Malleability of social impressions of hyperactive children

The role of adults' social cognitions in mediating judgments of hyperactive children's medicationrelated behavior change was explored. Two hundred eightyeight undergraduates observed two videotaped excerpts of a hyperactive target boy playing a group game with two peers. Each target was taking either methylphenidate (0.6 mg/kg) during both excerpts, placebo during both excerpts, methylphenidate first followed by placebo, or placebo first followed by methylphenidate. Adults' cumulative social evaluations of the child were assessed after they viewed both video segments. Results indicated that observers combined their perceptions of the two behavior samples into composite impressions using an equalweight averaging algorithm. Even for children whose behavior improved, adults' ratings of undercontrolled behaviors continued to meet or, in some cases exceed, research cutoff scores used to identify hyperactive children. The findings suggest that the actual behaviors of children with attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) play a more influential role in shaping interpersonal impressions than do perceiver socialcognitive processes such as primacy, recency, or integration biases.This project was supported in part by a UC Regents' Dissertation fellowship to Douglas A. Granger while at the University of California at Irvine. We acknowledge Tom Crawford and Karen Rook for their helpful comments at formative stages of this project, and support from the UCLA Fernald Child Study Center and Program in Psychoneuroimmunology. We thank behavior observers Leslie Klein, Jeanne Tsai, and Dawn Rowland, and data managers Pam Ajang and Scott Gutentag. A preliminary report of this study was presented at the 1991 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, WA.     

Eliminating the IQ-RT correlation by eliminating an experimental confound

Three experiments investigated the relation between visual scanning demands, reaction time (RT), and psychometrically defined intelligence (IQ). Prior studies have shown reliable correlations between RT and IQ in the range of −.20 to −.80. However, these studies have confounded the number of possible stimuli (stimulus uncertainty) with the size of the area in which the stimuli may appear (visual angle). Experiment 1 replicated these studies retaining this confound. As the number of stimuli increased from one to eight, the visual angle was permitted to increase as well (from 0° to 30°). The results showed that RT varied in accord with Hick's (1952) law, and a median correlation between IQ and six RT parameters (subjects' mean RTs and standard deviations at three levels of stimulus uncertainty) of −.47 was observed. Experiment 2 removed the confound, varying only stimulus uncertainty, and the median IQ-RT correlation declined to −.02. Experiment 3 held stimulus uncertainty constant at 1 bit (two stimuli) and varied visual angle; a median correlation of −.19 was observed. It was concluded that many of the previously reported correlations may not have hinged on speed of information processing alone, but at least in part on subjects' abilities to scan the display across which the stimuli appeared.     

JUST WHAT ARE SEX AND GENDER, ANYWAY?

Abstract— The terms sex and gender have come to be used as synonyms in the social sciences literature. However, nothing has been gained by the use of the term gender except confusion. This article identifies five meanings for which social scientists often use the terms sex or gender and proposes a distinct term for each of those five meanings. The terms proposed are (1) sex: to refer to the biological function; (2) biologically sex-linked: to refer to traits or conditions that are causally biologically related to being male or female; (3) gender-linked: to refer to traits or conditions that are causally linked with maleness or femaleness but are culturally based as opposed to biologically based; (4) sex- and gender-linked: to refer to traits or conditions that are causally related to both a biological component and a cultural component; and (5) sex-correlated: to refer to traits or conditions that are related to being male or female without asserting a causal relation to either biology or culture (because we do not wish to make such an assertion or cannot do so confidently). It is hoped that adopting a terminological standard will reduce the confusion resulting from nonspecific language use.     

The need to expand the horizons of the practical aspects of memory movement

The Practical Aspects of Memory movement began as a forum for applied memory research and as and acid test for basic memory theory. Contrary to initial expectations, the movement has attracted far fewer applied researchers and, instead, has primarily drawn researchers concerned with the ecological validity of basic research. The purpose of this special issue is to demonstrate to practical memory researchers the rewards of giving more consideration to applied memory research in government, industry, education, and consulting. This article explains that the Practical Aspects of Memory movement needs to give more consideration to applied research that does not emanate from basic theory, because such research may identify phenomena that basic research should investigate. It is argued here that an examination of the potential contributions of applied memory research will facilitate communication among basic, ecological, and applied researchers, thereby strengthening the movement's ability to contribute to the solution of societal problems.     

Setting events controlling social verbal exchanges between students with developmental delays

The peer social verbal exchanges (social conversational units) between four developmentally delayed students were studied as a function of setting events. A single conversational unit consisted of a verbal exchange in which each individual functioned as both speaker and listener. Each unit included a three term verbal contingency. Data were collected by trained observers viewing videotapes of 20-minute sessions in which running times were burned onto the videotape. Frequencies of social conversational units were measured under two conditions. Comparisons were made between sessions in which the teacher responded only when spoken to and sessions in which the teacher was absent using a combined reversal and multiple schedule design. Results showed that peer conversational units emerged at high rates when the teacher was absent and at low or nonexistent rates when the teacher responded only when spoken to in the living room setting. The setting and audience control for peer verbal exchanges were discussed as functions possibly of either a punishing audience, establishing operations, or response deprivation.     

The Influence of Contextual Factors on Afro-American and Euro-American Children's Performance: Effects of Movement Opportunity and Music

The present study sought to further establish that contextual factors informed by certain postulated cultural experiences could influence performance on a learning task. Towards this end, low income Afro-American and Euro-American children learned to pair pictures in an acquisition context that allowed for them to coordinate movement with music (High Movement Expressive [HME]) and in an acquisition context which allowed for little movement opportunity and no music (Low Movement Expressive [LME]). Children were subsequently tested for picture pair retention in a context where music was present or in a context where music was absent. The findings revealed that Afro-American children's tested performance was superior with the HME acquisition context, while Euro-American children's performance was superior with the LME context. In addition, music present at testing context seemed to have an independent enhancing effect only on Afro-American children's performance. The cultural and educational implications of these findings are discussed as are recommendations for future research.     

Effect of imagery ability on letter-level and word-level processing

In a letter-identification task, subjects matched a probe letter to the initial letter of a subsequently presented probe word. We varied word frequency and predicted that the performance of vivid imagers would resemble that of typical young adults, whereas the performance of poor imagers would fall in between that of typical young adults and of older adults, or would simply resemble the performance of typical older adults (a linear decrease in reaction time [RT] with word frequency; see Allen & Madden, 1989). The in-between function for young and older adults combined predicts a dip in RT for very-high-frequency words compared to medium-high-, low-, and very-low-frequency words. As predicted, vivid imagers exhibited increased latencies for medium-high-frequency words relative to the other three word-frequency categories, whereas poor imagers exhibited a dip.     

Dissociative effects in different prime domains

These experiments were performed to examine the effects of different types of primes across variations in prime set size, prime strength, and prior study in verification and lexical decision tasks. The primes consisted of taxonomic category names, associates, or rhymes that defined either small or large sets of related concepts, and they were either strongly or weakly related to their targets. Targets either were or were not studied prior to the priming task. The results indicated that, for taxonomic primes, shorter decision latencies were obtained when set size was smaller and when the target was studied before the priming task. In contrast, for rhymes, neither set size nor prior study had reliable effects. For all three types of primes, decision latencies were faster for stronger than for weaker prime-to-target relationships. These findings are contrasted with the results of manipulating these variables in episodic tasks such as cued recall, and they are interpreted in the context of a components-of-processing approach.     

Paired comparison,triple comparison,and ranking experiments as generalized linear models,and their implementation on GLIM

A wide variety of paired comparison, triple comparison, and ranking experiments may be viewed as generalized linear models. These include paired comparison models based on both the Bradley-Terry and Thurstone-Mosteller approaches, as well as extensions of these models that allow for ties, order of presentation effects, and the presence of covariates. Moreover, the triple comparison model of Pendergrass and Bradley, as well as models for complete rankings of more than three items, can also be represented as generalized linear models. All such models can be easily fit by maximum likelihood, using the widely available GLIM computer package. Additionally, GLIM enables the computation of likelihood ratio statistics for testing many hypotheses of interest. Examples are presented that cover a variety of cases, along with their implementation on GLIM.