Evaluation of a fortuitously reward other

Under the guise of an experiment on gambling decisions, subjects briefly met a confederate of the experimenter, whom they later evaluated. The major hypothesis was that the confederate would be evaluated more favorably by subjects who were told that she had received a fortuitous reward than by control subjects. The hypothesis was confirmed for female subjects only.     

Central integration effects with stabilized afterimages

Prolonged patterned afterimages were used to study integration effects in stabilized images. Seven Ss were presented with various configurations of a pattern through a prism stereoscope, both monocularly and binocularly. Some of the fragmentations and regenerations reported in the binocular condition could only have resulted as a function of organization of the inputs to the two eyes, suggesting that postretinal processes are operative in stabilized image phenomena.     

Word identification in reading proceeds from spelling to sound to meaning

Van Orden (1987) reported that false positive errors in a categorization task are elevated for homophonic foils (e.g., HARE for A PART OF THE HUMAN BODY). Two new experiments replicate this finding and extend it to nonword homophone foils (e.g., SUTE FOR AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING). False positive errors to nonword homophone foils substantially exceed false positive errors to nonhomophonic nonword spelling controls, showing that the phonological characteristics of the nonword foils are critical. Because nonwords are not represented in the lexicon, this new result implicates computed phonological codes as a source of the categorization errors. Additionally, in each of two experiments, matched word and nonword homophones produced virtually identical error rates. If stimulus nonword homophones are viewed as extremely unfamiliar words, compared with the relatively familiar stimulus word homophones, then our failure to observe an effect of stimulus familiarity strengthens the case that phonological coding plays a role in the identification of all printed words. The fact that the results are obtained in a categorization task that requires reading for meaning (rather than a lexical decision task) makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that phonological mediation plays a role in normal reading of text for meaning.     

Developing behavior analysis at the state level

Over the past fifteen years, behavior analysts in Florida have worked together to develop the discipline with a multifaceted system of contingencies. Basing their effort in the area of retardation and with the cooperation of the state's Developmental Services Program Office, they have gradually developed a regulatory manual of programming policy and procedures, a hierarchical system of responsibilities for programming approval and monitoring, a state-sponsored certification program, a professional association, and an active university community. These components are described and discussed in terms of suggested principles for developing the field of behavior analysis within a state.     

Levels of adult alcohol consumption induced by interactions with child confederates exhibiting normal versus externalizing behaviors

Investigated levels of distress and alcohol consumption in Ss interacting with problematic vs non-problematic child confederates. Social drinkers were randomly assigned to interact with boys trained to enact behaviors characteristic of either normal or attention-deficit disorder/conduct disorder (ADD/CD) children. Mood data were collected before and after the interaction. Ss engaged in ad lib beer consumption for 20 min, while anticipating another interaction with the same boy. Children in the ADD/CD role produced comparably distressed moods for both male and female Ss. However, only men drank to higher blood-alcohol levels in the ADD/CD vs. normal child condition. Results suggest that higher rates of drinking observed in fathers of ADD/CD children may be partly a function of their particular response to the distress associated with interactions with such children.     

CORRECTION DES VERBALISATIONS IRRATIONNELLES CHEZ DES JOUEURS DE POKER-VIDEO*

Earlier studies have shown that irrational thinking dominates rational thinking during gambling. The present study evaluated the effects of cognitive restructuring on gambling behaviors among video poker players. Within a single case experimental design across subjects, the results showed that irrational verbalizations decreased during treatment while rational verbalizations increased. Three out of four players reduced their frequency of gambling following treatment. The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.     

Syntactic complexity does not necessarily make sentences harder to understand

Researchers studying language comprehension have assumed that, all else being equal, more complex sentence constructions will take longer to process. However, results from experiments, such as the one presented in this paper, which use reading rates as the dependent measure suggest that it is the interaction of specific types of deep structure representations with their surface structure forms that accounts for fluctuations in readers' on-line processing of various sentence types. In particular, those sentences in which the deep structure direct object immediately precedes the verb in the surface structure sequence are easier for comprehenders to process. These data support a dual, parallel processing model of sentence comprehension in which lexical and morphological/relational information are processed independently.Johns Hopkins University.     

What is diagnosis? Some critical reflections

It is argued that the common definition of diagnosis as ‘the determination of the nature of a disease’ is misleading. Many diagnoses are not the names of disease entities. This finding reflects the integral relation of the diagnostic task to the rest of clinical reasoning. Diagnosis has no separate goal of its own, in particular it does not have the goal of determining the nature of a disease. Instead, diagnosis contributes to the general goals of clinical medicine. Any attempt to model diagnostic reasoning abstracted from the rest of clinical reasoning will yield an inadequate representation of diagnosis. Such a distortion of medical reasoning will blind us to whatever implications an adequate epistemology of medicine may have for an understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical knowledge in other contexts.     

Sex differences in children's group embedded figures test performance

Despite the fact that sex differences in field dependence/independence have been a fairly constant feature in studies employing adults, doubt surrounds the status of similar sex differences in childhood. Several attempts have been made to explain these findings, the most popular being that group Embedded Figures Tests do not tap sex differences. A simpler explanation is that large enough Ns have not been employed in past research to allow the small sex difference present in childhood to emerge as a statistically significant phenomenon. This explanation is supported by the results of the present study which employed 1200 children and was able to demonstrate a significant sex difference at both 8 and 11 yr using the Children's Group Embedded Figures Test.