Recognition memory in older adults: adjustment to changing contingencies.

Four older and 4 younger men were given extended exposure to a continuous-recognition memory procedure. Experimental variables included the type of stimulus (alphanumeric strings, words, or sentences), the intervals separating repeated items, gains and losses for correct and incorrect recognitions, and the extent of practice with the memory task. Signal detection analyses indicated that the older men generally were less accurate (sensitivity), particularly when the stimuli were strings, but that age differences decreased with practice. Under conditions in which the payoff matrix was neutral, the older and younger men showed equivalent rates of hits and false alarms (bias). Alteration of the matrix to require more liberal or more conservative patterns of recognition responding led to corresponding changes for men of both ages. Adjustments by the older men, however, were not as close to the bias values called for by the new matrices.     

Social Costs of Smoking: Effects of Tobacco Smoke on Hostile Behavior1

Male and female undergraduates interacted with a same-sex experimenter and a same-sex assistant of the experimenter. Either the experimenter or the assistant smoked. Subjects were provoked or not provoked by the experimenter and then smoked. Subjects were provoked or not provided by the experimenter and then provided with an opportunity to treat him or her in a hostile manner. Additionally, subjects were classified as smokers or nonsmokers and as supporting or opposing smoking in public places. Tobacco smoke was found to facilitate hostile behavior whether or not subjects were independently annoyed and whether or not it originated from the annoyer or a bystander. No sex differences were observed in this effect. Also, no appreciable difference was observed in the hostile behavior of smokers and nonsmokers. Persons opposed to public smoking reacted more strongly to the provocation than persons supportive of public smoking, but this effect was independent of the presence or absence of smoke.     

The informativeness and frequency of presentation of a social stimulus as determinants of its efficacy as a reinforcer

It was demonstrated that variations in the informativeness of a social stimulus place important limitations on the generality of the proposition that deprivation heightens, while satiation lowers, responsiveness to a social stimulus. Using 60 children 5 to 6 years of age as subjects, a social stimulus (“good”) was presented at either a high or a low frequency in one of three information-value contexts (high, medium, or low). Immediately following the exposure treatment the same social stimulus was employed as a reinforcer of nonpreferred responses in a two-choice discrimination learning task. The findings indicated that the heightened efficacy of deprivation relative to satiation only held for low information value; when initial information value was high the subsequent efficacy of a social stimulus was enhanced by its initial recurrent usage. Trend analyses revealed that the effects of variations in information value were strongest within the high-frequency-of-praise treatment. Possible mechanisms underlying the significant Information Value × Frequency interaction were discussed.     

Aggression and Heat: The Mediating Role of Negative Affect1

Sixty-four undergraduate males received either very postive or very negative personal evaluations from an attitudinally similar or dissimilar stranger, and were then given an opportunity to aggress against this person by means of electric shock. Half were exposed to these stimuli under comfortably cool environmental conditions, while half were so treated under uncomfortably hot conditions. It was predicted that aggression toward the victim would increase as the degree of negative affect induced among subjects by the experimental conditions increased up to moderate levels, but that beyond this point, further increments in negative affect would actually tend to inhibit such behavior. A significant (p < .007) curvilinear relationship between negative affect and aggression supported these predictions, and suggested that such affect mediates the influence of high ambient temperatures on human aggression.     

Label training and auditory generalization

To investigate the Miller-Dollard hypothesis (Social learning and imitation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941) that verbal labels increase distinctiveness of cues, generalization gradients to pure tones were obtained before and after label training. One group was trained to label all seven tones in an array and another only the middle tone. Three additional groups controlled for nonverbal factors. Before training, gradients were characterized by progressive loss of stimulus control with exposure to the generalization test stimuli. The main effect of possession of labels was to retard this loss, but only in tests where S+ was a labeled stimulus. While the specificity of label effects was in line with the Miller-Dollard hypothesis, the finding that labels did not confer a clear advantage at the start of testing was not. It was suggested that the unlabeled stimuli may have been sufficiently distinct to mask label effects and that interference generated by the test stimuli reduced distinctiveness to levels needed for such effects to emerge.     

Distraction and social comparison as mediators of social facilitation effects

Sanders and Baron (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975, 32, 956–963) suggested that increases in drive produced by the presence of others (social facilitation) are due to the tendency for others to distract task performers as they worked on a task. This Distraction-Conflict theory proposes that socially mediated drive induction will occur whenever there is some reason to shift attention from the task to the social stimuli. In the case of humans, one such reason may be the opportunity to obtain social comparison information from an audience or coactors. The present research demonstrated that social facilitation effects (improved simple task performance and impaired complex task performance produced by the presence of others) occurred only when subjects were motivated to obtain comparison information (Experiment I) and when comparison information was available (Experiment II). The availability of comparison information also led to increased accuracy in estimating the coactor's performance. This indicated that in conditions manifesting social facilitation, subjects were spending some time monitoring the coactor's work, which is an inherently distracting activity. Several supplementary measures of distraction were generally consistent in indicating greater distraction under conditions manifesting social facilitation. The present results offer no support for the explanations of social facilitation suggested by Zajonc and by Cottrell.     

Aggression and heat: mediating effects of prior provocation and exposure to an aggressive model.

Sixty-four undergraduate males participated in an experiment designed to examine the effects of level of prior anger arousal, exposure to an aggressive model, and ambient temperature on physical aggression. On the basis of Bandura's social learning theory of aggression, it was predicted that uncomfortably hot environmental conditions would be most effective in facilitating later aggression when subjects had both witnessed the actions of the model and been exposed to strong provocation from the victim, but least effective in this regard when they had neither witnessed the actions of the model nor been exposed to prior instigation. In contrast to these predictions, results indicated that high ambient temperatures facilitated aggression by nonangered subjects but actually inhibited such behavior by those who had previously been provoked.