Evidence of stress as a function of experimentally altered appraisal of stimulus aversiveness and coping adequacy.

The present study examined the effects of initial appraisal of stimulus aversiveness and coping adequacy on subsequent evidence of stress. Results indicated that level of appraised coping efficacy had the most pronounced effect during stressor exposure and that the pattern of this effect was dependent on whether the source of the appraised coping resources was "personal" (the subject's own resources) or "environmental" (a bogus technique donated by the experimenter). In addition, information about personal resources reduced the pre- to poststressor increment in state anxiety and lessened cognitive avoidance of stressor-related stimuli. Results were discussed with respect to differential sensitivity of components of stress response to variation in environmental versus personal sources of coping efficacy, and the specific aspects of cognitive structuring associated with variation in physiological reaction (muscle tension) were noted. The importance of factors associated with appraised coping efficacy was clearly supported, but factors involving the objective (in contrast to defensive) aspects of appraised stressor potency required further investigation, and suggestions for such future research were made.     

Anticipatory threat and physical danger trait anxiety: A signal-detection analysis of effects on autonomic responding

The method of Signal-Detection Theory (SDT) was applied to the analysis of autonomic data in two experiments. In the first, apprehension surrounding the administration of loud tones was induced through preliminary information; in the second, it was increased by selecting subjects scoring high on a physical-danger trait anxiety scale. Despite enhanced autonomic reactivity, those in the first study who were led to believe that the tones would be extremely disturbing subsequently rated them as less disturbing than did their counterparts who were given comparatively benign expectations. The signal-detection analysis of heart rate and skin conductance suggested enhanced “preparedness of response” among the high-threat subjects; given the diminished subjective ratings, increased response readiness at the autonomic level may have reflected physiological activity assuaging subjective aversiveness of the tones. Contrary to the first study, the psychometrically designated threatened group in the second experiment produced both greater autonomic reactivity along with elevated subjective ratings of disturbance. The SDT analysis provided evidence of greater autonomic sensitivity to noxious stimulus properties. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for theories of anxiety; the comparative utilites of signal-detection theory and conventional methods of autonomic-response scoring were elaborated.     

Response-selection processes in paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenia

Previous research (Marshall, 1973) has shown that the most pronounced component of deficit on a choice reaction time task among a mixed schizophrenic sample involved response-selection processes. Other evidence has indicated that paranoids may be more deficient in this respect than nonparanoids. Hence, it was hypothesized that the former subgroup of schizophrenics would display response-selection deficit while the latter subgroup would display either less or no deficit. Response-selection processes were re-examined using the CRT paradigm with comparisons carried out among paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics and a group of nonschizophrenic controls. Results indicated that only the paranoid schizophrenics displayed abnormally retarded response-selection operations, the nonparanoid schizophrenics being nonsignificantly discriminable from the controls. It was suggested that past evidence of CRT response-selection deficit among mixed schizophrenics might have been attributable primarily to the performance of the paranoids, whose performance appears to be adversely affected by an increase in the number of dimensions relevant to response selection.     

Cognitive processing of multidimensional stimuli in schizophrenia: formal modeling of judgment speed and content

This article presents a formal, mathematical account of relations between response times on simple cognitive tasks and content of complex judgments involving multiple stimulus dimensions for people with schizophrenia. Changes in multidimensional judgments were viewed as the result of interference from increased stages of encoding with respect to the individual dimensions. Information on dimensional properties encoded earlier in a judgment trial was considered to be more susceptible to loss over the rest of the trial, because of a larger number of encoding stages applied to the remaining dimensional properties. Model predictions were tested with samples of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenic participants and controls. Unidimensional encoding speed was assessed by reaction times in an explicit similarity ratings task, and multidimensional judgment content was assessed by the relative importance of different stimulus dimensions to participants' ratings in an implicit similarity ratings task. Results support validity of the model.     

Dialectic in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: garlandus compotista

Dialectic is a standard and important part of the logica vetus (or old logic) in medieval philosophy. It has its ultimate origins in Aristotle's Topics,its fundamental source in Boethius's De topicis differentiis,and its flowering in its absorption into fourteenth-century theories of consequences or conditional inferences. The chapter on Topics in Garlandus Compotista's logic book is the oldest scholastic work on dialectic still extant. In this paper I show the differences between Boethius's Theory of Topics and Garlandus's in order to illustrate the role of Topics in early scholastic logic. I argue that for Garlandus Topics are warrants for the inference from the antecedent to the consequent in a conditional proposition and that he is interested in Topics because of his overriding interest in hypothetical syllogisms. I conclude by discussing briefly the relationship between Garlandus's use of Topics and twelfth-century accounts.