Humor and coping with stress: A test under real-life conditions

The relationship between humor and coping with stress was investigated for trainees in a course for combat NCOs in the Israel Defense Forces. Measures of humor through self-report and peer-ratings were administered to 159 soldiers. Coping with stress was assessed through ratings by commanders and peers, and through final course grades. The findings showed that humor as rated by peers (but not by self-report) was positively related to performance under stress. This was especially true for active humor (self-produced as opposed to reactive humor). No differences were found between individuals characterized by self-directed humor and other-directed humor in performance under stress. The implications in terms of humor theories and further research are discussed.     

The American Psychological Association's response to Brown v. Board of Education. The case of Kenneth B. Clark

In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) that was the foundation of school segregation in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Brown is arguably the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century in terms of its influence on American history. Moreover, it has a special significance for psychology because it marked the first time that psychological research was cited in a Supreme Court decision and because social science data were seen as paramount in the Court's decision to end school segregation. This article describes psychologist Kenneth B. Clark's role in that case and the response of the American Psychological Association to scientific psychology's moment in a great spotlight.     

Waxing and waning in concert: dynamic comorbidity of conduct disorder with other disruptive and emotional problems over 7 years among clinic-referred boys

Six waves of structured diagnostic assessments were conducted of 168 clinic-referred 7- to 12-year-olds, over 7 years. Wave-to-wave changes in the number of conduct disorder (CD) behaviors were paralleled by correlated changes in the numbers of symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. In addition, CD in Wave 1 predicted levels of ODD, ADHD, depression, and anxiety in later waves when initial levels of those symptoms were controlled, but only ODD in Wave 1 predicted CD in later waves when initial CD levels were controlled. These findings indicate a striking degree of dynamic comorbidity between CD and other types of psychopathology and provide an initial empirical framework for needed developmental models of comorbidity.     

Children's emotional reactivity to interadult nonverbal conflict expressions

The authors investigated children's responses to nonverbal expressions of conflict. Reactions of 3 groups of children (ranging in age from 6 to 16 years) to multiple forms of nonverbal conflict behaviors expressed in videotaped simulations of interadult disputes were examined. Results indicated that children make few discriminations between different forms of nonverbal conflict behaviors and that their reactions to nonverbal conflict are similar to their reactions to verbal conflict. Adults' expressions of fear elicited the most negative emotional responses from children, suggesting that children react to the meaning of conflict expressions and that expressions of fear may represent the greatest emotional security risks to children. Implications of these results for a theoretical model of the effects of forms of marital conflict on children are discussed (P. T. Davies & E. M. Cummings, 1994).     

Causal conditional reasoning and semantic memory retrieval: a test of the semantic memory framework

This study tested and refined a framework that proposes a mechanism for retrieving alternative causes and disabling conditions (Cummins, 1995) during reasoning. Experiment 1 examined the relation between different factors affecting retrieval. The test revealed high correlations between the number of possible alternative causes or disabling conditions and their strength of association and plausibility. Experiment 2 explored the hypothesis that due to a more extended search process, conditional inferences would last longer when many alternative causes or disabling conditions were available. Affirmation of the consequent (AC) and modus ponens (MP) latencies showed the hypothesized pattern. Denial of the antecedent (DA) and modus tollens (MT) inferences did not show latency effects. The experiment also identified an effect of the number of disabling conditions on AC and DA acceptance. Experiment 3 measured efficiency of disabler retrieval by a limited time, disabler generation task. As predicted, better disabler retrieval was related to lower acceptance of the MP and MT inferences.     

A neural correlate of consciousness related to repression

In previous research Libet (1966) discovered that a critical time period for neural activation is necessary in order for a stimulus to become conscious. This necessary time period varies from subject to subject. In this current study, six subjects for whom the time for neural activation of consciousness had been previously determined were administered a battery of psychological tests on the basis of which ratings were made of degree of repressiveness. As hypothesized, repressive subjects had a longer critical time period for neural activation of consciousness, suggesting the possibility that this neurophysiological time factor is a necessary condition for the development of repression.     

Dissociating familiarity from recollection in human recognition memory: Different rates of forgetting over short retention intervals

Two functionally distinct forms of recognition memory have been identified in human and nonhuman species—the ability to recollect qualitative information about previous events, and the ability to differentiate between familiar and novel stimuli. Separate dual-process theories have been developed in the animal and human literatures to account for these findings. However, it is not clear whether these theories describe the same two underlying memory processes. On the basis of animal studies of medial temporal lobe function, familiarity is expected to exhibit disproportionately fast forgetting compared with recollection over short retention intervals. We tested this prediction in healthy human subjects by examining recognition forgetting rates across a range of 8–32 intervening items and found significant forgetting in the accuracy of familiarity-based discriminations and no evidence of forgetting in the accuracy of recollection-based discriminations. In agreement with the results from nonhuman species, the present results indicate that item familiarity decreases more rapidly than recollection over short retention intervals.