Emotional Self-Awareness,Eating Disorders,and Racial Identity Attitudes in African American Women

Certain racial identity attitudes may involve diminished internal emotional awareness, features of a syndrome known as “alexithymia,” which has been observed in survivors of extreme trauma. This study found that levels of alexithymia, but not eating disorders, were related to attitudes characteristic of early stages of racial identity development among African American women.     

Sexual responding of “nonrapists” to aggressive sexual themes: Normative data

The present study presents data relevant to the sexual responding to aggressive cues of a large sample of nonrapist males recruited from the community. Two hundred three subjects received physiological assessment of sexual arousal to heterosexual and rape stimuli. Results indicated that under instructions not to interfere with sexual responding, approximately 80% of the nonrapists would be correctly classified, which was significantly different from chance. However, under instructions to suppress arousal, classification was no better than chance. The rape index was not related to age, socioeconomic status, sexual experience, or amount of arousal shown in the laboratory. However, there was a small but significant relationship to IQ. Overall, the data suggest that for instructions not to interfere with responding, the error rate seen in this larger-scale sample was equivalent to that in previous studies using smaller normative samples and that classification in general is not biased by the subject characteristics measured in this study.Portions of this project were supported by USPHS Grant MH-34030-02 from the Center for the Studies of Crime and Delinquency and by Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Research Contract ID-0783 to the Department of Psychiatry.     

Conditioned fear and startle magnitude: effects of different footshock or backshock intensities used in training

In Experiment 1 four groups of rats received 30 light-shock pairings using footshock intensities of either .2, .4, .8, or 1.6 mA. One day later all rats were tested for startle by presenting tones in the presence or absence of the light CS. Potentiated startle (the difference between startle on light-tone vs tone-alone trials) was nonmonotonically related to the shock intensity used in training, with the greatest potentiation at intermediate shock levels. Experiment 3 demonstrated a similar relationship when backshocks instead of footshocks were used. In Experiment 2 rats were trained with either a moderate or high shock and then given an extended extinction-test session 1 day later. The moderate-shock group showed a gradual decline in potentiated startle over extinction. The high-shock group showed a nonmonotonic extinction curve where potentiation progressively increased toward the middle of extinction and dissipated thereafter. The results suggest that acoustic startle bears an inverted U-shaped relationship to fear and are discussed in relation to other studies concerned with this issue.     

A method of restraining goldfish during conditioning of electric-shock-induced suppression of breathing movements

An efficient method of holding individual fish in position for delivery of visual conditioned stimuli and electrical unconditioned stimuli, and for registration of breathing movements with a thermistor, is described. The holder restrains the fish gently and is readily opened and closed. In addition, a “mechanical fish” signal generator, for assessing thermistor performance in detecting breathing movements, and a safe constant-current electrical shock stimulus generator are described.     

Father-child relationships from the preschool years through mid-adolescence

In this study, we examined variations in fathering and father-child relationships from the children's preschool years through mid-adolescence. One hundred seventy-seven fathers with first-born children ages 4, 8, 12, and 16 years responded to five sets of questionnaires tapping four domains of childrearing: practices, attitudes, parental role involvement, and role satisfaction. A multivariate analysis of variance identified significant variability among the four age groups in fathers' use of acceptance in childrearing practices, role involvement (frequency and task sharing), satisfaction with paternal role performance, and attitudes about the modifiability of child behavior. The results contribute new information about the nature of fathering throughout the childhood years and adolescence and provide additional support for the view of parenting as dynamic and responsive to the developmental level and gender-related characteristics of the child.     

Distignuishing the source of memories reported during prior waking and hypnotic recall attempts

Subjects attempted to identify the occasion on which they first reported particular responses to questions that were asked twice during an experiment on hyphosis and memory 1 week earlier. During this earlier experiment, subjects of high and low hypnotizability had been randomly allocatd to one of two recall test sequences: wake-hypnosis ro wake-wake. Recall improved from the first (R1) to the second test (R2) in a comparable manner for both test sequences, indicating a failure of hypnosis to enhance memory. It is noteworthy that, when later queried about the origins of specific recollections, the majority of subjects exhibited a bias to attribute their responses to R1, regardless of whether hypnosis was used during R2. Moreover, low hypnotizables exposed to the hypnotic procedure and, to a lesser extent, high hypnotizables who recalled both times in the waking condition displayed and exaggerated tendency to overattribute recollections to R1. These data indicate that individuals cannot distinguish between memories retrieved prior to hypnosis and those that occured during hypnosis. Implications for implementing judicial standards regarding hypnosis are discussed.