Predicted and Recommended Behavior of a Woman as a Function of Her Inferred Helplessness in the Dowry and Wife-Beating Predicaments

Two experiments, using hypothetical situations, examined predictions and recommendations regarding a woman's behavior in the dowry and wife-beating predicaments as a function of her perceived helplessness. The dowry experiment described the situation of a stimulus person who has to decide whether to marry a boy under the dowry condition and had a 2 (subject's sex) × 2 (stimulus person's attractiveness) × 2(stimulus person's age) × 3 (stimulus person's socioeconomic status) factorial design, with estimated likelihood of marrying and recommendation to marry as the two dependent measures. The wife-beating experiment described the situation of a battered stimulus person who has to decide whether to leave her violent husband and had a 2 (subject's sex) × 2 (stimulus person's economic independence) × 2 (stimulus person's having children) × 3 (stimulus person's socioeconomic status) factorial design, with estimated likelihood of leaving the husband and recommendation to leave the husband as the two dependent measures. The subjects of the two experiments were undergraduate or graduate students of Bombay University, with 15 subjects per cell in the dowry experiment and 13 subjects per cell in the wife-beating experiment. Female subjects gave a stronger recommendation against marrying under the dowry condition and in favor of leaving the husband than did male subjects. The economically independent women was perceived as more likely to leave the husband than the dependent woman. Results of the wife-beating experiment suggested greater social constraints, under some conditions, on the middle class woman as compared to upper and lower class women in India.     

An on-line assessment of causal reasoning during comprehension

Fletcher and Bloom (1988) have argued that as readers read narratives, clause by clause, they repeatedly focus their attention on the last preceding clause that contains antecedents but no consequences in the text. This strategy allows them to discover a causal path linking the text's opening to its final outcome while minimizing the number of times long-term memory must be searched for missing antecedents or consequences. In order to test this hypothesis, we examined the reading times of 25 subjects for each clause of eight simple narrative texts. The results show that: (1) causal links between clauses that co-occur in short-term memory (as predicted by the strategy) increase the time required to read the second clause; (2) potential causal links between clauses that never co-occur in short-term memory (again as predicted by the strategy) have no effect on reading time; and (3) reinstatement searches are initiated at the end of sentences that are causally unrelated to the contents of short-term memory or that contain clauses that satisfy goals no longer in short-term memory. These results support the claim that subjects engage in a form of causal reasoning when they read simple narrative texts.     

INCREASING COMPLEX SOCIAL BEHAVIORS IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM: EFFECTS OF PEER-IMPLEMENTED PIVOTAL RESPONSE TRAINING

Two children with autism were taught to engage in a variety of complex social behaviors using peer-implemented pivotal response training (PRT), a set of procedures designed to increase motivation and promote generalization. Typical peers were taught to implement PRT strategies by modeling, role playing, and didactic instruction. After training, peers implemented the procedures in the absence of direct supervision in a classroom environment. After the intervention, both children with autism maintained prolonged interactions with the peer, initiated play and conversations, and increased engagement in language and joint attention behaviors. In addition, teachers reported positive changes in social behavior, with the largest increases in peer-preferred social behavior. Further, these effects showed generality and maintenance. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Wishes, Motives, Goals, and Personal Memories: Relations of Measures of Human Motivation

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to compare measures of explicit and implicit motives. One hundred and one participants completed six measures of motivation, including Thematic Apperceptive stories, autobiographical memories, three wishes, personal striving lists, the Personality Research Form, and self-ratings. Stories, memories, wishes, and strivings were content-analyzed using Winter's (1989) system. Although overall correlations did emerge among explicit measures within the same motive, there were numerous correlations among methodologically similar measures of different motives. In general, explicit measures did not correlate with thematic measures of the same motives. Although correlations among measures were similar for men and women, explicit measures of power converged with thematic measures of power only for men. Exploratory factor analysis identified three factors: explicit achievement, explicit affiliation, and power. Implicit achievement motivation loaded negatively on the affiliation factor. Implications for research on implicit and self-attributed motivation are discussed.     

Uncertainty in estimating distances from memory

Magnitude estimations involving spatial characteristics, such as distance, typically show a compressive function when estimates are made from memory. In particular, as the magnitude of a property grows larger and larger, estimates become more and more inaccurate, with increasing underestimates of the actual magnitude. Previous theories have attempted to explain this difference by supposing that magnitude estimation was accomplished through a reperceptual process, in which the errors of perception are magnified, or a transformation process, in which the memory trace undergoes a consistent alteration toward a more schematic form. The present experiments present evidence in support of an uncertainty hypothesis. When subjects are uncertain of the actual value of a distance, they are forced to guess on the basis of the mean distance they encountered, because they are unable to retrieve the information accurately. When they can retrieve the information, they are more certain and their estimates are more accurate. This hypothesis was also extended to integrative conditions in which the subjects were presented with the stimulus display in a piecemeal fashion. In these cases, distance estimates were derived by combining spatial representations. This method of presentation caused distance estimates to become less accurate.     

Why is 9+7 harder than 2+3? Strength and interference as explanations of the problem-size effect

In four experiments, the problem-size effect was investigated, using an alphabet-arithmetic task in which subjects verified such problems as A + 2 = C. Problem size was manipulated by varying the magnitude of the digit addend (e.g., A + 2, A + 3, and A + 4). The frequency and similarity of problems was also manipulated to determine the contribution of strength and interference, respectively. Experiment 1 manipulated frequency at low levels of practice and found that strength could account for the problem-size effect. Experiment 2 manipulated frequency at higher levels of practice, and found that strength alone could not account for the problem-size effect at asymptote. Experiment 3 manipulated frequency and similarity and found a substantial problem-size effect at asymptote, suggesting that both strength and interference contribute to the problem-size effect. Experiment 4 manipulated similarity, keeping frequency constant, and found no problem-size effect at asymptote, suggesting that interference alone is not responsible for the problem-size effect. The results are related to findings with number arithmetic.     

Subgroups of autistic children based on social behavior display distinct patterns of brain activity

Two questions were addressed in the present study: (1) Do autistic and normally developing children exhibit regionally specific differences in electroencephalographic (EEG) activity? (2) Do subgroups of autistic children classified according to Wing and Gould's (1979) system which emphasizes degree of social impairment exhibit distinct patterns of EEG activity? Twenty-eight children with autism (5 to 18 years of age) and two groups of normally developing children (one matched on chronological age and the other on receptive language level) participated. EEG was recorded from left and right frontal, temporal, and parietal regions during an alert baseline condition. Compared to normally developing children, autistic children exhibited reduced EEG power in the frontal and temporal regions, but not in the parietal region. Differences were more prominent in the left than the right hemisphere. Furthermore, subgroups of autistic children based on Wing and Gould's system displayed distinct patterns of brain activity. Compared to autistic children classified as “active-but-odd,” “passive” autistic children displayed reduced alpha EEG power in the frontal region.     

Biased attention in childhood Anxiety disorders: A preliminary study

This study provides preliminary tests of two hypotheses: (1) Anxiety-disordered children show an attentional bias toward emotionally threatening stimuli, and (2) normal controls show an attentional bias away from emotionally threatening stimuli. Twelve children, 9 to 14 years of age, with primary diagnoses of anxiety disorder were compared with 12 normal controls matched for age, gender, vocabulary level, and reading ability. Subjects completed a reaction time task that measured visual attention toward threatening versus neutral words. The anxious group showed the predicted attentional bias toward threat words. However, controls did not show the predicted bias away from threat words. These results are the first showing that biased attentional processing occurs among clinically anxious children. The potential role of such an attentional bias in childhood anxiety disorders and future direction for research are discussed.This research was supported by a Seed Grant and a Small Grant to the first author from The Ohio State University. Portions of this paper were presented at the 27th Annual Convention of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Atlanta, November 1993. Thanks are extended to the participants and all those who helped with the project.     

“mother is not holding competely respect”: Making social sense of schizophrenic writing

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and “an intersubjective world, common to us all” (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This “role-taking success” identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of “role-taking failure” (Rosenberg, 1992). The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .... Capital letters and all letters are employed without any apparent rules, the former even in the middle of a word. (Bleuler, 1950: 159) What we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it. (Ricoeur, 1971: 557) Why do we need an art of guessing? Why do we have to “construe” the meaning? Not only — as I tried to say a few years ago — because language is metaphorical and because the double meaning of metaphorical language requires an art of deciphering which tends to unfold the several layers of meaning.... [But also] because [a text] is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. (Ricoeur, 1971: 548)