Disruption of proofreading by irrelevant speech: Effects of attention,arousal or memory?

A series of five experiments examined the effects of irrelevant speech on proofreading and memory. Four of the experiments used a proofreading task and showed that the deleterious effects of irrelevant speech: (1) depend on the speech being meaningful, (2) are only present when the burden on short-term memory is low and (3) are manifested in a lower detection rate for non-contextual as opposed to contextual errors. Neither the spatial location of the speech (either in terms of spatial dispersion of sources or spatial movement of a single source) nor the intensity of the speech (in a range bounded by 50 dB(A) and 70 dB(A)) had any effect on proofreading. Late selection models of attention are favoured by the results in preference to models having arousal, short-term memory or early selection in attention as their basis. A final experiment showed serial recall for visual lists to be impaired by the presence of any speech-like sound (including reversed speech and speech in an unfamiliar language) which suggests a set of phenomena qualitatively different from those associated with proofreading. Throughout the article the practical consequences of the findings are emphasized.     

Information processing,neuropsychological function,and the inherited predisposition to alcoholism

Sons of male alcoholics are at particularly heightened risk for the development of alcoholism. This heightened risk frequently appears in association with increased incidence of conduct disorder or hyperactivity, with deficits in abstract thinking and poor school performance, with abnormalities in cued psychophysiological response, and with increased sensitivity to the putatively stress-response-dampening effects of alcohol intoxication. This risk and its associated features are discussed within the context of a neuropsychological theory, predicated on the notions (1) that deficits in cognitive functions theoretically dependent upon the intact functioning of the prefrontal cortex could underlie manifestation of the idiosyncracies commonly attributed to sons of male alcoholics, and (2) that acute alcohol intoxication could relieve the subjective discomfort associated with the consequences of such deficits.     

Negative priming insame-different matching: Further evidence for a central locus of inhibition

Responses to recently ignored information may be slower or less accurate than responses to information not recently encountered. Such negative priming effects imply that the mechanism of selective attention operates on unattended, as well as attended, information. In the present experiment, subjects judged the second and fourth letters of five-letter strings (e.g., BABAB) as “same” or “different.” Responses were slower when a target letter was identical to the distractors presented in the immediately preceding trial. This effect did not depend on which response was required on the current or preceding trial. The results suggest that ignored information is functionally disconnected from the response system as a whole, rather than from a specific response.     

Affective interactions of depressed and nondepressed mothers and their children

The expressed affect of clinically depressed and nondepressed mothers as measured by the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia: Lifetime Version (SADSL) and their children (1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years) was observed in seminatural situations. The objectives were to investigate how maternal depression enters into affective interactions between mother and child and how the affect patterns of mother and child are related. Fortynine unipolar and 24 bipolar depressed mothers and 45 nondepressed mothers were observed on 2 days, 2 weeks apart, for a total of 5 h. Each minute was coded for the predominant affect of mother and child. Affects relevant to depression (anxioussad, irritableangry, downcast, pleasant, tenderaffectionate) were coded. Depressed mothers expressed significantly more negative affect than did control mothers. Mothers' expressed affect and their selfreports of affect on days of observation were unrelated. Mother's and child's affects, measured on different days, were significantly correlated. Unipolar mothers and mothers severely depressed spent significantly more time in prolonged bouts of negative affect. There was significant synchrony between their bouts and the negative bouts of their daughters. Gender of child was related to mother's and child's affect, and to relations between mother's and child's affect.     

The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective

This experiment examines how narrative context affects French subjects' selection of past imperfective (imparfait) vs. perfective inflections with different predicate types. Adults and 10-year-old children were asked to inflect verbs presented in their written infinitive form in two conditions: (a) in isolated sentences; (b) embedded in the beginning, middle, or end of narratives. Regardless of conditions, the adults rarely used theimparfait with punctual resultative predicates. In both conditions, the frequency ofimparfait was high with durative predicates, particularly with aresultative ones, but it varied with position in the narratives, being highest at the beginning and lowest at the end. Although the children also used the imparfait frequently with durative predicates, they overgeneralized it to punctual resultative ones, regardless of conditions and of positions. These results show that adult uses of the imperfective/perfective distinction are determined by both predicate properties and grounding in narrative context. The children are less sensitive to some predicate properties than the adults and they do not differentiate imperfective/perfective aspect consistently as a function of discourse context.     

The gender role journey measure: Scale development and psychometric evaluation

The Gender Role Journey concept was developed to help women and men explore their gender role changes and transitions. A 34-item Gender Role Journey Measure (GRJM) was conceptualized and developed through empirical methods. The construct validity of the five phases of the gender role journey is assessed. The GRJM and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) were given to a sample of women and men (N=878). The sample was predominantly Caucasian from a mixed ethnic background. Principle factor analysis indicated three meaningful factors: Acceptance of Traditional Gender Roles; Gender Role Ambivalence, Confusion, Anger, and Fear; and Personal-Professional Activism. Moderately high test-retest and internal consistency reliabilities were found for each of the factors. Gender differences and gender by PAQ interactions were found for all three of the factors of the GRJM. Implications for future research, teaching, and workshops are suggested.This article was presented at the 99th convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, California, August 1991. It was supported by a grant from the Research Foundation of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.     

Pessimistic explanatory style and response to illness

Previous studies have shown that a pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for illness, but the factors linking explanatory style and illness are unknown. One's characteristic response to poor health may mediate this relationship. Perhaps pessimistic individuals act helplessly in the face of their symptoms, thereby exacerbating disease. In the present study, we investigated this possibility by asking 96 young adults to complete measures of explanatory style, habitual response to illness, and ways of coping during their most recent episode of illness. Subjects who explain bad events pessimistically (with internal, stable, and global causes) reported more frequent illnesses during the past year and rated their overall health more poorly than those who habitually favor external, unstable, and specific explanations. When ill, the pessimistic subjects were less likely than their optimistic counterparts to take active steps to combat their illness. Our results suggest that one pathway leading from pessimistic explanatory style to poor health is mundane: passivity in the face of disease.     

Racial bias and the MCMI

We studied the scores obtained on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) by Black and White male psychiatric inpatients to determine the presence or absence of racial bias. In predicting psychopathology for the two races, comparisons of MCMI performance indicated significant differences for all diagnoses except the personality disorders. The subjects were then matched into two groups of 209 patients each, according to DSM-III psychiatric diagnoses. The data were analyzed at the item, scale, and structural levels. At the item level, application of the Mantel-Haenszel Procedure revealed that 45 of the 175 items of the inventory were answered significantly different by the two racial groups. Because this number was higher than what could be expected by chance, the finding suggested possible deficiencies in terms of the culture-fairness of the items used in the test. At the scale level, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) demonstrated that the scores obtained by the Black and White groups were significantly different in 9 of the 20 scales (Histrionic, Narcissistic, Antisocial, Paraphrenia, Hypomania, Dysthymia, Alcohol Abuse, Drug Abuse, and Psychotic Delusion). With the exception of the Dysthymic scale, all of the differences were in the direction of the Blacks obtaining a higher score than the Whites. At the structural level, however, a principal components factor analysis performed on each group resulted in factor structures that looked identical.     

Compensation for Jaw Fixation by Aphasic Patients

The ability to compensate for fixation of the jaw by a bite block was investigated in 6 nonfluent aphasics, 6 fluent aphasics, and 10 normal control subjects. Acoustic analyses of the vowels [i u a æ] and fricatives [s s] revealed substantial but incomplete compensation for the perturbation in all three subject groups. Perceptual identification scores and quality ratings by naive and phonetically trained listeners indicated poorer identification of the high vowels [i u] under compensatory conditions relative to normal production. Of particular interest was the fact that all three groups of subjects exhibited similar patterns of results. The findings suggest that any deficit in speech motor programming demonstrated by the nonfluent aphasic patients did not affect compensatory abilities. Results are discussed with respect to normal speech adaptation skills and the nature of articulatory breakdown in nonfluent aphasia.     

Minds and Bodies: Human and Divine

Does God have a mind? Western theism has traditionally construed God as an intentional agent who acts on creation and in relation to humankind. God loves, punishes, and redeems. God's intentionality has traditionally been construed in analogy to human intentionality, which in turn has often presumed a supernatural dualism. Developments in cognitive science, however, render supernatural dualism suspect for explaining the human mind. How, then, can we speak of the mind of God? Borrowing from Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, I suggest that analogical reasoning regarding the mind of God be abandoned in favor of an ontologically agnostic approach that treats God as an intentional system. In this approach, God's purposive action is an explanatory feature of the believer's universe, a real pattern that informs our values and beliefs about the world and our place in it.