Social Dominance Orientation, Hierarchy Attenuators and Hierarchy Enhancers: Social Dominance Theory and the Criminal Justice System

This study investigated differences in social dominance orientation between incumbents of different social roles (police officers vs. public defenders) and ethnic groups known to differ in general social status (i.e., whites vs. blacks and Hispanics). Consistent with theoretical expectations: (a) Police were significantly more social-dominance oriented than either jurors or public defenders. (b) Public defenders tended to be less social-dominance oriented than jurors. (c) Euro-Americans were significantly more social dominance oriented than Afro- and Hispanic-Americans, (d) Euro-American police officers had, by far, the highest levels of social dominance orientation. Furthermore, all of the effects above held even when controlling for demographic factors such as gender, social class, age, education, and ethnic group. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Loomingness and the Fear of AIDS: Perceptions of Motion and Menace

The authors examined the role of "perceived loomingness" in fear of HIV. Perceived loomingness refers to perceptions of rapid forward movement and instantaneous changes in the distance and danger of a potential threat (Riskind, 1992). One hundred and twenty undergraduates rated vignettes of two public encounters with an HIV-positive stranger. High-HIV fear subjects perceived greater loomingness and danger in these vignettes than did low-HIV fear subjects. Regression analyses that tested for a mediated model confirmed that the perceptions of loomingness may spark threat cognitions (such as the probability and imminence of harm), which, in turn, lead to fear. As predicted by the harm-looming model, loomingness also had some effects on fear that were not mediated by such standard threat cognitions.     

ANALYZING ALERTNESS AMONG PEOPLE WITH PROFOUND MULTIPLE DISABILITIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR PROVISION OF TRAINING

We investigated whether variations in alertness among individuals with profound multiple disabilities affected subsequent responsiveness to training programs. Three experiments were conducted involving 5 people. In Experiment 1, results indicated that alertness of 3 individuals increased with provision of skill-acquisition training programs. Results also indicated no predictive relationship between alertness levels prior to training and subsequent responsiveness to training. Experiment 2 replicated results of Experiment 1 with 2 participants from Experiment 1 and an additional participant. Results of Experiment 2 also indicated that the increased alertness levels accompanying provision of training were not a function of the participants simply being in an inactive environment prior to training. Results of Experiment 3 indicated that alertness of an additional participant increased through provision of another training intervention, involving a systematic preference assessment. Responses during the preference assessment appeared to be unrelated to previously existing alertness levels. These findings suggest the need for caution when considering the withholding of scheduled training because an individual appears to be nonalert.     

Jurors' Decisions in Trials of Battered Women Who Kill: The Role of Prior Beliefs and Expert Testimony1

The present research explored the influence of four factors on mock jurors' decisions in a homicide trial involving a battered woman who killed her abusive husband: (a) jurors' preexisting beliefs about wife abuse, (b) the presence of expert testimony on the battered woman syndrome, (c) jurors' beliefs in a just world, and (d) gender. Mock jurors listened to a trial involving a woman who had killed her abuser, which either contained expert testimony or did not, and then rendered various judgments about the case. Results indicated that those individuals who were more informed about the dynamics of abuse and those exposed to the expert testimony, compared to their respective counterparts, were more believing of the battered woman's account of what occurred. In general, weak believers in a just world were more lenient in their judgments, with verdicts of not guilty being associated with weaker beliefs in a just world than guilty verdicts. Weak believers in a just world also felt that the expert testimony applied more to the defendant than did strong believers. Finally, women who were weak believers in a just world were less likely to hold the defendant responsible for the events and to be more informed about the dynamics of abuse following the experiment.     

Cotherapy treatment of phobias: A case study

A case study is presented of the treatment of a woman who had suffered from claustrophobia for over 13 years, by cotherapists using a combination of desensitization and flooding techniques. By assuming specific roles, the therapists expedited the therapeutic process to a successful conclusion in a brief period of time.     

Partial visual feedback and spatial end-point accuracy of discrete aiming movements

Five experiments are reported in which the effect of partial visual feedback on the accuracy of discrete target aiming was investigated. Visual feedback was manipulated through a spectacle-mounted liquid-crystal tachistoscope. The length of the visual feedback interval was varied as a percentage of the instructed movement time. In Experiment 1, the length of the vision interval was manipulated symmetrically at the beginning- and end-phase of the movement, whereas in the remaining experiments, the vision time was varied with respect to the end-phase only. The variations at the end were examined for different distances (Experiment 2), different movement speeds at the same distance (Experiment 3), and in small interstep intervals (Experiment 4). A vision time of more than 150 ms at the end-phase of the movement enhanced aiming performance in all experiments. Longer vision times monotonously improved aiming accuracy; the fifth experiment showed that a vision time of about 275 ms was sufficient for near-perfect aiming. Furthermore, the significance of vision during the first phase of a movement was demonstrated again. The results of the five experiments pointed to shorter visuomotor processing times. To explain the beneficial effects of short vision times for aiming accuracy, we propose a model of visuomotor processing that is based on the stochastic optimized submovement model of Meyer, Abrams, Kornblum, Wright, and Smith (1988).     

Motor skill acquisition and retention as a function of average feedback, summary feedback, and performance variability

Summary feedback involves withholding feedback from subjects until the last trial in a block is completed, and then presenting feedback about each trial. A variation of this method, called average feedback (Young & Schmidt, 1992), presents subjects with only the mean of the trial block. We investigated whether these methods have similar effects on acquisition and retention of a simple motor skill. Five groups of subjects (n = 16 per group) performed 60 acquisition trials of an aiming task involving both spatial and temporal accuracy. We presented average and summary feedback based on either 5-trial blocks or 15-trial blocks and compared these schedules with every-trial feedback. During acquisition, all groups improved with practice, with a slight tendency for the every-trial condition to have less absolute error than the longer summary and average conditions. Analysis of delayed no-feedback retention tests, however, revealed a strong advantage for the 5-trial summary and average conditions compared with the every-trial condition. In addition, we found that for long blocks of acquisition trials without augmented feedback, the performance variability of those trials was associated with retention performance. Results are discussed in terms of how these different manipulations may make feedback less useful during acquisition, but foster the use of certain information processing activities that enhance overall learning.     

One Personality, Multiple Selves: Integrating Personality and Social Roles

ABSTRACT How do people maintain multiple, role-specific self-conceptions as well as a consistent sense of self? In a sample of middle-aged women, we examined three issues: (a) the ways in which people view themselves as both different and similar across social roles (e.g., parent, friend, worker), (b) how role-specific self-conceptions and general self-conceptions are related, and (c) the merits of predicting role-specific criteria from role-specific and general self-conceptions. Results showed that subjects' self-conceptions were specific to role contexts, yet highly correlated across those same role contexts. In addition, role-specific self-conceptions were more similar to the general self-concept for roles with which the individual was more satisfied. Finally, as predicted from the bandwidth-fidelity trade-off, ratings of the general self correlated moderately with outcomes across all role domains, whereas ratings of role-specific self-conceptions correlated strongly with outcomes for the same role, but not in other roles.