Pursuing and distancing: the construct and its measurement

Although the concept of interpersonal pursuing and distancing has been introduced and used clinically, the lack of a reliable and valid measure has deterred its more formal investigation and relevance to personality theory. The Pursuing-Distancing (P-D) Scale, a 92-item measure of the behavioral expression of these characteristics, was developed. Evidence for internal consistency as well as internal support of construct validity is presented and discussed. An 80-item revised scale is available from the authors and is currently being evaluated in a variety of external validation settings.     

Response to two presentations of the Sentence Completion Test of ego development

This was a study of the differences among individuals on their performance on oral and written versions of the Washington University Sentence Completion Test of ego development. The study included 192 subjects from three age groups: College age, community residents, and retired people. No oral versus written differences were found in scores. Gender was the only factor to exhibit a consistently significant effect on Sentence Completion Test score differences.     

Effect of alcoholic intoxication on the appreciation of different types of humor

Male subjects were placed into one of three intoxication conditions (no ethanol, low dose, high dose) and were exposed to humorous segments from television programs. During manifest intoxication or the corresponding period in the no-intoxication control condition, they were exposed, in a balanced order, to a segment containing blunt (i.e., unsophisticated, raw) humor and to a segment containing subtle (i.e., sophisticated, refined) humor. Subjects' facial reactions to the humorous stimuli were unobtrusively recorded and later analyzed by judges who were naive about the experimental conditions. Subjects also rated the funniness of the segments. The perceived funniness of blunt humor was found to increase with ethanol intoxication. For subtle humor, in contrast, perceived funniness was found to decrease with intoxication. This divergent interaction of reported humor appreciation was less apparent in the analysis of facial expressiveness. Although correlations between ratings and aspects of facial expression were generally positive, clearly corroborative support for the humor appraisals was found only in the frequency of smiles in response to subtle humor.     

Mechanisms used by young children in the making of empathic judgments

Forty-four preschool children ranging from three to five years of age received a series of stones in which the protagonists experience happiness, sadness, or fear These protagonists were portrayed as either similar or dissimilar to the child, and the situations depicted were either familiar or unfamiliar to him/her as well The children's task was to infer the emotions experienced by the protagonists Results indicate that children were more accurate in judging the emotions of similar target persons than they were for dissimilar ones Familiarity with the situation, on the other hand, had no effect on accuracy Children were more accurate in identifying happiness and sadness than they were in judging fear, and age was positively related to judgmental accuracy for the former two but not for the latter These results help to resolve the controversy arising from earlier studies of empathy development which failed to disentangle the similarity and familiarity dimensions     

Memory deficits and memory surfeits: differential cognitive consequences of tokenism for tokens and observers

Historically, women and minority group members have been underrepresented in the professions and in better paying, high-status jobs. Even when they have been admitted to such positions, these underrepresented persons often have been the only member of their social category: a token. Previous field and laboratory research has shown that "tokens" attract disproportionate attention and are either evaluated unfairly or evaluated on the basis of their normal reactions to differential treatment by majority group members. We tested the possibilities of whether tokens might suffer more cognitive deficits than would nontokens, and whether they do so even when they are treated no differently. College students were led to believe that they were sharing their views on everyday topics with three other students (actually videotaped confederates), who were either all of the student's own sex or all of the opposite sex. In a later memory test, token participants remembered fewer of the opinions that they and the three other students had expressed than did nontokens. Observers, in contrast, remembered more of what token subjects said than what the three other students said. Theoretical and public policy implications are discussed.     

A note on accepting the null hypothesis: problems with respect to the mass-spring and pulse-step models of movement control

Models are sometimes developed on the premise that there are no differences between two or more conditions regardless of experimental manipulation. This article argues that unless a very sensitive experiment (or series of experiments) was conducted, such conclusions are often premature. Design and statistical factors such as alpha level, variability, sample size, and treatment effect are all determinants of the sensitivity of the experiment. It is sometimes the case that an experiment produces differences between means and yet the null hypothesis is not rejected because of high variability within experimental conditions or because too few subjects were used. Unless the probability of detecting a difference between groups is known, it would seem unwise to conclude that no difference exists. Judgment on the model should be suspended. Examples are taken from the mass-spring and pulse-step models fro voluntary movement control to illustrate the problem.