Relationships among affective and cognitive factors in humor

One hundred and twenty-five college students rated a total of 74 jokes, chosen by stratified sampling, on funniness and on 13 other scales suggested by humor theories. Highly similar factor structures were found with two sets of jokes. Ratings of surprise, resolution, and originality correlated strongly with funniness and helped define a factor on which funniness ratings loaded. Scales pertaining to painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic were positively correlated with funniness but defined a factor essentially independent of it. Partial correlations suggested that these scales were related to funniness through their common relationship with incongruity and resolution scales. Ratings of how much a joke made subjects “feel free” correlated much more highly with ratings of incongruity and resolution than with ratings of painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic. Results were interpreted as providing support for an incongruity-resolution theory of humor, and for the interdependency of affective factors with incongruity-resolution mechanisms.     

Developmental trends in cue utilization for attributional judgements

Fourth through twelfth graders of both sexes were tested for developmental trends in making causal attributions for success and failure and in using past history, social comparison, and importance information in making their attributional judgements. Results suggested that basic information processing rules had already developed by the fourth grade but that children continue to develop and become more consistent in applying these rules. Sex differences indicated that girls were more defensive generally in not taking responsibility for their outcomes by attributing them externally.     

Mobility Strategies and Career Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study of MBAs

This research examines the impact of work- and non-work-related mobility on salary, promotions, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment among 671 male and female managers over a 7-year period. Results indicated that those with frequent lateral moves had significant gain in salary increases compared to those who did not move. In addition, frequent lateral moves had a negative impact on work-related attitudes, specifically overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Implications of these findings for career strategies and future research are discussed.     

Medical crisis counseling: A new service delivery model

The diagnosis or exacerbation of a chronic illness, the aftermath of a serious accident, or worries about future in the context of illness or debilitating injury are all examples of medical crises that pose significant coping challenges. Too often, traditional approaches to psychotherapy have been unable to respond the most urgent needs of people confronting such crises. Medical crisis counseling is a specialized approach to addressing the needs of individuals and families confronted by the difficulties of coping with losses or changes, as well as the challenge of living with long-term illness. This paper describes the medical crisis counseling model in contrast with other more traditional intervention approaches.     

The Long-Term Effects of Military Service on Quality of Life: The Vietnam Experience1

In this study, we examined the effects of military service during the Vietnam War on the quality of life in middle adulthood for a cohort of men characterized by a privileged socioeconomic status. The final sample included 374 men who, upon graduating from an Ivy League college in 1966, performed military service in Vietnam, engaged in military service during this time in regions other than Vietnam, or did not serve in the military. As indices of quality of life in the middle years, we used a set of health-related behaviors, a series of life transitions experienced after the age of 40, and satisfaction with various components of life, as well as life as a whole. Multivariate analyses of variance and chi-square analyses revealed significant differences among the sample subgroups on several quality-of-life indices. The subgroup of Vietnam veterans reported more frequent alcohol use than the nonveterans. In terms of midlife transitions, the Vietnam veterans were most likely to have changed careers and to have moved residence, and the least likely to feel lonely in middle adulthood. Compared to the Vietnam veterans and the Vietnam-era veterans, the nonveteran group was least likely to have questioned their values, experienced depression, or to have moved to a new home. Finally, the Vietnam veterans were significantly less satisfied with their careers, finances, and with life in general, compared to their nonveteran counterparts; however, they reported more satisfaction with their male friendships than did Vietnam-era veterans. These findings suggest that the Vietnam War experience is associated with lower quality of life during middle adulthood in certain domains, even among a select group of individuals, of high socioeconomic status, whose privileged background could have presumably protected them from the adversities of the Vietnam War.     

The eccentricity effect: Target eccentricity affects performance on conjunction searches

The serial pattern found for conjunction visual-search tasks has been attributed to covert attentional shifts, even though the possible contributions of target location have not been considered. To investigate the effect of target location on orientation × color conjunction searches, the target’s duration and its position in the display were manipulated. The display was present either until observers responded (Experiment 1), for 104 msec (Experiment 2), or for 62 msec (Experiment 3). Target eccentricity critically affected performance: A pronounced eccentricity effect was very similar for all three experiments; as eccentricity increased, reaction times and errors increased gradually. Furthermore, the set-size effect became more pronounced as target eccentricity increased, and the extent of the eccentricity effect increased for larger set sizes. In addition, according to stepwise regressions, target eccentricity as well as its interaction with set size were good predictors of performance. We suggest that these findings could be explained by spatial-resolution and lateral-inhibition factors. The serial self-terminating hypothesis for orientation × color conjunction searches was evaluated and rejected. We compared the eccentricity effect as well as the extent of the orientation asymmetry in these three conjunction experiments with those found in feature experiments (Carrasco & Katz, 1992). The roles of eye movements, spatial resolution, and covert attention in the eccentricity effect, as well as their implications, are discussed.     

Understanding Within-Job Title Variance in Job-Analytic Ratings

This study examined the correlates of within-job title variance in job-analytic ratings. Q-factor analyses of SMEs' ratings for two jobs (i.e., Sales Representative [n = 26] and Felony Assistant Public Defender [n = 141]) yielded two and four factors, respectively. These factors represented shared views of the importance of the job tasks. Factor membership was related to sales performance for sales representatives. Previous professional experience and district of employment were related to factor membership for Felony Assistant Public Defenders. The implications of these studies of within-title variance in job-analytic ratings for human resource programs are discussed.     

Spontaneous attention to primed and nonprimed inputs

The literature is ambiguous with respect to whether attention is drawn spontaneously to expected or unexpected items in mixed arrays. Several studies from our own laboratory indicate that even though expected words are more localizable than unexpected words in unmixed four-word arrays, showing a baseline advantage for expected words, unexpected words are sometimes more localizable than their expected companions in mixed arrays, suggesting that unexpected words attract attention (see, e.g., Johnston & Schwarting, 1996). By contrast, Dark, Vochatzer, and VanVoorhis (1996) observed that expected words were more reportable than their unexpected companions in mixed, two-word arrays. However, because the Dark et al. research did not include arrays in which both words were expected, it is not clear whether their findings reflect an attentional effect over and above a baseline advantage of expected words. The present study added some additional controls in order to assess this possibility. The superior reportability of expected words was even greater in mixed arrays than in unmixed arrays, suggesting that expected words in mixed arrays attract attention. Following Johnston and Hawley (1994), the conflicting effects of expectancy on spontaneous attention are taken as further evidence that the mind/brain system is biased simultaneously toward both what it most expects and what it least expects to perceive.     

A COMPARISON OF TWO APPROACHES FOR IDENTIFYING REINFORCERS FOR PERSONS WITH SEVERE AND PROFOUND DISABILITIES

The development of effective training programs for persons with profound mental retardation remains one of the greatest challenges for behavior analysts working in the field of developmental disabilities. One significant advancement for this population has been the reinforcer assessment procedure developed by Pace, Ivancic, Edwards, Iwata, and Page (1985), which involves repeatedly presenting a variety of stimuli to the client and then measuring approach behaviors to differentiate preferred from nonpreferred stimuli. One potential limitation of this procedure is that some clients consistently approach most or all of the stimuli on each presentation, making it difficult to differentiate among these stimuli. In this study, we used a concurrent operants paradigm to compare the Pace et al. (1985) procedure with a modified procedure wherein clients were presented with two stimuli simultaneously and were given access only to the first stimulus approached. The results revealed that this forced-choice stimulus preference assessment resulted in greater differentiation among stimuli and better predicted which stimuli would result in higher levels of responding when presented contingently in a concurrent operants paradigm.