The selective impact of question form and input mode on the symbolic distance effect in children

Five experiments are reported on the symbolic distance effect (SDE) and related phenomena with 6- and 9-year-old children. In the first of these, children were asked to judge the relative sizes of animals in verbal and pictorial tests featuring the comparatives "bigger" and "smaller." A perceptual condition with actual objects was included by way of comparison. A Symbolic Distance Effect was obtained for both lexical and pictorial input. Mode differences were also observed. Pictures produced faster responses than words, and congruity effects occurred only in the pictorial condition. Although performance was similar in tests with either comparative, our subsequent experiments on both 6- and 9-year-olds reveal a significant asymmetry in the child's capacity to verify statements of relation as a function of the direction along the (size) continuum implied by the question. However, important differences between age groups also apparent in the data lead us to conclude that the older subjects develop strategies to overcome this asymmetry by translating certain statements of relation into a form more congruent with their natural modes of encoding.     

An educational-therapeutic group for drug and alcohol abusing combat veterans

Vietnam veterans have had a high incidence of substance abuse, resulting from attempts to control posttraumatic symptoms. Their recovery from drug and alcohol dependency has meant involvement in treatment for resolution of posttraumatic symptoms. The author found that the addition of a short-term educational-therapeutic group experience, focusing on the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, was helpful for the participants. They worked-through important war-related experiences via the following phases: (1) Breaking through detachment and establishing control over disruptive symptoms, (2) Revealing experiences of death and dehumanization (3) Describing the internal death of self experience, and (4) Beginning the grief response.     

The effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children

This study investigated the effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children. The sample consisted of 48 boys and 48 girls of Lebanese origin who were students in an elementary school in Beirut, Lebanon. After controlling for pre-experimental aggression, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: human-film aggression, cartoon-film aggression, neutral film, or real-life (act of war) aggression. The results indicated that boys as a group were more aggressive than girls and exhibited more imitative aggression after viewing both violent film and real-life violence. Girls were not more violent after viewing filmed aggression but were affected by the real-life violence. Comparisons of Bandura's work within the Lebanese culture are made.     

Discriminating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic blacks and whites on the MMPI

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of race (black, white) on the MMPI performance of alcoholic and nonalcoholic inpatients. Subjects were 73 (27 black, 46 white) male alcoholic inpatients and 73 (27 black, 46 white) male nonalcoholic psychiatric inpatients. While black and white alcoholics failed to differ on the MMPI, white alcoholics presented as less disturbed and black alcoholics as less defensive and distressed, compared to their respective nonalcoholic counterparts. Furthermore, only white alcoholics were accurately identified by the MMPI 2-4/4-2 high-point pair combination and only white alcoholics achieved more high-point pairs containing Scale 4 relative to nonalcoholic controls.     

Sweet sorrow: the color-shading response in an adult cystic fibrosis population

Research on the color-shading response on the Rorschach has been limited previously to its use as a predictor of suicide. The theoretical understanding of this response was addressed by some of the major Rorschach authors. Adult cystic fibrosis patients were administered a battery of psychological tests, including the Rorschach. While these patients face a premature death, none of these patients were suicidal. A higher than usual incidence of color-shading responses occurred. Rapaport's hypothesis that the color-shading response is an expression of a simultaneously conflicting emotion, or similar to "sweet sorrow," was suggested as a possible hypothesis.     

Multidimensional assessment of depression

A brief version of the Multiscore Depression Inventory was evaluated. Good coefficient alpha and test-retest reliabilities were obtained for the total score and the subscales. Two factor analyses were reported which appear to justify the use of a multiscore approach for at least 8 of the 9 subscales: helplessness, energy level, guilt, social introversion, cognitive difficulty, irritability, pessimism, and low self-esteem. Sad mood apparently overlapped with energy level on one analysis (replicating findings with the 118-item Multiscore Depression Inventory), and with self-esteem on the second analysis. Normative data are provided on diverse samples totaling 849 subjects.     

Attitude accessibility following a self-perception process

Self-perception processes have been postulated to occur only to the extent that initial attitudes are weak. The present research asked whether the outcome of such a process is a strengthening of the attitude in question. Two experiments investigated the accessibility of attitudes from memory following self-inference from behavior. Experiment 1 examined the consequence for attitude accessibility of reviewing and considering previously performed religious behaviors that were recent and primarily unmanded versus distant in time and "manded" in nature. Experiment 2 involved the performance of a new behavior that was either required or freely chosen. In each case, control subjects either did not review prior behaviors or did not perform a new behavior. In both experiments, attitude accessibility, as measured by the latency of response to attitudinal inquiries, was enhanced by the consideration or performance of unmanded behavior, but not by manded behavior. The relevance of this finding to issues regarding attitude-behavior consistency and attitudinal persistence is discussed.     

Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment

It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.     

Task-related arousal of type A and type B persons: level of challenge and response specificity

To determine whether different levels of challenge had differential effects on the arousal levels of Type A and Type B persons, 30 Type A and 30 Type B male subjects worked on an intelligence test task (digits backwards recall) that was easy, moderately difficult, or extremely difficult. Arousal was measured in terms of systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, pulse rate, pulse volume, skin resistance, and subjective arousal. Results indicated that while working on the extremely difficult task, the Type A subjects evidenced reliably higher systolic blood pressure than did the Type B subjects (p = 0.1; difference = 7.52 mm of Hg) and that there were not reliable differences between the subjects in systolic blood pressure at other levels of challenge or on other measures of arousal.