Changing Contraceptive Usage Intentions: A Test of the Fishbein Model of Intention1

The Fishbein model of intention suggests that intention may change as a consequence of change in either a related attitudinal or normative component. This hypothesis was tested on intention to use contraceptives. Users and nonusers of contraceptives were exposed to a message designed to change contraceptive-usage attitude, to a message directed toward changing the normative beliefs associated with using contraceptives, or to a no-message control. The messages advocated one of three contraceptive techniques: (a) males were advised to use condoms, (b) males were advised to rely on their partner's use of oral contraceptives, or (c) females were advised to use oral contraceptives. Contraceptive-usage intention changed only in the two conditions where the model's requirements for change were present. Thus, the pattern of change agreed with Fishbein's suggestions and provided moderate support for the intention model and its application to intention change in health care settings.     

Finding lung nodules with and without comparative visual scanning

The effect of a pretarget (TS1) masked by a noise mask (MS) upon the recognition of a posttarget (TS2) was examined in a TS1-MS-TS2 paradigm. The results clearly showed that the presentation of TS1 masked completely by MS reduced the recognition of a subsequent TS2 to a much greater extent if TS2 was the same as TS1 than when it was not. The results suggest that a TS1 that is perceptually masked by an MS nevertheless continues to have an effect within the visual system. A possible explanation of this reductive effect is described briefly.     

Written language acquisition after left or right hemidecortication in infancy

When written language is acquired in only one hemisphere because of hemidecortication in infancy, the left hemisphere is superior to the right at using morphophonemic rules to read and spell unfamiliar words, and at exploiting the structure of sentence units to achieve rapid reading of meaning in prose. The ability to learn names for logographs, however, is better in the right hemisphere than in the left. The greater mastery of written language in the left hemisphere is a result, not of an enhanced facility for making cross-modal associations between sounds and signs, but of a superior access to the morphophonemic rule system and the higher-order textual constraints of English.     

The Peabody Individual Achievement Test

The relationship of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) to the California Achievement Tests (CAT) and to the Wechsler Intelligence measures was assessed on adolescent psychiatric inpatients. Correlations among all three tests were high, but differentially so with advancing levels of the CAT. Further, age and grade estimates derived from the PIA T more closely approximated the youngster's actual age and grade placement than did those derived from the CAT.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding III: Distinctive features for vowels

To determine the processing of vowel sounds in short-term memory for a serial recall task, 100 Ss heard either a short string of isolated vowel sounds, or a string in which each of these same sounds was embedded between the consonants “h” and “d”. In contrast to findings by Wickelgren, neither an articulatory or an acoustic distinctive-feature analysis predicted the pattern of intrusion errors found. The overall recall of the different sounds was predicted by the ease with which they could be labelled for rehearsal. However, ease of labelling would not explain the pattern of intrusion errors, nor would any other analysis tried. These results are consistent with a coding model presented by Liberman et al (J967). Surprisingly, the patterns of intrusion errors were very similar whether the sounds were presented alone or embedded in words. The implications of these findings for distinctive feature theory and the encoding process are discussed.     

A different look at perceptual defense for taboo words

Hober has concluded from previous work that meaningfulness, frequency, and related stimulus variables directly affect the clarity of letters of words. To examine whether the letters of taboo words would be harder to see, 12 taboo words were matched in length to 12 very frequent and 12 very rare neutral words. Each word was shown an unpredictable number of times. Three groups of 8 Ss each were required, respectively, either to name the letters they saw on each flash, name the letters and then guess the word, or guess the word only. While no differences were found among the three groups, the clarity of the letters of the frequent words exceeded that for the rare words, which in tum was higher than that of the taboo words. This difference was apparent on even the first flash, supporting the interpretation of a perceptual defense effect.     

Recipients' affective responses to affirmative action interventions: A cross-cultural perspective

This study investigated whether individualism-collectivism (cultural) differences would account for the observed relationship between ethnic group status and affective responses to and fairness perceptions of affirmative action interventions. Forty-nine international (Latin America and East Asia), 116 minority, and 106 majority participants from a major southwestern university and its community provided fairness and affective response ratings to an affirmative action scenario. Implementation policy and qualification of the recipient were also manipulated. Though ethnicity was related to individualism-collectivism, the latter did not explain any variance in affective response ratings. Minority and international participants reported more positive affect and higher agreement and fairness levels than did majority participants. Participants in the preferential treatment and equally qualified conditions had more favorable responses than those in the reverse-discrimination and less qualified conditions.     

The role of symmetry in determining perceived centers within shapes

This study was designed to assess the effects of symmetry and plane of presentation on the determination of the perceptual center of flat figures. Experiment 1 demonstrates the existence of effects in improving center determination, both in the number of sides of the shape and in rotational and reflective symmetry (confounded in the experiment). Experiment 2 shows that the presentation plane has no effect on center determination. In Experiment 3, we divide the effects of the two symmetry types, showing that rotational symmetry alone is as effective as the presence of both symmetry types—that is, the presence of symmetry axes is not very useful in finding perceived centers.