychological adjustment. These data were analyzed with multivariate analyses of variance and stepwise regression. Life crisis was associated directly with psychological adjustment. Social conditions and life quality ratings also had significant effects. People with high life-crisis scores reported more psychological distress, and poor social conditions appeared to further exacerbate their adjustment problems. Regardless of the magnitude of the crisis, quality of life ratings had sizable effects on reports of psychological adjustment.     

Controlled comparison of aversive therapy and covert sensitization in compulsive homosexuality

Ethical objections to the use of behaviour therapy in homosexuality are discussed. It is pointed out that these objections were often based on a limited view of the aims of the therapy. The need for evaluating such therapy, as it is currently used, is elaborated.Twenty subjects requesting behaviour therapy to reduce compulsive homosexual urges were randomly allocated, half to receive aversive therapy using electric shocks and half to receive covert sensitization. Both groups were studied for one year. There was no consistent trend for one therapy to be more effective than the other in reducing the strength of compulsive homosexual urges, and the response to both was similar to that reported in previous studies. It was considered that aversive therapies in homosexuality do not act by establishing a conditioned aversion, nor by altering the subjects' sexual orientation. They reduce aversive arousal produced by behaviour completion mechanisms when subjects attempt to refrain from homosexual behaviour in response to stimuli which have repeatedly provoked such behaviour in the past.     

Predicting the Everyday Life Events of Older Adults

Predicting the everyday life events of people is a relatively unexplored topic, although several major theoretical approaches deal with related issues. The dispositional approach would assign a causal role to personality, while the situational approach would locate causation in the person's environment. Variations on these two extreme themes invoke an interactionist interpretation. Beyond this, a genuinely transactional approach focuses on the enduring person-environment relationship established as people deal with major and everyday life events. This study investigated a wide range of predictors of daily positive, negative, and ill-health events over time in a sample of 206 older adults. Results showed that personality variables played only a minor role in predicting daily events, although an interaction between extraversion and social network size was significant. Background demographic variables and the major stressors of recent conjugal bereavement and physical disability played a role in daily event occurrences. Overall, the strongest degree of predictability of events came from the events themselves: The high degree of event stability over time indicated the value of a genuinely transactional model in understanding the occurrence of everyday events.     

Some effects of positive life events on community mental health

Measures of positive and negative events were derived from a life-event inventory to test the predictions of an equilibrium model and a positive mental health model of psychological well-being. These measures were related to indicators of individual and community well-being with data obtained through a household survey of 454 residents. Residents who reported more negative events also reported more psychological distress and less positive adjustment. Positive events were associated with reports of positive adjustment. An analysis of census tract scores on life events revealed that the relative absence of positive events in census tracts was associated with higher service utilization rates to the community mental health center serving those tracts. The number of negative events was unrelated to service rates for census tracts but was related to several demographic indicators of well-being.     

Child performance on discrimination tasks: Effects of amount of stimulus variation

Two independently conducted studies investigated stimulus variation effects on children's discrimination learning. The stimuli in the first study were generated by a conjunctive rule and were presented in pairs. Mean trials to criterion was significantly lower for the single-feature change treatment (17.4) than for the multiple-feature change treatment (29.9). Single-feature change-treatment transfer scores were significantly higher only for stimuli that differed in terms of one of the features. The second study not only replicated the initial finding concerning the single-feature change treatment but also found that students made more errors in reaching criterion when stimuli were generated by an exclusive disjunctive rule and were presented singly. For all tasks, the single-feature change treatment with stimuli presented in pairs was accompanied by fewer errors to criterion than the other treatments.     

Memory for pictures and words as a function of level of processing: Depth or dual coding?

The experiment was designed to test differential predictions derived from dual-coding and depth-of-processing hypotheses. Subjects under incidental memory instructions free recalled a list of 36 test events, each presented twice. Within the list, an equal number of events were assigned to structural, phonemic, and semantic processing conditions. Separate groups of subjects were tested with a list of pictures, concrete words, or abstract words. Results indicated that retention of concrete words increased as a direct function of the processing-task variable (structural < phonemic 相似文献