Disclosure of Personal Problems, Self-Esteem, and the Facilitativeness of Friends and Lovers

The relationship between disclosure of personal problems, self-esteem, and Rogers' facilitative qualities of unconditional acceptance, empathy, and congruence in a casual friend, the closest friend of the same and opposite sex, and the romantic partner, was investigated in 104 females and 19 males (pooled together). They completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, a shortened Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory, and a two-item index of disclosure of personal problems. Self-esteem was most strongly positively correlated with the facilitative qualities in the romantic partner, followed by the casual friend. Disclosure of personal problems was also positively related to these facilitative qualities. When the facilitativeness of the romantic relationship was controlled through partial correlation, the positive correlation between self-esteem and disclosure of personal problems was reduced to near zero, while that between self-esteem and the facilitativeness of the casual friend was little affected.     

Category effects in visual search: A failure to replicate the “oh-zero” phenomenon

In the experiment of Jonides and Gleitman (1972), subjects searched displays of digits or letters for single, specified digit or letter targets. The slope of the function relating reaction time to display size was positive (mean=25 msec/item) if target and nontargets belonged to the same alphanumeric category (within-category search), but zero if target and nontargets belonged to different categories (between-category search). This held even for the target O, whose categorical relationship to nontargets was determined entirely by the name it was given. In the present paper, two attempted replications are reported, one as close as practically possible. For the unambiguous targets A, Z, 2, and 4, slopes were greater in within-category search than in between-category search, but positive and very variable in both cases. For the ambiguous target O, slopes were identical in within-category and between-category search, and again positive. The results suggest that with single, specified targets, differences between within-category and between-category search may be due entirely to variation in the average physical resemblance between target and nontargets. In line with previous findings, they show that one cannot characterize within-category search as generally “serial” and between-category search as generally “parallel.”     

Effect of exteroceptive feedback in controlling electrodermal activity in pre-conditioned fears.

Ss with a strong fear of snakes were taught to increase and decrease their skin resistance during practice sessions with a continuous visual display. Ss were not aware that they were increasing or decreasing their levels of skin resistance and attempted only to influence the magnitude of the multimeter display, the polarity of which was controlled by the experimenter. The study used a within-subjects reversal design to investigate whether bidirectional control could be acquired over skin resistance level. To investigate whether this acquired control could affect the magnitude of elicited pre-conditioned autonomic responses, a pre- and post-training comparison was made between the GSRs elicited during test sessions in which Ss viewed slides of snakes while attempting to influence their electrodermal activity with the assistance of the visual display. The results suggest that Ss are able to acquire voluntarily bidirectional control of their level of skin resistance with continuous visual feedback and that this control can either depress or facilitate the magnitude of pre-conditioned emotional responses as a function of visual feedback.     

On signalling that it's your turn to speak

The operation of a “speaker-state signal” in two-person, face-to-face conversations is hypothesized. Display of this signal by an auditor appears to indicate, among other things, that he is claiming the speaking turn, differentiating this action from a “back-channel behavior” by which he merely acknowledges some portion of the speaker's message. The signal also appears to play a part in the resolution of situations in which both participants simultaneously claim the speaking turn. The signal is defined as the display of at least one of a set of four behavioral cues, two in paralanguage and two in body motion.     

The response ratio hypothesis for magnitude estimation

Assume that each presentation of a signal produces two independent random variable representations and that the ratio of responses on successive trials of a magnitude estimation experiment are proportional to the ratio of a representation from the present trial, which representation is then lost, to the remaining one from the previous trial. The mean response to a particular signal depends on the mean of the representation used, but in general exhibits drift over trials and sequential effects due to the preceeding trial; the mean response ratio does not exhibit drift, but it has a simple form only when there are no sequential effects; however, a modified mean ratio function has a simple form. A model suggested by D. V. Cross is a special case of this one. Simple timing and counting models for the representations fail to exhibit sequential effects, contrary to considerable data. However, data of the authors have suggested a version of the timing model in which the sample size of the representation varies by an order of magnitude depending on how close the signal is to the preceding one; this hypothesis accounts for the observed sequential effects and other aspects of the data.     

Transition structure versus commitment in sequential subjective probability revision

When Ss revise subjective probabilities, in the light of new evidence, a common finding is that they are conservative with respect to Bayes' theorem; revisions are too small. One kind of hypothesis to account for this is ‘model specific’, assuming a breakdown in an otherwise potentially Bayesian process. The other kind assumes that statistically irrelevant, task-specific information is processed. An example of the latter is the commitment hypothesis, assuming a commitment building up to the indications of early evidence, causing Ss to lag behind Bayes' theorem in their later judgements. Evidence is presented suggesting that Ss are not necessarily sensitive to mere sub-sets of a sequence, but that this form of suboptimality may result from overall sequence structure; specifically from a bias against long runs of like evidence. This would fit with findings from other areas of research, and would suggest that there is a general form of suboptimality operating which is relevant to all sequential processing tasks.     

Variants of basic black computer interfaces

An input interface for connecting psychological apparatus to a process-control computer is described. It permits connection ofresponse switches to eliminate contact bounce and to provide interrupts on ongoing transitions of any data bit.