Socioeconomic status,value, and response to number

An experiment was designed to study the role of sensory; empirical, and motivational variables in number discrimination of coin or slug displays having equal luminance. It was found that groups of children, differentiated on the basis of economic status, social class, and availability of money but equated for knowledge of purchasing power of money, respond in identical fashion when the number of slugs or coins viewed is within the “span of attention,” i.e., when response is at a sensory level. Differences between groups of children appear when the number of coins (but not slugs) in a display are so many as to fall outside the child’s “span of attention,” thus requiring the additional utilization of a judgmental framework in ascertaining the “manyness” of a display. The less favored socioeconomic group coin estimates were significantly greater than those of the more favored. When response data are expressed as numerosity functions, the operation of motivational factors may be differentiated algebraically. A t a theoretical level, it appears that motivational and sensory explanations are both true, providing they are restricted to definite and appropriate ranges of stimulus number and type.     

Improving Juror Comprehension of Judicial Instructions on the Entrapment Defense1

When the defense of entrapment is raised, the legal and psychological question is not whether the defendant committed some illegal act, but rather why the defendant behaved as he or she did and whether government agents' actions provoked the defendant to commit the same crime. The subjective test of entrapment focuses on the predisposition of the defendant to commit a particular crime, while the objective test focuses on situational forces. In Study 1, type of entrapment defense (subjective, objective) and the defendant's prior record (no prior record, prior record) were experimentally manipulated. As expected, superior comprehension of the judge's instructions was found for jurors who heard subjective test instructions. Study 2 was designed to improve the comprehension and judgments of jurors who received 1 of 3 versions of the objective test. Juror comprehension of key legal concepts and subsequent judgments improved if jurors heard one of the rewritten versions of the objective test.     

Student Socio-Economic Status and Counselor Contact in Junior High School

Cumulative records over 3 years for 196 junior high school sophomores were analyzed to assess the effect of socio-economic status of students on counseling exposure. Statistical significance was found between socio-economic status of the student and both the frequency with which he was referred to the counselor and the problem areas discussed. Frequency of counselor contact was not significantly associated with student socio-economic status. Where the counselors initiated the interviews, they apparently did so only in keeping with administrative policies. The differences that did occur arose when parents or, less frequently, the students themselves, initiated the interviews. Here, socio-economic status appeared to play a crucial and singular role.     

Maintained generalization testing of conditioned suppression

This study concerns the use of a multiple stimulus discrimination procedure for producing data on the generalization of conditioned suppression. Four rats were maintained on a variable interval schedule of milk reinforcement in the presence of five stimuli varying in auditory click rate. When response rates were stable, electric shock was regularly paired with the termination of one of the click stimuli. For two rats the shock was paired with the slowest click rate, and for two rats shock was paired with the fastest click rate. The VI schedule remained in effect. Plots of the relative rates of response to each of the five stimuli yielded concave gradients for both animals suppressed at the slowest click rate, and flat gradients with a sharp drop at the warning stimulus for both animals suppressed at the fastest click rate. When the warning stimuli were reversed for both pairs of subjects, both gradient forms were reproduced. The present procedure was contrasted with procedures used by other investigators.     

Red herrings, dead horses, straw men, and blind alleys: Escaping the stuttering conundrum

Regret is expressed for the energies being dissipated by colleagues addressing outmoded hypothetical constructs pertaining to the onset, development, and maintenance of stuttering. Following a review of the development of the author's thinking regarding fluency disorders over a 30-year period, it is concluded that the study of any single aspect of stuttering must include consideration of the interactive effects of the disorder's affective, behavioral, and cognitive components extant at the time of assessment. To stimulate the development of more comprehensive yet communicable frameworks from which to view fluency disorders, a definition is proffered of stuttering as a clinical syndrome with three subtypes (developmental, remediable, and chronic perseverative) comprised of characteristic affective, behavioral, and cognitive components.     

Videotaped Versus In-Court Witness Testimony: Does Protecting the Child Witness Jeopardize Due Process?1

Videotaping depositions may protect a child witness from the stress of testifying in court but also may influence jurors’ perceptions of the child and the defendant, and jurors’ verdicts in systematic ways. The present study examines several psychological hypotheses that emerge from the controversy over the use of videotaped depositions of child witnesses in child sexual abuse trials. We predicted that student jurors viewing a videotaped deposition would be more proprosecution and less prodefense than those who did not receive testimony in such a form. Thus, it was predicted that jurors viewing a videotaped deposition would perceive the prosecution witnesses and their testimonies more favorably, the defense witnesses and their testimonies less favorably, and give more guilty verdicts than jurors who viewed identical testimony during the course of a trial. We also predicted that females would be more proprosecution and less prodefense than males and that this gender difference would be accentuated by the medium of presentation. The medium of presentation had only a few effects on jurors’ responses. However, when differences emerged, they generally provided support for the predicted main effects. The implications of these findings for the use of videotaped depositions of child sexual abuse victims are discussed.