PERSONAL SPACE AMONGST ARABS AND AMERICANS*

Personal space zones were examined amongst Arab and American university students by jointly varying degree of acquaintanceship and sex of subject. Overall, there were few differences between Arab and American males. Arab females, however, showed dramatic differences in comparison to American males and females and to Arab males. Arab females kept male friends very far away relative to female friends. Indeed, male friends were kept almost as far away as male strangers.     

Effects of Perceived Group Effectiveness and Group Role on Attributions of Group Performance1

Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy completed a questionnaire describing their experiences in Cadet Basic Training (CBT) and Cadet Field Training (CFT). Analyses of variance examined the impact of Group Role (Leader vs. Follower) and Perceived Group Effectiveness (High vs. Low) on group member perceptions of the extent to which each of six factors affected group performance. Significant main effects for Perceived Effectiveness were interpreted in terms of the egodefensive bias. Role main effects indicated that leaders tended to make stronger dispositional attributions than did followers. There were no signifcant Group Role × Perceived Effectiveness interaction effects. Findings support, in part, hypotheses concerning the operation of an attributional bias within the leader-member relationship.     

Dual hemispheric processing in a letter matching task

It has been reported that performance on recognition, detection, and matching tasks is enhanced if stimuli are projected to both sides of the visual field rather than to one side alone (Dimond, 1972). The present study investigated the claim that this phenomenon is due to the distribution of the burden of perceptual processing between the hemispheres. Three experiments were carried out using a matching paradigm in which RT and response errors were recorded. In all experiments, subjects were required to match two letters that were displayed separately on either side of a central fixation point (bilateral presentation) or were displayed together on the same side of the visual field (unilateral presentation). It was found that although lateral interference between adjacent stimuli was significantly implicated in the phenomenon, a strong residual effect, which could be tentatively ascribed to hemispheric mechanisms, remained in relation to letter name matches. It is argued that a model based on parallel hemispheric decision processes provides a better account of the data than does one based upon the notion of distributed perceptual processing.     

Stability and Change in Type A Components and Cardiovascular Reactivity in Medical Students During Periods of Academic Stress1

This study examined the effects of academic stress upon components of Type A behavior and cardiovascular reactivity. In a longitudinal design, heart rate and blood pressure responses to the Type A Structured Interview (SI) and additional laboratory challenges were measured in medical students at three points during an academic semester. Sessions 1 and 3 were scheduled during vacation periods; Session 2 took place during an intensive examination week. Results indicated that three “stylistic” components of Pattern A derived from the SI—loud and explosive speech, short response latency, and potential for hostility—increased significantly during the exam period. Similar increases achieved marginal significance for another stylistic component, rapid and accelerated speech. By contrast, global Type A assessments did not increase with academic demands. Cardiovascular reactivity was significantly but only moderately stable across the three sessions, showing less consistency than has been reported in previous research. In addition, there was little evidence in this study that cardiovascular reactivity was potentiated by academic stress or by Type A behavior. These results demonstrate the influence of naturalistic environmental factors on overt behavioral components that have recently been suggested as coronary risk factors. Therefore, it is advisable for future experimental and epidemiological research to examine the social and environmental context in which these behaviors occur.     

Psychoanalytic training and its effect on the candidate's clinical work

This paper explores the effects of the psychoanalytic candidate's role, supervision, training analysis, office setting, and emerging professional identity on his clinical work. The strains associated with institute candidacy and how these may be perceived by patients are explored. The author suggests that further study of the process of becoming an analyst could ultimately improve training.     

Perceptual normalization of vowels produced by sinusoidal voices

When listeners hear a sinusoidal replica of a sentence, they perceive linguistic properties despite the absence of short-time acoustic components typical of vocal signals. Is this accomplished by a postperceptual strategy that accommodates the anomalous acoustic pattern ad hoc, or is a sinusoidal sentence understood by the ordinary means of speech perception? If listeners treat sinusoidal signals as speech signals however unlike speech they may be, then perception should exhibit the commonplace sensitivity to the dimensions of the originating vocal tract. The present study, employing sinusoidal signals, raised this issue by testing the identification of target /bVt/, or b-vowel-t, syllables occurring in sentences that differed in the range of frequency variation of their component tones. Vowel quality of target syllables was influenced by this acoustic correlate of vocal-tract scale, implying that the perception of these nonvocal signals includes a process of vocal-tract scale, implying that the perception of these nonvocal signals includes a process of vocal-tract normalization. Converging evidence suggests that the perception of sinusoidal vowels depends on the relation among component tones and not on the phonetic likeness of each tone in isolation. The findings support the general claim that sinusoidal replicas of natural speech signals are perceptible phonetically because they preserve time-varying information present in natural signals.