Startbox-goalbox confinement durations as determinants of self-punitive behavior

Two levels of confinement duration (5 or 60 sec) in either startbox or goalbox were factorially combined with presence or absence of shock during extinction of a runway escape response in a self-punitive paradigm under a spaced-trials procedure. All groups were equated for amount and temporal spacing of handling before and after each trial. Shocked rats were more resistant to extinction than nonshocked rats only when startbox confinement was short. When startbox confinement was long, shock facilitated extinction. Long goalbox confinement enhanced running speed for shocked rats, but only in the presence of shock. It was suggested that duration of startbox confinement affects strength of conditioned fear, with long confinement leading to its extinction.     

Wilhelm Dilthey: Forerunner of humanist social thought

Humanist social thought is as a meadow in the forest of positivist science. Much of this space was cleared by Wilhelm Dilthey, not only through his attack on the fundamental assumptions of positivism, but also through his formulation of a critical method by which the works of free human consciousness could be understood. The first tenet of positivism is that the world is made up of ‘out there’ objectively knowable ‘facts’. Dilthey undercut this notion by asserting that the subject matter of the human studies was not mere facts of nature, but rather objectified expressions of the human mind. The second central assumption of positivism is that these facts are explainable or determined by general causal laws. In contrast, Dilthey asserted that, while we can explain the natural world, human action must be understood through an interpretive rather than a causal logic. In demonstrating and specifically describing such an interpretive procedure, Dilthey provided an epistemological and methodological grounding fur a humanistic science of the person and of the social world. His ideas illuminate the works even of his critics and his influence, though largely unacknowledged, continues to be widespread in all the human studies.     

Alcohol-induced changes in contrast sensitivity following high-intensity light exposure

Relatively low doses of alcohol produced large, significant, dose-related increases in the time required to recover foveal contrast sensitivity following bright light exposure. Nine subjects participated in a double-blind experiment involving three dose levels of alcohol (including placebo). The luminance parameters of the test were comparable to those encountered in practical situations such as driving. The alcohol-induced delay in glare recovery is probably retinal and lasts for several hours after drinking.     

Perceptual comparisons of adolescent stutterers' and nonstutterers' fluent speech

Numerous investigators have reported that listeners are able to perceptually differentiate adult stutterers' and nonstutterers' fluent speech productions. However, findings from similar studies with children ranging in age from 3 to 9 yr have indicated that perceptual discrimination of child stutterers is difficult. A logical extension of this line of investigation would be to determine when during maturation from childhood to adulthood stutterers' fluent speech becomes perceptibly different than nonstutterers'. Therefore, in this study similar fluent speech samples from seven 12–16-yr-old adolescent male stutterers and seven matched nonstutterers were analyzed perceptually in a paired stimulus paradigm by 15 sophisticated listeners. Individual subject analyses using signal detection theory revealed that five of the seven stutterers were discriminated. When averaged for subject group comparison, these findings indicated that listeners successfully discriminated between the fluent speech of the two groups. Therefore, the perceptual difference in fluent speech production reported previously for adults appears to be present by adolescence.     

Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification