Smoking onset in adolescence: a person-centered analysis with time-varying predictors.

Predictions from smoking-specific versus contextual models of smoking onset were tested with data from a 4-wave sample with 1,364 adolescents. Predictor variables were derived from stress-coping theory, social influence theory, and problem-behavior theory. In addition to groups of abstainers and experimenters, cluster analysis of smoking data indicated 3 groups who showed onset either in 7th grade (early onset), 9th grade (intermediate onset), or 10th grade (late onset). Almost all study variables discriminated the smoking groups from the abstainers. The onset groups were discriminated by Group X Time interactions showing differential changes in predictors (increases in risk factors and declines in protective factors), which occurred just prior to onset. The results generally support a contextual model of the onset process.     

Recalling more childhood events leads to judgments of poorer memory: Implications for the recovered/false memory debate

Dissociative disorders that are believed to develop from childhood sexual abuse are often considered to include amnesia for childhood events, particularly the events that involve the abuse itself. One unresolved issue is the extent to which memory recovery attempts can contribute to claims of having amnestic symptoms. Experiments with undergraduate subjects reveal that requiring more reports of childhood events will increase judgments of having poorer memory of one’s childhood. The results are consistent with the use of heuristics when one is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, as experienced difficulty in remembering more experiences is attributed to the incompleteness of childhood memory. The findings challenge the validity of reports of childhood amnesia that follow memory recovery attempts.     

Aggressive Responding in the Laboratory Maintained by the Initiation of a Provocation-Free Interval

The Psychological Record - Four adults participated in an experiment designed to study how the duration of an interval free from provocation, following aggressive responding, affected the...     

The Effects of Censorship on Attitude Change: The Influence of Censor and Communication Characteristics1

The effects of censor characteristics and audiences' initial agreement with a censored communication on attitude change and desire to hear a communication were investigated. Subjects were informed that a communication taking a position with which they had originally agreed or disagreed had been censored. The censor was either an attractive or unattractive agent and his expertise on the topic of the speech was either high or low. The results indicated that in all cases except one, censorship led to an increased desire to hear the communication and attitude change toward the position of the communication. In the one exceptional case, when an attractive expert censor forbade a communication with which the audience disagreed, the subjects decreased their desire to hear the speech and did not change their attitudes on the topic of the communication. The results were interpreted as indicating that censorship arouses both reactance and balancing attempts but that balancing will be observed only in limited situations.     

Linguistic influences on visual memory

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis has raised considerable controversy in the literatures of psychology and anthropology. Several misconceptions of the hypothesis are reviewed, and the hypothesis was experimentally supported in a visual reproduction paradigm. Subjects were first given label training for a set of figures, and were then asked to recall by drawing the shapes. Training with categorized labels resulted in a 25% improvement in recall when compared to a condition with nonword (paralog) labels. Even stronger evidence of linguistic influence on visual memory was obtained by examining the order of recall. The conceptual relationships among labels strongly influenced the sequence of reproductions.