Stimulus suffix effects with speech and nonspeech sounds

The stimulus suffix effect (SSE) was examined with short sequences of words and meaningful nonspeech sounds. In agreement with previous findings, the SSE for word sequences was obtained with a speech, but not a nonspeech, suffix. The reverse was true for sounds. The results contribute further evidence for a functional distinction between speech and nonspeech processing mechanisms in auditory memory.     

Effects of self-awareness on antinormative behavior

Based on Zimbardo's (1970) theory of deindividuation and Duval and Wicklund's (1972) theory of “objective self-awareness” it was predicted that self-awareness would lead to a decrease in transgressive behavior. Subjects were either made self-aware (seated in front of a mirror listening to their own tape-recorded voice) or nonself-aware (seated to the side of the mirror listening to another's voice) and were given an opportunity to cheat on an anagrams test. Significantly more cheated in the nonself-aware condition (71%) than in the self-aware condition (7%). The results support the basic premise of deindividuation theory that self-awareness influences impulsive, counternormative behavior and suggest that an integration of the theories of deindividuation and objective self-awareness is possible.     

ALICE: A system for manipulating and analyzing multidimensional data

The computer program ALICE solves the two major problems of data manipulation and analysis. First, ALICE allows the user to treat data from an experiment in the form they are generated. Second, mathematical calculations and statistical analyses are included as an intrinsic part of the multidimensional approach to data handling. ALICE accepts raw data in the form and order they were collected; reorganizes, partitions, or selects any subset of them (including a single entry), and arithmetically combines, transforms, or evaluates any formula involving them. Furthermore, learning to use ALICE is simple, even for those who are naive to both computers and data analysis.     

THE EVALUATION OF CHILDREN'S PLAY MATERIALS1

Although reliable data concerning toys' safety, durability, and appeal to children would be useful to parents, educators, and toy manufacturers, systematic procedures for evaluating toys and collecting such data have not been readily available. This paper describes a technology for carrying out such evaluations with children in free-play settings. Children entering the toy-evaluation area were each given a large tag, coded to indicate their names, age, and sex, to wear on the back of their shirt. Twenty-five toys were initially displayed on a table. Children were required by an adult to check out, and later return, any toy they selected for play. Every 5 min, an observer wrote down the tag number of any child playing with each of the 25 toys. The area was open for several hours daily, and at the end of each day a supervisor completed a toy-use questionnaire that identified problems associated with toy management, safety, and durability. Each interval in which a child was recorded as playing with a toy was considered five child-minutes of use for that toy. Data were summarized after each 5- to 10-day toy evaluation to indicate the total number of child-minutes of use attributed to each of the toys tested. The toys were then ranked from the most- to least-used. This measure of toys' overall use proved to be a reliable predictor of toys' appeal across many subjects and settings, and correlated well with our other analyses of toys' use. For example, toys used by individual children for long periods of time, and those toys most often chosen from the toy table were frequently the same toys that ranked high in overall child-minutes of use. Reliable differences in toys' appeal to boys and girls of different ages were observed. To test the generality of the toy-evaluation procedures, several experiments were conducted. To find out whether the popularity of certain toys depended on the number of children playing, a series of popular toys was made available first to only a single child at a time, then to any number of children. While certain toys required the presence of two or more children before they would be used, most toys were used by children both alone and in groups. The popularity of most toys, even the least-used toys, could be increased by having an adult play alone with the children. With some toys, an adult could maintain the play of several children at a time; with other toys, only one child at a time would be engaged. Another study showed a prolonged period of enforced sampling with little-used toys almost never increased their subsequent use once the enforced sampling procedures were discontinued. Finally, we found that having multiple copies of the same popular toys did not produce much more use of the toys than having single copies. The data produced by these evaluation procedures could be helpful to parents and educators in selecting desirable toys, and to manufacturers in improving the toys they develop and market. Future research might involve developing procedures that would encourage concerned adults to carry out toy evaluations in their own communities.     

Analyzing the random control procedure: Effects of paired and unpaired CSs and USs on autoshaping the chick's key peck with heat reinforcement

A series of five experiments using a total of 264 subjects investigated the effects of paired and unpaired key light (CS) and heat (US) stimuli on autoshaping the chick's key peck. Experiment 1 established that paired presentations of CS and US promoted a more rapid rise in key pecking than did randomly presented CSs and USs and that the specific sequence of stimuli under the random control procedure affected key pecking performance. Experiment 2 used a trace conditioning procedure to determine the role of the CS-US interval on autoshaping and to define empirically unpaired CSs and USs. Key pecking declined as the trace delay interval was increased from 0 to 25 sec; at 25 sec, no conditioning of key pecking occurred. Experiments 3–5 assessed the effects on autoshaped key pecking of (a) number of daily CS-US pairings, (b) added unpaired CS presentations, and (c) added unpaired US presentations, since paired and random control schedules differed in all of these respects. Reduction in the number of CS-US pairings slowed the acquisition of key pecking as did the concurrent addition of nonreinforced CSs and unsignaled USs. These results support theories of association formation that stress the effects of both paired and unpaired CSs and USs.     

Effects of orienting task,spacing of repetitions,and list context on judgments of frequency

Subjects were given an unexpected frequency judgment test following a list of words in which items were presented either two, three, and five times or three, five, and seven times, with a spacing of 0, 2, 16, or 32 items between repetitions. During list presentation, they either rated the imagery value of each word or made continuous frequency estimates. Postlist frequency judgments of words presented three and five times were higher for the list containing words of Frequency 7, and judgments were also higher following the imagery rating task. Continuous judgments were unaffected by the list context and showed different effects of spacing than postlist judgments. The results provide support for the operation of response bias factors in the frequency judgment task and are relevant to theoretical interpretations of the spacing effect.     

The effects of humor-induced arousal upon aggressive behavior

The present experiment attempted to reconcile previous results in the area of humor and aggression. It was hypothesized that humor serves two functions, arousal and attentional shift, with regard to its influence on the relation of prior anger arousal and aggression. As a test of this assumption, subjects in the present experiment were subjected to three forms of humor (high arousing, low arousing, nonhumor) after being angered or treated in a neutral manner by a confederate. In an analysis on subsequent aggression toward the confederate, it was found that female subjects reduced their aggression after exposure to low arousing humor while maintaining aggression at a high level for high arousing stimuli. Male subjects were not influenced by humor exposure. Possible reasons for this sex difference are examined in light of the arousal and attentional shift properties of humorous stimuli.