“Reflections on a peach-seed monkey”: Empowering relationships

The focus of this essay is on human relationships, specifically, the empowering potential of those relationships, and, most particularly, on the empowering potential those relationships have for enabling us to discover our respective possibilities. It is argued that we often discover who we are and what we can become as our possibilities are discovered by another and reflected back to us. This empowering potential of human relationships can be helpfully understood as a manifestation of the redemptive role of God in human life.     

The Undecided Student—How Different Is He?

Students who were undecided about a vocational choice were compared in two studies with those who were decided. In the first study comparing decided and undecided college freshmen, only chance differences were found for men and women. The second study demonstrated no differences between decided and undecided college-bound high school students on academic aptitude and high school grades. Undecided students were found to be less vocationally oriented and more intellectually oriented. Reasons for these findings are discussed and some reinterpretations of student indecision are given.     

Memory for symmetry: real or artifact

Subjects recalled nonrandom digit sequences according to either (a) free recall or (b) a serial recall mode in a series of three studies. Sequential structure was varied with specific rules determining higher-order structure of either (a) arithmetic, (b) symmetrical, or (c) haphazard types. In Experiment I, 18 temporal patterns of 12 digits each were presented visually. Although symmetric patterns were easier than the other two pattern types, this superiority was not determined by recall mode. In Experiment II, 6 temporal patterns of 18 digits each were presented visually, with results similar to those of Experiment I. Auditory patterns equivalent to those of Experiment II were presented in Experiment III. In this study, although the free recall mode produced slightly superior recall with symmetrical sequences, this difference was not statistically significant. It was concluded that superior memory for symmetries cannot be wholly accounted for by organizational strategies made possible by a free recall mode.     

Recall of grammatical relations within clause-containing sentences

Two major findings were obtained in a study of college students' recall of meaningful grammatical relations within sentences: (1) verb-object relations in object focus relative clauses were recalled less accurately than verb-object relations in subject focus relative clauses, thus supporting the hypothesis that permuted word order in certain relative clauses interferes with adequate encoding of underlying grammatical relations, and (2) subject-verb relations in nested sentences in which a relative clause intervened between subject and verb (nested sentences) were retained in memory as accurately as uninterrupted subject-verb relations (not nested sentences).     

Mexican adolescent sexuality: attitudes,knowledge, and sources of information

Data from a study of the attitudes, knowledge, and sources of information of Mexican adolescents are presented. 24 male and 57 female unmarried adolescents of mean age 16.2-16.5 years (range 14-19 years) from Cuernavaca and Guadajara responded to a 66-item questionnaire. Participants were from a broad range of socioeconomic levels and 86% self-identified as being Catholic. 12 males and 4 females had experienced sexual intercourse. Responses to the questionnaire indicate that 85% had received some sex education in school, yet only 8% thought that teachers should be responsible for sex education. Further, the majority were satisfied with what they knew about sex, but the greatest mean score was 5.5 on a series of 9 knowledge questions. The youths were generally conservative, holding that people, especially females, should be married before having sex and that sex without love is unacceptable. The author hopes that these findings will help health education providers plan programs for this population in Mexico and the US.     

Studies of the cognitive representation of spatial relations: II. A familiar environment

This experiment tested the ability of people to recall the locations of buildings in a familiar campus setting. Ten graduate students represented the relative locations of buildings by pairwise distance judgments (on a 100-point scale) and by direct mapping of locations on a Tektronix cathode ray terminal. As evaluated by Stevens's power law, both methods led to accurate judgments of relative distance (the average exponent was close to 1). In addition, the pairwise judgments were analyzed by multidimensional scaling (MDS) and the buildings were located in a two-dimensional map. When asked to choose between the MDS representation and the map created directly on the Tektronix, all 10 subjects chose the latter as the more accurate. Moreover, 6 out of 10 subjects thought the direct map was more accurate than the actual map of the building locations. These results suggest that either pairwise judgment or direct mapping yield accurative representations of spatial relations in a familial environment, but that subjects favor the direct map.     

Quantitative functions for size and distance judgments

A psychophysical approach was used to obtain judgments of visual extent under three conditions. In tuvo conditions a comparison stimulus at each of two distances was matched in size to a standard which varied in distance. Stimuli were presented on a well-lighted table and were judged by two observers under Objective instructions. Both the standard and comparison were located in either a frontal or longitudinal plane. In a third condition relative distance estimates were given of two stimuli which varied in their relative positions along the table. The mean results for all conditions were described as a power function of physical stimulus measures. The exponent was greater than 1.0 for frontal size and usually less than 1.0 for flat size and distance. The position of the comparison affected the magnitude of the exponents to a lesser degree. These findings have relevance for interpretations of size and distance judgments.     

Use of position and feature cues in discrimination learning by the whiptail lizard (Cnemidophorus inornatus)

Animals use a variety of cue types to locate and discriminate objects. The ease with which particular cue types are learned varies across species and context. An enormous literature contains comparisons of spatial cue use to use of other cue types, but few experiments examine the ease with which various nonspatial cues are learned. In addition, few studies have examined cue use in reptiles. Thus, the authors compared whiptail lizards' (Cnemidophorus inornatus) ability to learn and reverse a discrimination using either position (left or right) or visual feature cues. Lizards learned and reversed the task using position cues faster and with greater accuracy than using feature cues.     

Politics, operant conditioning, Galileo, and the American Psychological Association's response to Rind et al. (1998)

The controversy surrounding B. Rind, P. Tromovitch, and R. Bauserman (1998) provides valuable lessons into scientific independence, politics, and organizational decision making. In an unprecedented action, the U.S. Congress officially condemned findings of Rind et al. Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association took similarly unprecedented measures in an effort to assuage its Congressional critics. This article, written from the perspective of a psychologist serving in Congress, discusses the various political and organizational dynamics that developed during the controversy. Understanding and learning from this incident can help psychologists and their professional associations better prepare for and respond to potential controversies arising from research or other publications.