Psychosocial Factors in Child Safety Restraint Use1

Within the past 3 years, a majority of states have passed laws requiring children riding in automobiles to be properly restrained in safety devices. Several studies indicate that such laws have only a modest effect on the number of children being properly protected. To determine factors associated with safety restraint use a telephone interview survey was conducted with 211 residents of a state that has had a child safety restraint law in effect for two years. Several hypotheses derived from the Health Belief Model were tested. The model was generally supported, but will require some revision to explain a routine and repetitive behavior such as safety seat use. While strong general resistance to government intervention in family behavior was found, this did not translate into resistance of safety seat laws.     

Detecting (in)consistencies in personality: reconciling intuitions and empirical evidence

After Mischel's (1968) critique of the traditional concept of personality, others have attempted to resolve the apparent discrepancy between intuitive (and theoretical) notions of consistency in the behavior patterns of individuals, and the available empirical evidence, much of which seems to suggest that the intuitive/theoretical notions are erroneous. Virtually all of these attempts have been grounded ultimately in some variation of the individual differences paradigm that has long dominated empirical personality research. In contrast, the present article suggests that this apparent discrepancy results from an attempt to reconcile essentially idiographic intuitions with aggregate empirical findings. Going beyond previous conceptual discussions of this point, the present article offers an empirical illustration of the problem, and suggests that the intuitions vs. empirical evidence discrepancy regarding questions of (in)consistencies in personality reflects the "incorrectness" of neither, but rather the fact that the intuitions and empirical evidence speak to fundamentally different questions. The implications of this fact for programmatic, theoretically oriented personality research are emphasized.     

A discourse on semantic priming

The processing of a word is sometimes affected if earlier words are semantically related to it (semantic “priming”). Priming phenomena have generally been interpreted as reflecting the organization of the mental lexicon. Past studies have shown that priming effects have a very fast rise time and a relatively rapid decay time. This paper investigates the rate of decay of semantic facilitation in both sentences and lists. It was hypothesized that sentence processing involves the construction of a discourse model in which the main topics stay active. If true, then words referring to related objects or events will be processed rapidly even if they occur later in the input, i.e., there will be no decay of facilitation. Three experiments with college students examined the relative time to process a critical word when it was preceded by either a pair of semantically related words or more neutral words. The materials occurred in either sentences or lists, the latter being word-level anagrams of the sentences. Subjects carried out the phonememonitoring task, responding to a word-initial target phoneme that occurred immediately after the critical word. In Experiments I (N = 58) and II (N = 40) 12 words separated the related/neutral words and the critical items. Facilitation in processing the critical word was present in sentences but not in lists. Experiment III (N = 128) showed that the amount of facilitation in sentences was the same when 12 words separated the related/neutral and critical words as when 1.5 words separated them. Thus, there was no evidence obtained here for decay of facilitation in sentences. The results are taken to be consistent with a discourse-model interpretation of semantic facilitation in sentences.     

On the relationship between conceptual schemes and behaviour reports: A closer look1

The validity of the assertion that rated and self-reported behavior is “almost entirely under the influence of preexisting conceptual schemes” is questioned. It is argued that the approach previously used to test this thesis is inadequate, and an alternative approach is described. A comparison of findings obtained using the two approaches suggests that the thesis is in need of revision: The presumed correspondence is neither as high nor as consistent as it may be thought to be. Some implications of the present findings for future research in social cognition and in personality are discussed.     

Semantic facilitation and lexical access during sentence processing: An investigation of individual differences

An earlier experiment (Blank & Foss, 1978) showed that the time required to access the object noun of a sentence was shortened if the noun was preceded by a semantically related verb or adjective. When both the verb and the adjective were semantically related to the noun, the amount of facilitation of lexical access was additive. However, additivity appeared to break down for subjects who did poorly on the comprehension test administered in that experiment, suggesting that the activation function among related lexical items was different for good and poor comprehenders. Such a finding would have implications for theories of lexical facilitation, especially the two-factor theories such as the one proposed by Posner and Snyder (1975). The present experiment again measured access time for the object noun of a sentence when it was preceded by an unrelated or a related verb or adjective (four sentence types). Two groups of college subjects were tested, relatively good (N = 63) and relatively poor (N = 42) comprehenders. The difference in the time taken to retrieve the object noun was ascertained by measuring reaction time to respond to the initial phoneme of the next word in the sentence (phoneme monitoring technique). Reaction times were shorter when the noun was preceded by a semantically related word; the effects of two sources of related context (verb and adjective) appeared to be additive forboth groups of subjects. These results were discussed within the context of two-factor theories of lexical activation and within the context of Morton’s (1969) logogen model.     

The tactile perception of size: Some relationships with distance and direction

The results of a series of experiments carried out by Bartley (1953) demonstrated a tendency for the size of a tactually perceived object to be underestimated with increased distance of the object from the eyes. He took this to indicate that visual imagery played a part in the spatial organization of tactile data. In the present investigation this effect of distance was further examined under various conditions with sighted and blind subjects. The tendency was found to exist, but there is clear evidence that it is not due to the participation of visual imagery. No hypothesis was found to explain the tendency adequately. An interesting difference emerges between the situation where the subject extends his arm when making the comparison and that in which the arm is retracted when making the comparison.     

Two Strands of Scholarship on Language Comprehension: Phoneme Monitoring and Discourse Context

This paper briefly reviews two areas of work on language comprehension and gives an informal assessment of each. One area discussed is phoneme monitoring, a method for measuring on-line spoken language comprehension. The origins of this method are sketched, as are some of the ways in which it has been used and the assumptions behind its use. The second area is substantive rather than methodological, being concerned with discourse context and its effect upon word and sentence processing. The hypothesis of interest states that discourse context has its effects on subsequent word processing primarily by affecting the ease of integrating new information into the ongoing discourse representation. This organizationally based view is distinct from a more elementaristic one which states that context operates by items priming other individual items. Some work consistent with the integration perspective is noted.     

High-speed memory retrieval with auditorily presented stimuli

Two groups of 8 Ss memorized three lists of consonental phonemes. The length of the memorized lists (M) was one, two, and four phonemes. Test words were presented, and reaction time (RT) for S to say whether or not the word started with a member of the memorized list was measured. RT increased with M. In one group, the phonemes comprising the memorized sets were dissimilar. RT increased linearly with M for that group. In the other group, the phonemes comprising the sets were similar. The function relating RT to M appeared to deviate from linearity. Even after extended practice, all the evidence was consistent with a somewhat modified serial model of memory retrieval.     

Decision processes during sentence comprehension: Effects of surf ace structure on decision times

Sentence comprehension is considered to be a set of decisions concerning the identification of entities at the various linguistic “levels.” Such decisions utilize overlapping fixed capacity psychological mechanisms. To the extent that one decision is difficult, others should take longer. This framework received support in two studies in which Ss’ reaction times (RT) to the presence of a phoneme in a sentence were measured. When surface structure syntax was difficult, as in self-embedded sentences, RT was longer (given that S comprehended the sentence) than when surface structure syntax was relatively easy. Additionally, the presence in surface structure of a putative cue for underlying structure did not affect RT, though comprehension was significantly inferior.     

Toward a further understanding of the intuitive personologist: Some preliminary evidence for the dialectical quality of subjective personality impressions

Despite significant advances over the past three decades in our understanding of the implicit personality theorist, some important questions remain, particularly as regards the nature of the underlying reasoning process by which subjectively meaningful personality impressions are formulated and expressed. The present article seeks to address this issue, with particular attention being given to the distinction between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning. Preliminary empirical evidence is offered to suggest that, at least under certain conditions, lay persons formulate and express subjective personality impressions on the basis of a reasoning process that is essentially dialectical in nature. Some major implications of this point of view for the study of the intuitive personologist are discussed. The limitations of the evidence presented, and the need for further research are also noted.