Learned liking versus inborn delight: can sweetness give sensual pleasure or is it just motivating?

In this study, we separated for the first time the learned liking for a particular level of sweetness in a familiar drink from the infantile delight in sweetness as such ("the sweeter, the better"). It is widely assumed that sensing a liked food or drink evokes a pleasurable experience, but the only psychological evidence for this assumption has been tongue movements that are elicited specifically by sweet taste in animals and human neonates. We found that adults felt such movements in response to drinking juice at both their personally preferred level of sweetness and levels they deemed so sweet as to be undrinkable. Yet only the intolerably strong level of sweetness elicited enjoyment of the experienced movements, elevation of mood, and a sense of smiling. Hence, the pleasure that adults experience during ingestion could be exclusively linked with the congenital sweetness reflex that sends mother's milk down an infant's throat.     

The cause of infant categorization?

We asked whether infants are sensitive to causal relations between objects and outcomes and whether this sensitivity supports categorization. Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants were familiarized with objects from a novel category. For some, the objects caused an electronic toy to activate. For others, the objects were present during activation of the toy, but did not cause the event. For the remaining infants, the events were never activated. Infants were asked to select another category member from a pair of previously unseen objects (one from the familiar, and one from a novel, category). Infants were more likely to select the category match in the causal than the non-causal and no outcome conditions, suggesting that they capitalize on causal information in forming object categories.     

'She Herself was the Ultimate Rule': Arabic biographies of missionary teachers and their pupils

Arabic biographies of missionary teachers and their pupils found in magazines published in Cairo and Beirut voice an indigenous perspective on missionary activity by educated women and men. The feelings of the missionaries' target population reveal a tension between local histories and foreign incursions as well as between female domesticity and professional aspirations. This larger imperial discourse informed worldwide missionary agendas for women at the turn of the twentieth century; however, the individual biographies cited within the paper demonstrate the personal interaction and effects on both foreign missionary and local women within their specific context through insightful Arab sources.     

Counselling in general practice: Clients' perceptions of significant events and outcome

An investigation of clients' perceptions of the change process and outcome of counselling in primary care is presented. Significant events were identified by 51 clients post-session for a mean of 4.7 counselling sessions. Outcome was assessed by clients, through their perceptions of goal attainment and change in quality of life from pre-to post-counselling. Four-hundred-and-nine events were categorized by use of the Therapeutic Impact Content Analysis System (TICAS) and a content analysis system was created to categorize clients' goals. Results showed that ‘reassurance’, ‘problem solution ’, ‘insight’ and ‘involvement’ impacts were reported most frequently by clients. No category of significant events was related to change in quality of life. For 11 clients who set goals in the ‘expression’ category, more ‘reassurance’ and fewer ‘problem solution’ impacts were related to attainment of ‘expression’. Some suggestions are made for the lack of significant relationships with overall measures of outcome and it was suggested that more qualitative analysis of the process of outcome is needed.     

Book reviews

BLACKMAN, D. Operant Conditioning: An Experimental Analysis of Behaviour. London: Methuen. 1974. Pp. 248. £3.20.

Bower, G. H. (Ed.). the Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory. Vol. 7. Academic Press: New York. 1973. Pp. 370. £.15.

Lehrman, D.S., Hinde, R. A. and Shaw, E. (Ed.). Advances in The Study of Behavior. Vol. 4. Academic Press: New York. 1972. Pp. 217. £4.70.

MARK, R. Memory and Nerve Cell Connections. Oxford University Press. 1974. Pp. 156. E2.95.

HABER, R. N. and HERSHENSON, M. The Psychology of Visual Perception. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1973. Pp. 398.

ESSMAN, W. B. and NAKAJIMA, S. (Eds.). Current Biochemical Approaches to Learning and Memory. New York: Spectrum/Wiley. 1973. Pp. ix+205. £8.40.

GIBBS, M. E. and MARK, R. F. Inhibition of Memory Formation. New York and London: Plenum. 1973. Pp. x + 554. $29.00.

ZIPPEL, H. P. (Ed.). Memory and Transfer of Information. New York and London: Plenum. 1973. Pp. xxiv+582. $33.50.     

Fathers: The invisible parent

Viewing the family as a system of interdependent roles has frequently led to the assumption that fathers, in comparison with mothers, play highly restricted roles vis-à-vis their children. Much of the literature on fathers, in point of fact, stresses their absence, their disinterest, and lack of competence in child care. Reported here are findings from a sample of 231 families which suggest that this conception of fatherhood does an injustice to the empirical case. The evidence indicates that when the amount of time available to spend with children is considered, the father's involvement with his children is equal to that of the mother's. Under certain conditions, in fact, father-child involvement exceeds the child-related activities performed by mothers.     

Proneness to psychosis and selection of objects of visual attention: individual differences in visual marking

Deficits in early visual attention and perceptual organisation have frequently been shown to associate with both poor pre-morbid schizophrenia and those at a greater putative risk of psychosis. The nature of the deficit is unclear. The present study investigated the relationship between speed of visual marking and proneness to psychosis. 20 males and 20 females completed several tasks assessing speed of selection and de-selection of visual objects. As predicted, negative schizotypy was associated with poorer marking in males, but socially desirable responding potentially confounded this result. In addition, impulsive non-conformity swas associated with poorer visual marking, more prominently in females. These results are discussed in relation to possible mechanisms by which psychosis-proneness and impulsivity may restrict the top–down influences operating on early visual attention.     

Development of Lexical and Sentence Level Context Effects for Dominant and Subordinate Word Meanings of Homonyms

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided into three reading skill groups based on an independent measure of single word oral reading accuracy. There were three main developmental and reading skill findings. First, 9-year-olds and low skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in accuracy. Second, 9- and 10-year-olds or low and moderate skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in reaction time. Third, 12-year-olds or high skill readers showed sentence level facilitation in reaction time with high skill readers additionally showing sentence level inhibition in reaction time. These results show that lexical level context effects decreased and that sentence level context effects increased with development and skill. These results are discussed in terms of connectionist models of visual word recognition that incorporate distributed attractor principles.