Sniffy,the virtual rat: Simulated operant conditioning

We report on the use of our Sniffy program to teach operant conditioning to 900 introductory psychology students. The simulation is designed primarily to teach the principles of shaping and partial reinforcement in an operant chamber. Advanced features are provided for exploring modeling issues and the learning parameters of the model. Students observe the rat’s pretraining behaviors, shape barpressing, and explore the effects of partial reinforcement schedules on a cumulative record. Any of 30 actions can be trained to occur in specific locations in the Skinner box. This paper summarizes details about the software, interface, and instructional objectives.     

Expectations regarding acquaintance sexual aggression among sorority and fraternity members

Among women, college is a high risk period for sexual assault by male acquaintances. Differences in expectations held by men and women may contribute to misinterpretation of social cues and subsequent sexual aggression and may impair women's ability to respond effectively. This paper presents findings from a predominantly Caucasian sample (85.9%) of college sorority (n = 66) and fraternity (n = 34) members regarding the social context within which they interact and their expectations regarding perpetration of and response to sexual aggression. Results showed differences in men's and women's expectations and responses, and in particular highlighted how men's expectations were related to women's resistance of unwanted sex. Understanding the cognitive processes that men and women draw upon in social interactions can be useful for developing sexual aggression prevention and resistance interventions.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting, March 1995, San Diego. The authors would like to thank Robert D. Abbott, Kelly Cue, and Virginia Senechal for their input on earlier versions of this paper.This project was jointly supported by the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, School of Social Work, and Addictive Behaviors Research Center. It was also supported in part by grants from NIAAA (AA05591 and AA07271) and NIMH (MH53702).     

The morphological asymmetry of the hemispheres and cerebral dominance for speech: A possible relationship

The asymmetry of the posterior Sylvian branches of the middle cerebral artery was examined on the carotid angiograms of 59 patients in whom the lateralization of speech representation was known from sodium amobarbital (Amytal) studies. The usual asymmetry of these vessels was found to be present in the group of patients with left-hemisphere speech representation but significantly reduced in patients with atypical cerebral dominance for speech. A model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance is extended to take account of these results.     

A reexamination of sex differences in job preferences

Previous research has found conflicting answers to the question of whether males and females share similar preferences for various job characteristics. It is difficult to determine if the different findings are due to the different populations sampled, the various methodologies employed, or to a real change in the phenomenon itself. This study essentially replicates earlier work by having 130 male and 84 female college students rate the importance of 10 job characteristics for both themselves and members of the opposite sex. Both sexes rated motivators as important, but females also placed importance on the hygienes. Males tended to underestimate the importance of the motivators for females, while females overestimated the importance of hygienes for males. The subject's sex could be predicted by both the importance for self and importance for opposite sex ratings, contrary to the earlier study. The difference in results and interpretation was shown to be due to the type of analyses used. Additionally, it was found that females' job preferences were related to their mothers' educational achievement.     

Causal attributions of high and low achievement motivation college students for performance on examinations

College students high and low in test anxiety attributed their performance on each of four examinations in a course to ability, test difficulty, preparation, and luck. Individuals high and low in test anxiety typically evidence systematic predispositions to account for their achievement-related behavior in different terms. The present research substantially replicated these earlier (laboratory and Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale) findings in an actual achievement setting. In addition, however, the present findings differed from the earlier evidence in some important respects. Specifically, (a) high test-anxiety students' attributions for failure were far less self-deprecating than in the laboratory evidence, and (b) high test-anxiety students' attributions (for both success and failure) became more personally flattering, or comforting, as the semester progressed. Results were discussed in terms of the laboratory — field distinction and of the influence of a temporal, or time of measurement, factor, hitherto ignored in the causal attribution literature.This research was facilitated by a grant from the Research Council of the Graduate School, University of Missouri-Columbia, and the National Institute of Mental Health (1 R08 31910), both to the first author.