Competition, cooperation, satisfaction, and the performance of complex tasks among air force cadets

Forty-eight U.S. Air Force Academy cadets were studied to examine the effects of individual attitudes and organizational reward structures on the performance of a complex, integrative task. An attitudinal survey was used to measure each subject’s preference for cooperative or competitive situations. Distinctly different group environments were created by giving four groups of six subjectscompetitive instructions and another four groupscooperative instructions. The performance criterion was the “sum” score across eight trials of a complex arcade-type computer game which required one subject to control horizontal movement and another to control vertical movement. Although neither attitude nor reward structure alone influenced performance, their interaction was found to be very significant; subjects performed poorly when the reward structure did not match their individual orientation. Implications for military and professional training programs are discussed.     

Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia

Three groups of aphasic patients, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's, and a nonaphasic patients control group were tested for comprehension of object-relative center-embedded sentences. The sentences were of three types: sentences in which semantic constraints between words allowed the subjects to assign a correct semantic reading of the sentence without decoding the syntax, sentences in which semantic constraints were relaxed and for which a correct reading was only possible with knowledge of syntactic relationships among words, and sentences which described highly improbable events. The subjects' task was to choose which of two pictures captured the meaning expressed in the sentence. Broca's and Conduction aphasics performed near perfectly on sentences where they could use semantic information. Their performance dropped to chance when they had to use syntactic information. These results support a neuropsychological dissociation of heuristic and algorithmic processes based primarily, though not exclusively, on semantic and syntactic information, respectively.     

Competitiveness in males and in females

Male and female undergraduates performed a task at which they either succeeded or failed in competition with either a male or female partner who subsequently either accepted or rejected them. Subjects who were rejected by a male partner following success or accepted following failure performed less well on a subsequent anagram task than did those who were accepted following success or rejected following failure. These results suggest the importance of situational factors as determinants of fear of success behavior.     

Phenomenal dominance relationship of substructures in binary pattern learning

The effect of run order in different substructures of a pattern on binary pattern learning is investigated. Thirty-six subjects learned binary patterns by the serial anticipation method. Run lengths and order of the runs in odd and even numbered positions respectively were systematically varied. Latency times of anticipation, prediction errors and number of presentations to a criterion indicated that the order of runs in odd numbered position has a greater effect on grasping the pattern than the order of runs in even numbered position. This effect is explained by the particular phenomenal dominance relationship of the two substructures.     

Shifts in the perceived location of a blurred edge increase with contrast

Perceived brightness is nonlinearly related to luminance. Consequently, any mechanism operating on the (transformed) luminance profile of a blurred edge to detect its location should make errors, and the magnitude of these errors should increase with contrast. The perceived location of a blurred edge was measured at a range of contrasts and a range of blur space constants in a vernier alignment task. It was found that the perceived location of a blurred edge was affected by the contrast and the blur space constant of the edge. At low contrasts, the apparent location of the blurred edge was near the calculated location of the edge, assuming the linear transduction of luminance. At higher contrasts, the perceived location of a blurred edge was shifted toward the dark side of the edge, and the shift increased with contrast.     

Functional localization in the brain with respect to syntactic processing

This report describes some recent examinations of the ability of aphasic patients to construct syntactically governed dependency relations in real time. The data show that Wernicke's patients can link the elements of dependency relations in the same way as neurologically intact subjects, even for sentences that they do not understand. Broca's patients, by contrast, are shown to be unable to create such links, even for sentences that they do understand. These data underline the isolability of this stage of syntactic analysis and they suggest that comprehension limitations statable in syntactic terms can be traced to changes in cortically localizable processing resources.     

Gender role masculinity and angry aggression in women

The extent to which gender role masculinity is related to degree of women's angry retaliation was investigated. The study also examined whether the relationship between gender role masculinity and anger is mediated by gender role differences in reactivity to provocation, or to differences in the labeling of anger. It was expected that the influence of gender role masculinity on affect and aggression would be greatest when the nature of the affective arousal is ambiguous. Sixty undergraduate women (predominantly upper middle class and white) were given a placebo pill. They were either given ambiguous information about the pill's effects, or were told it was a vitamin or a stimulant. They then were either provoked or not provoked, and finally received an opportunity to retaliate. The participants had been divided by median split into high- and low-masculinity groups based on their scores on Spence and Helmreich's (1978) Personal Attributes Questionnaire. As expected, when provoked, high-masculinity subjects were more aggressive than low-masculinity subjects but only in the ambiguous drug information condition. Although they reported more arousal-related sensations, they did not rate themselves higher in anger. The results are discussed in terms of gender role influences on the experience of anger and the expression of aggression.     

Nondiscriminatory career counseling?

Client data from nine church-related career development centers were studied with two questions in mind: (1) How well do the client assessment rating data predict the counselor recommendations given to clients? (2) Are there discriminatory effects due to referral source and/or to gender? Analyses were done separately for Professional Church Workers and Candidates. In addition to a general profile of these two client types, findings show that assessment ratings account for most of the explained variance in recommendations, and that neither client gender nor referral source is a basis for discrimination in recommendations. Counselor gender does make a difference, however, and differences between men and women counselors suggest the useful distinction between gender bias and gender effect.