The semantic congruity effect: Some tests of the expectancy hypothesis

Subjects comparing items in memory along some dimension are usually quicker to specify the lesser (than the greater) of two low magnitude items and the greater (than the lesser) of two high magnitude ones. One account explains this congruity effect as due to subjects instructed to specify the higher as expecting high magnitude items to follow and the reverse being true for subjects specifying the lesser. Three experiments tested this expectancy hypothesis. In experiment 1, subjects were set to the actual size range of each pair before the pair was shown but the congruity effect still occurred. In experiments 2 and 3, subjects compared critical pairs from a narrow size range plus more from either the same or much broader ranges. Times to compare the critical pairs were the same regardless of the range of the other pairs that subjects were exposed to. These results are strong evidence against the expectancy hypothesis.     

Personality and Daily Experience: The Promise and the Challenge

This special issue of the Journal of Personality is devoted to personality and daily experience. Through historical analysis of the daily event literature, empirical inquiry, and methodological and statistical commentary, the contributors to this issue convey both the possibilities and the problems of studying everyday life. These articles demonstrate how people's dispositions, goals, and commitments can influence daily emotional well-being and health, their inner experience, their reactions to events, and perhaps even which events they encounter. The introduction of personality to the study of daily experience holds the promise of enriching our studies of both.     

Values interpretation: A new model for hospital ministry

The importance of values in clinical settings is a topic of increasing discussion in the medical literature, but the nature of values and the process of interpreting them have received little attention. The hospital chaplain or religious professional is an underused resource in addressing values issues. This paper summarizes the current models of the hospital chaplaincy in historical context, and then develops a new model drawn from the disciplines of pastoral care and clinical medical ethics in order to address problems involving values in clinical settings. The model construes the chaplain as values interpreter who provides both consultation and liaison functions in clinical situations. We present a clinical case to illustrate the role of the values interpreter. We conclude that the religious professional can make an important contribution to both clinical decision making and medical education through such a model.The authors thank Don S. Browning, Ph.D., and Thomas H. Jobe, M.D., for their critical readings of earlier versions of this paper.     

Mysticism and psychedelics: The case of the dark night

This study uses a model of consciousness derived from LSD-assisted psychotherapy to illumine an enigmatic set of painful experiences that occur on the mystic's path known in Western circles as the dark night. It argues that the dark night experiences described in John of the Cross's classic workDark Night of the Soul can be conceptualized in terms of Stanislav Grofs category of perinatal experience. The discussion examines the implications of this reconceptualization in three areas: (1) our understanding and evaluation of mysticism, (2) assessing LSD's potential for fostering genuine spirituality, and (3) reassessing the ancient claim that the capacity to experience transcendental states of being is innate.     

A notorious affair called exportation

In Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes, Quine held (a) that the rule of exportation is always admissible, and (b) that there is a significant distinction between a believes-true (Ex)Fx and (Ex) a believes-true F of x. An argument of Hintikka's, also urged by Sleigh, persuaded him that these two intuitions are incompatible; and he consequently repudiated the rule of exportation. Hintikka and Kaplan propose to restrict exportation and quantifying in to favoured contexts — Hintikka to contexts where the believer knows who or what the person or thing in question is; Kaplan to contexts where the believer possesses a vivid name of the person or thing in question. The bulk of this paper is taken up with criticisms of these proposals. Its ultimate purpose, however, is to motivate an alternative approach, which imposes no restrictions on exportation or quantifying in, but repudiates Quine's other intuition: this is the approach taken in my A Logical Form for the Propositional Attitudes.This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation (Rockefeller University, 1977). I wish to thank Susan Haack for her help in turning a draft into the present version.     

Non-dominance,third person and non-action Newcomb problems,and metatickles

It is plausible that Newcomb problems in which causal maximizers and evidential maximizers would do different things would not be possible for ideal maximizers who are attentive to metatickles. An objection to Eells's first argument for this makes welcome a second. Against it I argue that even ideal evidential and causal maximizers would do different things in some non-dominance Newcomb problems; and that they would hope for different things in some third-person and non-action problems, which is relevant if a good theory of rational choices of acts should fit smoothly into a good theory of rational desires for facts.This paper elaborates on Section V of Sobel. forthcoming.     

Organizational and family systems factors in stress among ministers

Forty-one Protestant ministers completed measures of stress-related symptoms, family of origin contact, church governing body density, history of pastor-parish conflict in the church, and a measure of Bowen's (1959b/1985) concept of emotional triangles. A denominational executive provided ratings of each church's history of pastor-parish conflict. Path analysis using multiple regression showed support for a model in which governing body density and history of conflict predicted emotional triangles, and emotional triangles predicted stress symptoms. Contact with the pastor's family of origin moderated the relationship between emotional triangles and stress symptoms. Results suggest that the organizational and family ecology of the ministerial role can be important in understanding occupational stress among ministers.     

Attribution of control and teenage pregnancy

In rural Appalachia in Tennessee, data on 13 female adolescents who had experienced a pregnancy (mean age=16 years, 7 months) were compared with those on 38 female adolescents who had not experienced a pregnancy (mean age-16 years, 4 months) to test the hypothesis that teenagers who experience a pregnancy have external attributions of control over their life events. The Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale for Children was administered to determine their beliefs about causes of events in their lives. All the girls were white and matched for socioeconomic status, housing, and cultural background. The mean attribution of control to external agents score stood at 14.5 for girls who had experienced a pregnancy compared with 12.7 for those who had not experienced a pregnancy, but the difference was not significant (p=.08).54% of the cases exhibited external attributional orientation compared with 16% of the controls (p.02). This finding concurred with that of earlier studies. The fact that not all the girls who had experienced a pregnancy had external attributional orientation suggested that it is not the only factor linked to adolescent pregnancy. Studies have not identified whether external attributional orientation is a causal factor or consequence of adolescent pregnancy. A 1980 study found that women who had shown more external locus of control scores during pregnancy and tended to castigate themselves had a high probability of postpartum depression. Another study indicated that rises in depression among adolescents were linked to prechange orientations toward external attributions of control. Practitioners should selectively pay attention to teenagers who have extreme attributional orientations since many teenagers carry their pregnancies to term and choose to rear their infants. These orientations appear to pose risks for the adolescent mother and her children.     

The positioning of rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions and the use of self-referencing in print advertising

This research examines the use of questions in advertising through a content analysis of magazine print ads. Three variables are examined: question type (rhetorical vs. non-rhetorical), position (pre-argument vs. post-argument) and self-referencing (present vs. absent). Results reveal that rhetorical (non-rhetorical) questions tend to be used after (before) the arguments to which they refer. Further, self-referencing tends to be used with rhetorical questions in the post-argument position. The findings are discussed illustrating how theoretically-based empirical research can be used to guide decisions in ad practice, and how the practice of advertising can provide support for testable ideas in the conduct of future research.     

Fixation-point offsets reduce the latency of saccades to acoustic targets

If an observer’s fixation point is extinguished just prior to the onset of a peripheral target, the latency to saccade to that target is reduced. We show that this "gap effect" is not specific to visual targets. Observers made saccades to a light flash or to a white-noise burst. A warning tone was presented on every trial to control for the possible warning effect of the fixation-point offset. For both target modalities, saccade latencies were significantly reduced when the fixation point was extinguished 200 msec prior to the target onset. Implications of this outcome for interpretations of the gap effect are considered. It is argued that the presence of a gap effect for tones, in conjunction with previous findings, is consistent with the hypothesis that the gap effect is produced by a facilitation of premotor processes in the superior colliculus.