When does responsiveness pique sexual interest? Attachment and sexual desire in initial acquaintanceships

Three studies examined the contribution of attachment orientation and perceived partner responsiveness to sexual desire in initial acquaintanceships. In all studies, participants discussed a recent negative event with an unfamiliar, opposite-sex partner and then rated how responsive this partner had been during the interaction and their desire to have sex with him or her. Study 1 examined the association between perceived partner responsiveness and sexual desire in randomly paired strangers. Studies 2 and 3 experimentally manipulated partner responsiveness by standardized Instant Messages (Study 2) and a confederate's responsive or unresponsive reactions during face-to-face interviews (Study 3). Results indicated that perceiving a partner as responsive was associated with heightened interest in sex with this partner, primarily among less avoidant people. These results are consistent with research showing that secure individuals see sex as a means of becoming close to relationship partners, whereas avoidant individuals tend to approach sex in distancing ways.     

Competitive Fighting between Mice with Different Hereditary Backgrounds

It was hypothesized that Piaget's argument on behalf of the reorganization of cognitive processes would gain empirical support from a color/form, matching similar objects problem for 52 (29 boys, 23 girls) 6-year-olds from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. The instrument had 32 frames, each of which had three red or blue objects, some of regular and some of irregular shape. After color or form dominance for each child was established, frames were presented in which the dominant dimension could be chosen only through cognitive reorganization. Indications of cognitive reorganization for form-processing children included switching to color choices when all three objects were of identical shape, taking significantly (p < .05) greater time to make a choice for irregularly shaped objects, and having judges find indications of the use of parts of irregularly shaped objects for matches in verbal explanations by each child.     

When insecurity dampens desire: Attachment anxiety in men amplifies the decline in sexual desire during the early years of romantic relationships

Sexual desire is typically high during early relationship stages and decreases gradually over time. In the present research, we adopted an attachment-theoretical perspective to investigate why sexual desire for romantic partners erodes more rapidly for some people than others. We employed two samples of developing relationships (dating couples, N = 62; and newlyweds, N = 175) and examined the effects of attachment insecurities on sexual desire in prospective longitudinal designs. Results showed that attachment anxiety moderated the trajectory of men's sexual desire, such that over time, highly anxious men declined in desiring their partner, whereas less anxious men's desire did not drop. Attachment avoidance also predicted lower levels of initial desire in both sexes. These findings suggest that avoidance generally interferes with relationship initiation for both sexes, whereas anxiety in men interferes with the maintenance of desire over time, possibly because of sensitivity to increasing interdependence.     

Weight of evidence supports one operation for "ratios" and "differences" of heaviness

This paper investigates an apparent contradiction between recent studies of "ratios" and "differences" of heaviness. Birnbaum and Veit (1974) found a single rank order for judgments in the two tasks, whereas Rule, Curtis, and Mullin (1981), who used a different stimulus set, procedure, and experimental design, reported two orders. To investigate the cause of this discrepancy, the present study manipulated the experimental design using the same stimuli and procedure as Rule et al. (1981). In one experiment (within-subject designs), each subject judged all combinations of the standard and comparison stimulus; in the other experiment (between-subjects designs) each subject received only one standard, and different groups of subjects were given different standards. "Ratios" and "differences" of heaviness were monotonically related for the majority of subjects who judged all combinations of standards and comparisons. Variations in the modulus and response examples did not affect the rank order of "ratios" within subjects. These results suggest that the contradiction in results is due to the difference in experimental design rather than differences in stimuli or procedure. In the between-subjects designs, the rank order of the "ratio" judgments depended on the standards and examples. Both previous and present results are consistent with the theory that subjects use one operation, subtraction, for both tasks and that the judgment function varies with between-subjects manipulations of the standard, examples, and modulus.     

Psychological reality of cross-media artistic styles

The sensitivity of artistically naive people to cross-media styles (baroque, neoclassic, and romantic) and to period styles (works composed by artists born during the same epoch) in four media (painting, poetry, music, and architecture) was assessed. In two studies, adult subjects tended spontaneously to sort stimuli according to both cross-media styles and period styles. In a third study, nursery school children were shown to be able to sort pictures of paintings and architectural facades on the basis of cross-media styles. Other experiments using rating scales again demonstrated that artistically naive adults are sensitive to both cross-media styles and period styles even when they are not implicitly urged to disregard medium. These and other studies using rating scales suggested that the bases for discrimination of both cross-media styles and period styles are the dimensions of realistic versus unrealistic and of overall arousal potential.     

Neuroscience and psychopharmacology into the next millennium

The end of the millennium provides an opportunity to review some of the common practices that were present in psychopharmacology during the 20th century. The author focuses on two approaches that have dominated research and guided the clinical application of psychopharmacologic therapeutics: the unitary clinically-based and single-lesion perspectives. The author expands upon these older formulations of neuropsychiatric disease pathogenesis and describes how the approach to psychopharmacologic research and therapeutics has changed in light of advances in the basic neurosciences. Relevant recent advances in the basic neurosciences that shed light on the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disease states and that guide psychopharmacologic practices are described. The use of atypical antipsychotic agents to treat schizophrenia is given as one example of the clinical applications of the approach to psychopharmacology in the next century.     

Nonmetric tests of ratio vs. subtractive theories of stimulus comparison

Theories of stimulus comparison were tested by examining ordinal properties of data obtained with six scaling tasks. Subjects judged simple “ratios” or “differences” of stimulus pairs constructed from a factorial design. In four additional tasks, the same judges also compared relations between pairs of stimulus pairs, judging “ratios of ratios,” “ratios of differences,” “differences of ratios,” and “differences of differences.” The data were consistent with a subtractive theory, which asserts that two stimuli are compared by subtraction, regardless of the task, but that judges can compare two stimulus differences by either a ratio or a difference. All six tasks could be related by the subtractive theory using a single set of scale values. Other simple theories, including the theory that “ratio” judgments can be represented by a ratio model, could not reproduce the six rank orders (of the six sets of data) using a single set of scale values.