Marital conflict and adjustment: speech nonfluencies in intimate disclosure

Speech nonfluency in response to questions about the marital relationship was used to assess anxiety. Subjects were 31 husbands and 31 wives, all white, college educated, from middle- to lower-middle-class families, and ranging from 20 to 30 years of age. Three types of nonfluencies were coded: filled pauses, unfilled pauses, and repetitions. Speech-disturbance ratios were computed by dividing the sum of speech nonfluencies by the total words spoken. The results support the notion that some issues within marriage are more sensitive and/or problematic than others, and that, in an interview situation, gender interacts with question content in the production of nonfluencies.     

Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.     

The Effect of Job Level and Amount of Information on the Evaluation of Male and Female Job Applicants

The addition of job-related information regarding an applicant's leadership ability reduced bias against female applicants applying for a managerial position.     

Perceptual sensitivity to dimensional and similarity relations in free and rule-governed classifications

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in the stimulus classifications of younger and older subjects. In Experiment 1, 4- and 10-year-olds were given free classifications in which they could group stimuli according to overall similarity or identities in size, color, or orientation. Both age groups classified stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were given free classifications followed by rule-governed classifications which required them to group stimuli according to specific relations. In the free classifications, a majority of subjects in both age groups classified the stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In the rule-governed classifications, both age groups were more accurate when a single separate relation was required for solution than when overall similarity was required. These results support a differential-sensitivity view of perceptual development, which asserts that individuals at all ages primarily perceive and use separate relations.     

Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

Developmental changes in attentional skills: the effect of irrelevant variations on encoding and response selection

The present experiments examine how irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfere with performance in a selective attention task. Second graders, fifth graders, and adults were administered a discrete trial version of a selective attention task in which they were required to search for an object that matched the prime on the targeted dimension. The stimuli in the first experiment were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions whereas the second experiment used spatially separated dimensions. The results indicated that while the spatially separated dimensions were perceived independently by all age groups, developmental differences in perceived structure were evident with the spatially integrated dimensions. Problems associated with response selection were a major source of interference with both types of stimuli, but the severity of the interference varied with the age of the perceiver and the nature of the stimuli. The developmental implications of these findings were considered.     

The Systematic Measurement of French and Raven's Bases of Social Power in Workgroups

A typology of five bases of social power developed by French and Raven (1959) has been used to study small-group behavior in field settings by various researchers but interpretation of these data is limited by several methodological shortcomings. This study describes the development and testing of questionnaire measures for the Legitimate, Expert, Referent, Reward, and Coercive bases of social power and attempts to correct some of the scale format confounds that have affected previous empirical efforts. Analyses of Likert-scaled responses from the 23-item questionnaire show for the first time that these five constructs are factorially identifiable and orthogonal. Scale responses are shown to accurately reflect hierarchical status differences in an organization and to correlate significantly with such common leader behaviors as Initiation of Structure and Consideration.     

Differences Between Personal Estimates of Body Fatness and Measures of Body Fatness in 11- and 12-Year-Old Males and Females

This study was designed to assess the accuracy of perceived levels of body fatness as indicated by 11- and 12-year-old children. Using a rating scale ranging from 1 (extremely lean) through 9 (extremely overweight), 50 males and 50 females estimated personal levels of body fatness. Using a 2 × 2 between-and-within-groups ANOVA, these estimates were compared to individual skinfold sum percentile scores derived from comparisons with national skinfold norms. The results revealed that the females tended to overestimate personal levels of body fatness, whereas estimates given by the male subjects were interpreted as not significantly different from skinfold sum percentile scores.     

BEHAVIORAL MOMENTUM IN THE TREATMENT OF NONCOMPLIANCE

Behavioral momentum refers to the tendency for behavior to persist following a change in environmental conditions. The greater the rate of reinforcement, the greater the behavioral momentum. The intervention for noncompliance consisted of issuing a sequence of commands with which the subject was very likely to comply (i.e., high-probability commands) immediately prior to issuing a low-probability command. In each of five experiments, the high-probability command sequence resulted in a “momentum” of compliant responding that persisted when a low-probability request was issued. Results showed the antecedent high-probability command sequence increased compliance and decreased compliance latency and task duration. “Momentum-like” effects were shown to be distinct from experimenter attention and to depend on the contiguity between the high-probability command sequence and the low-probability command.     

Television Food Commericals' Effect on Children's Resistance to Temptation1

This study investigated the effect of television food commercials on children's self-control within a resistance to temptation paradigm. Commercial type, food stimulus type, and the child's sex provided the three independent variables in a 4 × 4 × 2 factorial design. Behavioral and self-report indices of temptation and control were measured. Children were significantly more tempted to transgress for the low-nutrition food, regardless of the commercial shown. Sex differences in reported degree of temptation were found. However, the television commercials did not affect the children's latency to transgress.