Subject emotionality and subsequent pylorus ligation-induced or restraint-induced gastric ulcer

Rats were tested for “emotionality” in a standardized open-field procedure for four consecutive days. In one experiment, open-field testing was followed by a 24-hour period of starvation and by a 10-hour period of pyloric occlusion. In a second study, open-field testing was followed by 12 hours of starvation and by three hours of supine restraint-cold (4–6° C). “High-emotional” and “low-emotional” animals differed significantly in terms of glandular ulcers (both experiments) and gastric secretion (Experiment 1). Low-emotional animals had less gastric damage and secreted a smaller volume of less concentrated gastric acid. Discriminant analysis indicated that the behavioral measures of open-field defecation and open-field ambulation were the best discriminators of high and low emotionality. Multiple regression analysis also suggested that open-field defecation and ambulation were good predictors of gastric glandular ulceration induced by either pyloric ligation or stress due to supine restraint-cold.     

A sequential analysis of the partial reinforcement extinction effect in children*

In a series of studies employing children between the ages of 7.6 and 10.6 years of age guessing on a modified Humphreys’s board, extinction training was administered following either continuous reinforcement or various schedules of partial reinforcement training. Besides the observation of a partial reinforcement extinction effect, it was found that resistance to extinction appeared to be regulated by those sequential variables specified by extensions of Capaldi’s theory of instrumental learning.     

The personal and marital adjustment of parents as related to observed child deviance and parenting behaviors

The purpose of this study was to document the relationship of parents' personal and marital adjustment to their own behavior as parents and the behavior of their children. A total of 31 families who had been referred for behavioral counseling regarding their male child's behavior problems were given a diagnostic battery which included home observations as well as administration to parents of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the LockeWallace Marital Adjustment Test. Results revealed consistent negative relationships between marital satisfaction and the observed level of child deviance. Similarly, there were consistent negative relationships between marital satisfaction and the level of observed “negativeness” to the child. Analyses using the MMPI indicated that a large number of the fathers ' MMPI scales were related to child deviance, but this finding was not replicated for mothers. Several MMPI scales were related to marital satisfaction for both parents. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the assessment and treatment of families with a problem child.     

Provoked and unprovoked aggressiveness in athletes

In a factorial design, athletic involvement (no varsity sport, varsity noncontact sport, varsity contact sport) was varied with induced disposition (unprovoked, provoked). Under conditions of no provocation, no significant differences in aggressiveness were observed between nonathletes and athletes, nor between noncontact- and contact-sport athletes. In contrast, under conditions of provocation, nonathletes displayed more aggressiveness than athletes. Non-contact-sport athletes behaved significantly less aggressively than both nonathletes and contact-sport athletes. Contact-sport athletes failed to behave significantly less aggressively than nonathletes, however. The findings were explained as the result of an acquired superior ability in athletes to cope with provocation under competitive circumstances, which is partially counteracted in contact-sport athletes by their aggressiveness habits and disinhibition training.     

Memory processes in the identification of pitch

A study in pitch identification with three interstimulus intervals is reported. Ss received a pretest, three drills, and a posttest. Results include: (a) superior performance on stimuli requiring only a simple discrimination judgment, (b) inferior performance at longer interstimulus intervals, (c) a greater tendency to repeat correct rather than incorrect responses to adjacent tones at the same pitch level, and (d) a modest, but reliable, improvement in pitch identification accuracy from the pre- to the posttest. Relevance of the results for an interpretation of pitch identification as dependent on memory processes is discussed.     

The effect of repetition on iconic memory

The present experiment examined the influence of repetition on iconic memory using the Sperling (1960) procedure. It was assumed that the whole-report procedure would estimate only information available from a somewhat more permanent memory system than the icon, while the partial report would estimate both that information and the information available in the icon. The difference between the whole and partial report was assumed to measure information available only in the icon. Across a series of 160 displays one particular display occurred half the time (80 repetitions). The results indicated that the repetition influenced recall from the more permanent memory system assessed by whole report, but had no influence on the information available from the icon (partial report minus whole report).     

Memory for prenominal adjectives in ordinary English sentences

Ss have been found to remember the gist of English sentences quite well while having little or no memory for structural features unrelated to the basic meaning. This research examines the representation of meaning in memory using adjective-noun phrases embedded in ordinary sentences. Ss studied a long series of sentences and were later tested for memory of certain of the adjectives in these sentences. Tested with a specially constructed forced-choice recognition procedure, Ss made significantly more recognition errors to distractors from the same predicative class as the correct choice than they did to distractors from different classes. This effect was highly significant when the correct choice was a nonpolar adjective but was not different from chance when a polar was correct. Data from a recall test procedure suggested this difference was due to Ss remembering the denotative or referential meaning of the adjective. The results showed that Ss remember abstract aspects of the predicative meaning of adjectival modification.     

The drive for meaning in William James' analysis of religious experience

Summary Now that we have looked at the characteristics of mystical experience, we are ready to discuss the assumption made in this paper that mystical experience can be translated into an understanding of integration or the drive for meaning which Fingarette pursues in a much more analytic fashion. Reviewing the conversion process as an integration process we have seen that for the sick-souled, beset with the meaninglessness or melancholy which paralyzes his will, his own awareness of wrong in his situation prevents him from opening up to larger views of reality. But, as James has described, at the same time as the subject is attending so strongly to his own sense of worthlessness, all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work toward rearrangements. Yet the rearrangements can only come about by obeying the command of Chaung-Tse: Cease striving. The result is self-transformation in reconciling, unifying states. There is achieved a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness; facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.However, James cautions us to realize that the same incursions of the subconscious which produce such reconciling, unifying states can also produce pathological states, a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. In such a state the meanings of events become dreadful and the ruling emotion is pessimism. To this possibility James applied the pragmatic test, By their fruits..., and concluded that the mystical experience which brings optimism to the individual is a genuine experience and one which brings truth. In our context then, we would say that real integration brings the subject away from the melancholy and meaninglessness he felt into the genuinely insightful resolution of which Fingarette speaks.Conversion, then, is a process in James's analysis of religious experience analogous to the process of integration and meaning-discovery while mysticism is analogous to the state in which integration or meaning-discovery is achieved. Conversion is climaxed by self-surrender; mysticism is characterized by new determination, self-transformation: two ways of describing an indivisible event. Furthermore, the four characteristics James applies to mysticism are indeed characteristic of the experience of integration.Two other points should be added here which are much in line with James's treatment of experience. In the first place, one of the basic principles of radical empiricism is that not only objects but relations between objects are the subject of experience. Such an experience of relationships, of wholeness, is exactly what characterizes integration. At the same time, the five senses are suspended, and the insight is experienced with such a strong immediacy that it is almost sensed. James refers to this quality of mystical states: The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, - that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.I am not saying that every integration is a mystical experience. Rather I have been saying that James's discussion of religious experiences such as healthy-minded, sick-souled, melancholy, conversion, and mysticism provide analogues for better understanding the phenomenological processes and characteristics of the drive for meaning and integration which Fingarette analyzes. In fact, the very notion of religion itself for James bears not just an analogous resemblance but perhaps an identification with integration. For in his personal letters James had defined religious experience as Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more home to one. And in Varieties James defines religion as a man's total reaction upon life....; his attitude towards what he felt to be the primal truth.If we look upon this outlook of James toward religion as an exaggeration of the reality of integration, we can follow James to what he perceives as the importance of religion upon an individual's life. The man of religious feeling possesses the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, an enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. So we are brought again to the area of creativity in which an individual has experienced the widening of the area of his immediate experience and is re-born in the karmic pattern, a valid pattern for both James and Fingarette. As Fingarette describes it, the converted individual creates values which the dead reality he had previously faced did not possess. The result of the achieved integration is explained by James when referring to religious experience as an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, dynamogenic order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. This emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy [meaninglessness] and imparts endurances to the subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.We might sum up this discussion not by a criticism of the shortcomings of James's treatment of the religious life, such as his apparent insensitivity to the part played by institutions in the religious experience itself, but rather by underscoring the richness of the phenomenological analysis James has undertaken. James Edie acknowledges that James's studies of religious experience itself rather than of religion. ... are not only more sound phenomenologically than some of the studies which have, under the influence of Husserl, up to now explicitly invoked the phenomenological method, but they are also the first to establish any solid basis for a true phenomenology of religious experience.And John Wild has pointed out the parallel between James's concept of melancholy and Heidegger's concept of anxiety as the genesis of the process of becoming: beginning with the prospect of death and nothingness, the individual gropes toward new birth.As we have seen, then, James's analysis of the varieties of religious experience leads to a fruitful discussion of the psychological processes involved in melancholy and meaninglessness, rearrangement and integration. In all such experiences, a sense of inner unity is reached to which the following words of Fingarette would apply by analogy: The soul-racking death which leads to blissful rebirth is the death of the subjectively experienced, anxiety-generated self perception; it is the emergence into the freedom of introspective self-forgetfulness of the psychically unified self.