Margaret Mead and behavioral scientists in World War II: problems in responsibility, truth, and effectiveness

In World War II, Margaret Mead and her behavioral science colleagues actively applied their science to the American war effort on issues such as morale, food habits, psychological warfare, and the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Mead's participation or lack of participation in these activities, and her varying enthusiasms and misgivings about them, raise fundamental issues about the responsibility of behavioral scientists to warn the public against dangerous policies, as well as the ethics of behavioral scientists participating in deceitful psychological warfare and the extent of their effectiveness in contributing to public policymaking.     

In Hall's shadow: Edmund Clark Sanford (1859-1924)

Edmund C. Sanford of Clark University had earned a reputation by the end of the nineteenth century as a leading American psychologist. He had written the first training manual for experimental psychology and created numerous pieces of laboratory apparatus. He was also editor of the American Journal of Psychology and a charter member of the American Psychological Association. Although his peers elected him to the presidency of the APA in 1902, his standing had already begun to decline. Sanford's impact on early American experimental psychology is documented and the reasons for his reduced status as American psychology grew in the early years of the new century are explored.     

Configurational information in face perception

A new facial composites technique is demonstrated, in which photographs of the top and bottom halves of different familiar faces fuse to form unfamiliar faces when aligned with each other. The perception of a novel configuration in such composite stimuli is sufficiently convincing to interfere with identification of the constituent parts (experiment 1), but this effect disappears when stimuli are inverted (experiment 2). Difficulty in identifying the parts of upright composites is found even for stimuli made from parts of unfamiliar faces that have only ever been encountered as face fragments (experiment 3). An equivalent effect is found for composites made from internal and external facial features of well-known people (experiment 4). These findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.     

Relative effectiveness of three stimulus variables for locating a moving sound source

A study is reported in which it is shown that observers can use at least three types of acoustic variables that indicate reliably when a moving sound source is passing: interaural temporal differences, the Doppler effect, and amplitude change. Each of these variables was presented in isolation and each was successful in indicating when a (stimulated) moving sound source passed an observer. These three variables were put into competition (with each indicating that closest passage occurred at a different time) in an effort to determine their relative importance. It was found that amplitude change dominated interaural temporal differences which, in turn, dominated the Doppler effect stimulus variable. The results are discussed in terms of two interpretations. First, it is possible that subjects based their judgements on the potential discriminability of each stimulus variable. However, because the stimuli used involved easily discriminable changes, subjects may instead have based their judgements on the independence of a stimulus variable from different environmental situation conditions. The dominance ordering obtained supports the second interpretation.     

Individual differences and measures of aggression in laboratory studies

After inducing hostility toward a confederate by threatening subjects' self-esteem, subjects were then given the opportunity either to deliver shocks (Experiment 1) or to withhold rewards (Experiment 2) from their confederate. Physiological measures were taken prior to the hostility induction, shortly after the induction and, finally, after the opportunity to aggress. Measures of individual differences relating to aggressive behavior were also considered. While the experimental manipulation was the best predictor in the ‘withholding rewards’ condition, measures of dissipation-rumination tendencies and emotional vulnerability were the best predictors in the ‘shock administration’ condition. In both conditions, systolic blood pressure seemed to reflect differences in arousal as a function of the hostility induction procedure, while subjects in the withhold rewards procedure also showed a decrease in systolic pressure after having an opportunity to aggress toward the confederate. It was concluded that not only is the withholding of rewards a more ethically acceptable procedure than shock administration, but it is also more likely to reflect experimental rather than individual difference affects.