Beauty Is Only "Name" Deep: The Effect of First-Name On Ratings of Physical Attraction

College students ( n = 197) voted to select a beauty queen from among six photographs equivalent in physical attractiveness, as determined by rankings of 35 students from a separate university. Half the photographs bore a desirable first-name and half were assigned an undesirable first-name. As predicted, firstname had a significant effect on physical attraction: Girls with desirable firstnames received 158 votes to 39 for those with undesirable names. These data were discussed in terms of an additive, rather than an interactive, effect, due to the nature of the task. The strength of these findings was related to the study's ecological validity.     

Computer-Assisted Careers Counselling: A New Approach

This paper describes the outcome of a research and development project concerned to construct a computer aid for careers advisers and career decision-makers which differs in basic philosophy and design from others currentiy in the field. The resulting Careers Decision Aiding System (CDAS) is principally concerned with improving the quality of the decision-making strategy employed by clients by raising their awareness of the way in which their career choice is made, ratherthan with employing computer technology to attempt to match people to careers. The use of the CDAS by clients and careers advisers is illustrated by two case-studies.     

A general scheme for the analytic decomposition of objective test scores: Illustrative demonstrations using the Rod-and-Frame test and the Müller-Lyer illusion

Objective tests of personality typically include a number of items or trials; the total score on the test is the sum of the subject's “correct” responses across all such trials. Normally, the trials are varied systematically across various facets of the test design, so that the total score represents a composite measure of accuracy averaged across these test facets. However, since only one score is computed for each subject, some potentially important kinds of individual differences—namely all those associated with each particular variation in the test design—are treated solely as measurement unreliability. Such a psychometric stance may serve to obscure more differentiated types of individual differences, with the result that composite scores from trials based on one type of experimental design may not be highly related to such scores from trials using a somewhat different design. The present paper presents a general procedure for scoring objective tests more analytically. To illustrate this general rationale, and to demonstrate its potential utility, data have been reanalyzed from two previous studies, one using the Rod-and-Frame test, the other the Müller-Lyer illusion. In both cases, the traditional global accuracy score did not correlate significantly with other theoretically related variables, while a number of component scores were quite highly related.     

CS duration,amount, and concentration effects in conditioning taste aversions

The relative contributions of the duration, amount, and concentration of a taste CS were assessed in pairings with an ionizing radiation US in two experiments. Increasing the duration of the CS (0.1% saccharin) up to 9 min yielded increasingly better conditioning over a $\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{hr}$ CS-US delay interval. When the concentration of the sacharin was increased, only a few seconds' exposure to the CS was necessary for near asymptotic conditioning. It was observed that the CS duration effect had not been identified earlier because most investigators utilize 10–20 min CS access periods. The role of CS duration in conditioning over a delay was discussed with reference to the probability of the memory of the CS being present at the time of the pairing with the US event.     

Effect of CS-US pairings on shock-elicited aggression as a function of US intensity

In two experiments with paired rats, the effect of superimposing CS-US pairings on a baseline of shock-elicited aggression was studied. Baseline shocks (3.0 mA, 0.125-sec duration) occurred at a rate of 20 shocks per min throughout each session. In Experiment I, each independent group of two pairs of subjects received (in addition to baseline shocks) US shocks of 1.0, 3.0, or 5.0 mA and 5-sec duration, each shock signalled by a 1-min CS. At all three US intensities, aggression increased during the CS. In Experiment II, pairs of subjects received each unconditioned stimulus intensity in a within-subjects design. This procedure revealed a direct relationship between rate of responding and unconditioned shock intensity.     

Problem‐Focused Content in the Job Search: Two Tests of the Cognitive‐Emotional Theory of Esteem Support Messages

The Cognitive‐Emotional Theory of Esteem Support Messages posits that messages intended to enhance recipients' state self‐esteem focus on cognitions and/or behaviors. In the current studies, problem‐focused message content (i.e., content focused on enacting behavior to alleviate the esteem threat) was of particular interest. College students (Study 1, n= 227) applying for postgraduation jobs and unemployed, underemployed, and/or displaced workers recruited from a government one‐stop career center (Study 2, n = 292) rated esteem support messages varying in degree of focus on behaviors vs. cognitions relevant to the job search process. Messages focused on behavior were rated as less effective than those focusing on cognitions relevant to the esteem threat, although support for this result was stronger in Study 2.