Attributions of success and failure for actors and observers

Causal attributions of a person actually experiencing a success or failure (the actor) and someone who read about the situation (the observer) were compared. Results supported Jones and Nisbett (1971). Actors were relatively more likely to perceive their outcomes as caused by external factors (task difficulty), while observers attributed these outcomes more to internal factors (effort). Attributions for both actors and observers were also strongly affected by whether the outcome was a success or failure. Hypotheses concerning sex differences in attributions were not supported.     

The role of awareness in human conditioning

The cognitive view of human classical conditioning is that Ss are active in thinking about the pattern of stimulus events which occurs, the demands of the situation, and the kind of responses which they give. A question crucially central to conditioning theory is whether these thoughts and expectations determine conditional responding. This paper reports on two conditioning and personality experiments, employing the standard procedure of a single cue CS-UCS schedule and masking task, which assess awareness of stimulus contingencies and demand characteristics by means of a postexperimental questionnaire. Results were quite clear in showing no significant relationship between measures of awareness and eyelid conditioning.     

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.     

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.     

Side-to-side differences in overuse running injury susceptibility: a retrospective study

Despite the number of studies examining factors associated with overuse running injury, little is known about why an individual gets injured on a particular side of the body. Abnormal levels of several strength, structural, kinetic, and kinematic factors have been attributed to injury susceptibility. However, while most studies have compared the injured limb of injured runners to an arbitrary limb of healthy controls, there is some evidence to suggest that injury risk is related to characteristics on both sides of a runner. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how bilateral characteristics of strength, structural, kinetic, and kinematic factors relate to overuse injury. The first purpose was to compare these factors between the injured and uninjured limbs of runners with a history of injury on only one side of their bodies. The results showed that hip internal rotation range of motion and peak tibial acceleration were both elevated on the side with a history of injury. The second purpose was to compare asymmetry levels between the injured runners and runners who had never sustained a running-related injury. Asymmetry levels were similar between groups for all variables, which suggests that some level of asymmetry is normal. The final purpose of the study was to compare bilateral values of these factors between the injured and uninjured runners. The results showed that hip internal rotation range of motion, as well as the deviation from normal arch height index, were bilaterally elevated in the injured runners. Although peak tibial acceleration was different between sides of the injured runners, it was not bilaterally elevated compared to the uninjured runners. These results support the notion that injury risk may be related to risk factors on both sides.     

Aging affects acquisition and reversal of reward-based associative learning

Reward-based associative learning is mediated by a distributed network of brain regions that are dependent on the dopaminergic system. Age-related changes in key regions of this system, the striatum and the prefrontal cortex, may adversely affect the ability to use reward information for the guidance of behavior. The present study investigated the effects of healthy aging on different components of reward learning, such as acquisition, reversal, effects of reward magnitude, and transfer of learning. A group of 30 young (mean age = 24.2 yr) and a group of 30 older subjects (mean age = 64.1 yr) completed two probabilistic reward-based stimulus association learning tasks. Older subjects showed poorer overall acquisition and impaired reversal learning, as well as deficits in transfer learning. When only those subjects who showed evidence of significant learning were considered, younger subjects showed equivalently fast learning irrespective of reward magnitude, while learning curves in older subjects were steeper for high compared to low reward magnitudes. Acquired equivalence learning, which requires generalization across stimuli and transfer of learned contingencies to new stimuli, was mildly impaired in older subjects.