The effect of hypnotically elicited testimony on jurors' judgments of guilt and innocence.

Survey data from several countries indicate that many people believe that hypnosis may increase the accuracy of an eyewitness's memory; most experimental research, however, suggests that this belief is inaccurate. This study examined whether the belief could influence judgments of guilt and innocence in a simulated criminal trial. The results indicated that British undergraduates were more likely to find a male defendant guilty when told that the testimony against him had been elicited under hypnosis. Results concerning a nonhypnotic memory facilitation technique were found to be inconclusive, and the salience of hypnotically elicited testimony was ruled out as a contributory element.     

The development of reactions of the public to warning and emergency situations in France, Greece, and the Netherlands.

This article describes the different reactions to emergency warning messages among residents living within a 3-km radius of a hazardous chemical complex and by people living at least 10 km from an industrial site in France, Greece, and the Netherlands. Belief in warning, primary and secondary appraisal, emotional response, and adherence to normal routine were assessed by conducting face-to-face interviews in which a four-phase scenario simulating a credible industrial accident was presented. The results showed that respondents who did not reside in the neighborhood of the hazardous site were, in general, more inclined to trust the warning messages than respondents who resided in the neighborhood were. With the exception of primary appraisal, the warning phases evoked very distinct reactions in the respondents from all three countries with regard to warning belief, secondary appraisal, emotional response, and adherence to normal routine.     

Choice of medical specialty: analysis of students' needs.

The purposes of this study were to assess the career development needs of entering medical students as measured by the Medical Career Development Inventory and to examine gender differences in responses to the inventory. A total of 115 entering medical students (representing two entering classes) took the inventory two months prior to matriculation. Analysis suggested that this sample of entering students had formed a vocational identity and that they had evaluated the suitability and viability of a commitment to a physician's career. However, the participants had not formed a clear picture of their specialty interest and goals. No significant gender differences were indicated. A recommended career assistance workshop is presented as appropriate for these students' needs.     

Type A behavior, job satisfaction, and stress among black professionals.

Most studies of work-related Type A behavior have been conducted with samples of white men. Using a mail questionnaire to assess Type A behavior, job satisfaction, and daily stress and tension among 250 black men and 233 black women public accountants, the prevalence of Type A behavior and its relationship with satisfaction and stress were highly consistent with those reported for other samples of white men and women.     

Use of the analyst as a fetish.

In some cases a gratifying transference fantasy is the subject of progressive analytic work, while in other cases the same type of fantasy eludes investigation, and its enactment causes treatment to become an unproductive endless task. One cause for the latter difficulty can be that the patient uses his or her analyst as a fetish, permitting the distinction between reality and fantasy to remain inconclusive, so that relinquishment of magical expectations does not take place. The particular form of thinking involved in use of the analyst as a fetish is described. The role of illusion, its various clinical manifestations, the countertransference reactions they can evoke, and the technical problems posed are discussed. Special attention is given to the crucial issue of termination. By considering extreme instances in which use of the analyst as a fetish predominates, the author hopes to call attention to a phenomenon that appears to some degree in many, if not all, analyses.     

Validity and clinical scale comparisons between the MMPI and MMPI-2 with psychiatric inpatients.

This study was designed to investigate the comparability of the original MMPI (1950) and the MMPI-2 (1989) with a psychiatric patient population. 34 male and 3 female patients, shortly after admission to one of two acute psychiatry units, completed the old and revised versions of the MMPI. Paired t tests indicated but scant differences for raw scores, while many more differences were found among T scores for validity, clinical, and supplemental scales. Analyses, however, showed all scales on the two forms to be highly correlated. Analysis of the high-point and two-point codes across the two administrations also showed relative stability, although the proportion of Scales 2 (Depression) and 8 (Schizophrenia) decreased, while those for Scales 6 (Paranoia) and 7 (Psychasthenia) increased markedly in the MMPI-2 protocols. Examination of each version's discriminability among mood- and thought-disordered subsamples suggested that the MMPI provides slightly better delineation between diagnostic classes. Discriminant function analyses showed that there were essentially no differences between the two forms in the accurate classification of clinical and nonclinical groups. The findings reported here provide support for the MMPI-2; despite modification, the newer form retains the advantages of the original MMPI. Differences found here may be unique to psychiatric patients and their patterns of MMPI/MMPI-2 equivalence and may not generalize to other special populations.     

Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.     

Human evaluative conditioning: acquisition trials, presentation schedule, evaluative style and contingency awareness.

Two different processes may be operative in human Pavlovian conditioning: signal learning and evaluative learning. Whereas most studies on evaluative conditioning focused on a mere demonstration of the phenomenon or on a theoretical analysis of the underlying processes, some basic parameters of evaluative learning are still unexplored. Hence, using the standard neutral picture--(dis)liked picture pairing paradigm (Baeyens, Eelen & Van den Bergh, 1990), in this study the effect of two parameters of evaluative conditioning was assessed on a between-subjects base, namely the Number of Acquisition Trials (2/5/10/20) and the Presentation Schedule of the stimulus pairs (blockwise or random). Additionally, the study included an exploratory analysis of the potential effects of the Evaluative Style of subjects (Feelers vs Thinkers, operationalized in terms of speed of emitting evaluations). Finally, the relationship between contingency awareness and evaluative learning was reassessed. Neutral-liked conditioning was found to be quadratically related to the number of acquisition trials (increase in effect up to 10 trials, decrease from 10 to 20 trials), whereas neutral-disliked conditioning linearly increased with increasing numbers of trials. Randomized vs blockwise presentation schedules of the stimulus pairs did differentially affect the overall pattern of conditioning, but in a way which was both unexpected and difficult to account for theoretically. Both the Evaluative Style of subjects and contingency awareness were demonstrated to be generally orthogonal to conditioned shifts in CS valence. Based on these findings, some practical suggestions are provided for the application of evaluating conditioning based therapeutical interventions to affective-behavioral disorders which are centred around inappropriate (dis)likes.     

A case of premenstrual distress: bisexual determinants of a woman's fantasy of damage to her genital.

Case material is used to illustrate specific clinical application of the concept of primary femininity. Some contemporary contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of female psychosexual development are presented as complementary with, rather than contradictory to, more familiar, longstanding formulations that emphasize phallic strivings in women. In the clinical example reported, a fantasy of genital damage underlay a woman's premenstrual distress. Aspirations and concerns related to both aspects of her fundamental bisexuality participated in symptom formation and had to be investigated in order to achieve symptom relief. As the analytic work unfolded, it could be seen that the patient's awareness of her feminine aims served to keep her masculine aims out of awareness, and vice versa.     

Orientation congruency effects in visual search.

Subjects searched for the letter E in a background of Ls and Fs in displays that had 1, 2, 4, 8, or 12 letters. The letters could be shown at one of six orientations (upright or rotated clockwise in 60 degrees increments). The displays were either congruent for orientation (all letters had the same orientation) or incongruent (letters in haphazard orientations except for the target on E-present trials). Search time increased linearly with the number of letters in the display, and more so for E-absent trials than for E-present trials. Letter orientation, in general, increased search time and produced an M-shaped function. Furthermore, orientation effects were attenuated in congruent displays relative to those produced by incongruent displays. The results demonstrated systematic orientation effects on the time to search for a simple pattern embedded in simple backgrounds, and provided converging evidence for the orientation-congruency effect found by Jolicoeur (1990b, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 351-364).