The effect of social comparison information on learned helpless and mastery-oriented children in achievement settings

The present study investigates the effect of social comparison information on learned helpless and mastery-oriented children's attributions, behaviour, and affect following a failure experience. Ninety-one fifth grade children experienced failure in the context of high consensus or group failure feedback, low consensus or personal failure feedback or no social comparison feedback. The Jindings point to the robustness of the helpless and mastery response patterns: the behaviour of learned helpless children, as compared to mastery-oriented children, deteriorated following failure regardless of the social comparison feedback they recieved. However, the attributions made by the two groups of children differed. Mastery-oriented children appeared to use social comparison information more accurately in that they appropriately made higher task difficulty ratings when receiving group failure feedback than when receiving personal failure feedback. Learned helpless children were more likely to use a self-derogatory bias and made attributions to their low ability, even when presented with social comparison feedback that was contrary to their bias. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for education and for intervention with learned helpless childrens.     

Mental-task instructions and optokinetic nystagmus to the left and right

The frequency of elicited optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) in both directions was studied in subjects instructed to perform mental tasks thought to be asociated primarily with either the right or left hemisphere or a combination of both. A negative relationship between OKN frequency and right-hemisphere activity was more strongly confirmed than the alternative hypotheses that OKN frequency would be negatively related to the total amount of inner processing or to the amount of visualization required by a task. A significantly higher frequency of OKN was elicited (in nonmyopic subjects) when the stripes were moving in the direction contralateral to the hemisphere presumably involved in the instructed mental task. Subjects showing higher rates of right lateral eye shift (in an interview situation) made greater adjustments in OKN frequency according to the nature of the mental task.     

Type A behavior pattern, inhibited power motivation, and activity inhibition

The constructs of the Type A behavior pattern and the Inhibited Power Motive Syndrome (IPMS) have many features in common. The empirical relation between the two constructs was investigated in this study with 45 employed, male medical and surgical patients. Four different measures of the Type A pattern were examined. Results showed that, of the four measures, the Structured Interview and the Hostility Scale were related significantly to the IPMS. Systolic blood pressure reactivity was also related significantly to the IPMS. These relations could be ascribed largely to activity inhibition alone. The contribution of activity inhibition to an understanding of the biological and psychological substrates of the Type A behavior pattern is discussed.     

Feature distribution and background knowledge in category learning

Three experiments examined the interactions of category structure and prior knowledge in category learning.Experiment 1 examined the distribution of atypical or 'crossover' features in category learning. In real categories, crossover features may be unevenly distributed found primarily in very unusual examples of a category (like whales or ostriches). In contrast, in many psychology experiments, each item has exactly one crossover feature. Even versus uneven distribution of crossover features did not affect category learning when the features were neutral. However, when the features were connected by prior knowledge, it was much harder for subjects to learn the structure with the uneven distribution of crossover features. Experiments 2 and 3 found similar results with a slightly less uneven condition. We conclude that learning is a function of the interaction of category structure and prior knowledge rather than either one alone. Furthermore, knowledge benefits learning even when the category contains contradictions of the knowledge, so long as the contradictions are not very salient.     

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.