A brief scoring method for voice stress analysis

The Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE) detects inaudible frequency changes in the human voice, and it is claimed that the pattern of these changes can provide a measure of psychophysiological arousal. A few studies have given some support to this hypothesis, but further clarifica tion is needed. One major technical problem in this research is that the traditional scoring esyStem is unreliable unless considerable numbers of scores are taken and averaged , The paper presents a conveniently brief scoring system which has fair reliahility, and which correlates significantly with a measure of Critical Flicker Fusion Threshold.     

AN ANALYSIS OF SOME VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REPRIMANDS

Although several studies have shown that social reprimands can function as punishers, no study reported to date has isolated any of the factors influencing reprimand efficacy. Three experiments were conducted to investigate several factors. Experiment 1 used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on two elementary school boys, one of whom was in a special education class. Results showed that verbal reprimands delivered with eye contact and firm grasp of the student's shoulders reduced disruptive behavior to a greater extent than did verbal reprimands delivered without eye contact and grasp. Both types of reprimand were more effective than a baseline condition during which disruptive behavior was ignored. Experiment 2 also used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on one elementary school boy. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered from one meter away were considerably more effective than reprimands delivered from seven meters away. Experiment 3 used a reversal design and was conducted on two pairs of elementary school children, one a pair of boys and the other a pair of girls. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered to just one member of the pair reduced the disruptive behavior of both members of the pair. Thus, the effects of reprimands “spilled” over to nonreprimanded students.     

Detection of auditory signals occurring at random times: Intensity and duration

Observers attempted to detect a weak auditory signal presented in noise. The onset of the signal was determined by a Poisson process, and only responses occurring 1 sec after signal onset were considered detections. Three latency distributions were measured, the time to a signal onset, the reaction time distribution, and the false-alarm distribution (of responses occurring before a signal onset). A simple two-state model is proposed to account for a discrepancy between the distribution of signal waits and the distribution of false alarms. The hazard functions of the reaction time distributions are considered in detail and a simple accumulation model is proposed to account for the results.     

Enhancement of recall using multiple environmental contexts during learning

Distributing the presentation of sublists of words into multiple learning rooms produced better free recall scores than a single learning room condition for subjects who were given a comprehensive recall test in a new environment. No such effects occurred on recognition or list differentiation tests in Experiment 2, implying a retrieval explanation rather than one relying upon learning or list differentiation effects. Experiment 3 found that the contextual dependence of recall li.e., recall tested in a learning context is better than recall tested in a new context was nullified by using multiple learning rooms, rather than a single room for input. The data are consistent with an explanation that states that the multiple learning rooms become associated with the different sublists during learning and subsequently act as memory landmarks that guide the course of retrieval.     

The effect of subject's race and other's race on judgments of causality for success and failure

This study examined the proposition that blacks and whites make dispositional attributions for an in-group's positive behaviors and an out-group's negative behaviors. The study also examined whether this positive in-group bias was caused by dislike of the out-group or belief in a stereotype. Thus, blacks and whites made attributions to black and white others who succeeded or failed on tasks for which there was either no stereotype or a more negative stereotype of whites than of blacks. An out-group other's failure on both tasks was attributed to lack of ability more than was an in-group other's failure. This finding suggests that the in-group bias is caused by dislike of the out-group. Furthermore, in success conditions subjects' attributions to the in-group or out-group other did not differ. It was suggested that these attributions may result from a combination of an in-group bias and a polarized appraisal.     

Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study

English and Italian provide some interesting contrasts that are relevant to a controversial problem in psycholinguistics: the boundary between grammatical and extra-grammatical knowledge in sentence processing. Although both are SVO word order languages without case inflections to indicate basic grammatical relations, Italian permits far more variation in word order for pragmatic purposes. Hence Italians must rely more than English listeners on factors other than word order. In this experiment, Italian and English adults were asked to interpret 81 simple sentences varying word order, animacy contrasts between the two nouns, topicalization and contrastive stress. Italians relied primarily on semantic strategies while the English listeners relied on word order—including a tendency to interpret the second noun as subject in non-canonical word orders (corresponding to word order variations in informal English production). Italians also made greater use of topic and stress information. Finally, Italians were much slower and less consistent in the application of word order strategies even for reversible NVN sentences where there was no conflict between order and semantics. This suggests that Italian is ‘less’ of an SVO language than English. Semantic strategies apparently stand at the ‘core’ of Italian to the same extent that word order stands at the ‘core’ of English. It is suggested that these results pose problems for claims about a ‘universal’ separation between semantics and syntax, and for theories that postulate a ‘universal’ priority of one type of information over another. Results are discussed in the light of the competition model, a functionalist approach to grammar that accounts in a principled way for probabilistic outcomes and differential ‘weights’ among competing and converging sources of information in sentence processing.     

The effects of instructional variables on young children's organization and free recall

The relationship between verbal instruction and children's free recall was examined. Sixty first-grade children (mean age 84 months) were trained to categorize pictures of common objects. Half were given organizational instructions emphasizing categorization, and half were given instructions emphasizing the individual objects. Similarly, half were given detailed verbal instructions and encouraged to listen, and half were taught using a question type format that encouraged participation. Immediately and after a 2- to 3-week delay, children who were shown an organizational strategy categorized the materials during study and attained higher recall scores than children who were shown a specific strategy. After the 2- to 3-week delay, children in the explanation groups out-performed children in the question-asking groups. The child's competence as measured by intelligence and performance in school did not contribute to amount recalled when subjects were given instructions emphasizing the general strategy. However, children of high competence benefited more from specific training by recalling more items than did children of low competence. These findings point to the importance of instructional variables in studying changes in children's processing capabilities.