Heroes and heroines among American adolescents

Based upon the analysis of questionnaire responses of 1092 high school students, an attempt was made to assess the type of heroes and heroines most often chosen. The major findings are that high school students have more heroes than heroines, that they have an approximately equal number of personal heroes and heroines, and that the preference for heroes is not altered when the sex or race of the respondents is considered. The findings are explained both by the greater numbers of males than females in public professional roles and by the greater salience of male than female professional role models. Implications of the possible effects of hero and heroine choices for sex-role identification are discussed.     

BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT FOR PEDIATRIC INTENSIVE CARE UNITS1

Two studies were conducted to analyze behaviors of staff and patients on a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). In the first study, behavioral observation procedures were employed to assess patient state, physical position, affect, verbal behaviors, visual attention and activity engagement, and staff verbal behavior. On the average, one-third of the patients were judged to be conscious and alert but markedly nonengaged with their environment. In the second study, a member of the hospital staff provided alert patients with individual activities to determine whether a simple environmental manipulation could positively affect behavior of children in intensive care. Employing a reversal design, the activity intervention was found to increase attention and engagement and positive affect, and to decrease inappropriate behavior. Both studies demonstrate that behavioral assessment procedures can provide an empirical basis for designing PICU routines affecting children's psychosocial status, and, thus, complement current procedures designed to provide quality medical care.     

The effects of conditioning and novelty on the rat's analgesic and pyretic responses to morphine

Six experiments with rat subjects investigated the role of conditioning in morphine tolerance. Concurrent assessments of body temperature and pain sensitivity were conducted. Experience with morphine produced tolerance to its analgesic effects but enhancement of its hyperthermic effects. Environmental novelty enhanced analgesia but not body temperature (Experiments 1 and 4). Under conditions in which a discriminated hyperthermic CR provided clear evidence that morphine-environment learning had developed, discriminated analgesic tolerance was not obtained (Experiments 2 and 3). Similarly, whereas placebo administrations extinguished the hyperthermic CR (Experiments 4 and 6), analgesic tolerance remained unaffected (Experiments 4, 5, and 6). These experiments suggest that the pyretic and analgesic systems are differentially sensitive to conditioning and the effects of novelty.     

Response and encoding factors in “ignoring” irrelevant information

Subjects classified either the numerosity or numeric value of elements in successive stimulus displays. In separate experiments, responses were indicated by oral naming, card sorting, manual tapping, and oral “tapping.” Incongruent levels of numeric value slowed naming and sorting, but not tapping, when numerosity was the cue for responding. Incongruent numerosity slowed tapping, but not naming and sorting, when numeric value was the cue. Changes in stimulus response mapping may thus critically alter the ability to ignore an irrelevant stimulus dimension.     

Assessment of human obesity: The measurement of body composition

The most common methods of assessing degree of obesity in humans are reviewed. These include anthropometry, somatotyping, bodyweight, skinfold calipering, densitometry, and several nondensitometric procedures. The evidence suggests that bodyweight may often be an unreliable and invalid index of obesity. The parameters influencing its inaccuracy are discussed. These include age, height, sex, muscularity, and degree of obesity or amount of recent weight loss. The most reliable and valid measures of human bodyfat are generally the most complicated and impractical. Compromise assessment procedures involving nonintrusive measurement of subcutaneous fat and selected anthropometric dimensions may offer an incomplete but welcome improvement over sole reliance on bodyweight as an index of obesity.     

A preparation for the experimental analysis of human cigarette smoking behavior

A preparation for the experimental analysis of cigarette smoking is described in detail. The preparation permits the intensive study of cigarette smoking in individual subjects under controlled laboratory conditions. A variety of behavioral and physiological measures used include rate and pattern of puffing, duration of each puff, time spent smoking cigarettes, expired air carbon monoxide levels, cigarette butt weights, and subjective rating scales of various aspects of smoking. The preparation is reliable and permits relatively unobtrusive monitoring of smoking performance. Cigarette smoking occurs in orderly patterns, within subjects; it varies as a function of number of cigarettes provided and hours of smoking deprivation.     

Reactions of college recruiters to interviewee sex and self-presentation style

College recruiters evaluated the qualifications and employability of either a male or a female applicant for a supervisory position. Half the recruiters in the experiment viewed a videotape of the candidate presenting himself or herself in a passive manner. The other half of the recruiters viewed a moderately aggressive interviewee. Contrary to the hypotheses, the moderately aggressive female was rated as favorably as the moderately aggressive male and the passive male was rated as negatively as the passive female. Although recruiters were as willing to hire a moderately aggressive male as they were the moderately aggressive female, they perceived the female's overall qualifications and her experience/training as superior to that of the male's.     

Positive contrast following gradual and abrupt increases in reward magnitude using delay of reinforcement

In Experiment 1, rats were given a 1-pellet reward for 48 preshift trials. During a subsequent 20-trial postshift phase, one group was shifted to a 12-pellet reward on Trial 1, a second was shifted on Trial 11, and a third was given 1 more pellet each trial and then 12 pellets for the last 10 trials. The speeds of all three groups increased to a level above that of a control group given a 12-pellet food reward throughout training (positive contrast). In experiment 2, rats were shifted from 1 to 12 pellets either gradually or abruptly following either abbreviated training (9 trials) or extended training (20 trials). One group of control subjects received 12 pellets throughout training. The results revealed a positive contrast effect for gradually shifted subjects following extended training but not following abbreviated training. The abrupt shift procedure produced positive contrast following abbreviated training but only a marginal effect following extended training. These results indicate that, contingent upon the amount of preshift training, either gradual or abrupt reward increases may produce positive contrast.     

Monaural right-ear advantage in a target-identification task

Subjects were monaurally presented with consonant—vowel syllables to the right or left ear, with or without simultaneous noise to the other ear. The subject's task on each trial was to indicate whether or not the item presented was the target item /ba/. A right-ear advantage in reaction time was obtained: 14 msec for target items, 6 msec for nontarget items. The size of this effect was comparable in the presence vs. absence of competing noise. No consistent individual differences were found in the size of the right-ear advantage for this task, although such differences were obtained in a dichotic-perception pretest.It is argued that data of this type do not permit inferences about the use of particular ear/hemisphere neural pathways.