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.     

Prediction of facial displays from knowledge of norms of emotional expressiveness

A study was conducted to examine the accuracy of prediction of facial expressiveness from knowledge of the norms of expressiveness in same-sex and mixed-sex social interactions. Men and women subjects were videotaped while they viewed emotionally loaded stimulus slides and rated their responses to them. The edited videotapes were shown to judges who attempted to identify the emotion reported by each viewer for each slide. A separate group of subjects was asked to rate how acceptable or appropriate it is for a man or a woman to express each target emotion under the conditions of the slide-viewing study. The accuracy of emotion identification data correlated highly with acceptability ratings across emotions and sex pairings, although examined more closely, the data show this predictability only for same-sex pairings. Alternative explanations for these results in terms of display rules and the social demands of interactions are discussed.The authors wish to thank Alan Fridlund for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.     

When Courtship Persistence Becomes Intrusive Pursuit: Comparing Rejecter and Pursuer Perspectives of Unrequited Attraction

Two hundred forty-one undergraduates described their experiences with unrequited love, both as pursuers (actors) and love interests (targets). As expected, targets and actors perspectives differed. As targets, participants reported being on the receiving end of more unwanted courtship tactics, violent and nonviolent, than they reported using as pursuers. Further, participants in the actor role—particularly men—tended to overreport receiving signals that their love interest was reciprocating, and to underreport receiving rejections. Meanwhile, targets—particularly women—claimed numerous attempts to reject, including explicitly stating “I am definitely not interested in you,” and indicated minimal positive reactions to the unwanted pursuit. Implications of these differences, and others, in perspectives for understanding difficulties in differentiating persistence from stalking are discussed.     

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.     

Convergence among multiple methods of measuring positivity and negativity in the family environment: relation to depression in mothers and their children

The present study addressed the following questions: (a) To what extent do different methods of measuring the family environment converge onto a single latent construct? (b) How are the constructs of positive and of negative family environment related? (c) Do the associations among various methods of measuring the family environment differ as a function of children's gender or of risk? and (d) How are the latent constructs of family environment related to depression in mothers and their children? Participants were 240 children (mean age = 11.86 years, SD = 0.57) and their mothers, who varied with regard to their history of depression. Family environment was measured with self-report questionnaires completed separately by mothers and by children, observations of mother-child interactions, and a 5-min speech sample of each mother talking about her child. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that different methods for assessment of the family environment converged and that the constructs of positive and of negative family environments were significantly related to each other and to depression in both mothers and their children. These findings may help inform future intervention efforts by highlighting specific parenting dimensions that are strongly associated with maternal and with child depression.     

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.     

Predictors of Categorical At‐Risk High School Dropouts

The authors attempted to identify key contributing factors to school dropout among 3 categories of at‐risk students: those with low grade point averages, those who had been suspended, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Logistic regression analysis of the data, which were derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth‐1997 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002) indicated that student dropout rates were affected differently by students' membership in the 3 at‐risk categories.