Some effects of sex-linked clothing and gender schema on the stereotyping of infants

Two predictions were evaluated: first, that given minimal information about an infant, individuals would use sex-related cues (i.e., clothing) to categorize, evaluate, and make attributions about the infant, and second, that gender schematic individuals would be more likely than gender aschematic individuals to use such sex-related cues. On the basis of the Bem Sex Role Inventory, American college students were classified as either gender schematic (masculine or feminine) or gender aschematic (undifferentiated or androgynous). The students categorized, evaluated, and made trait attributions about an infant dressed in male, female, or ambiguous clothing. Both gender schematic and gender aschematic individuals relied on sex-related cues in their perceptions of the infant.     

Detection of conscious deception using the Child Abuse Potential Inventory lie scale

Two studies were conducted to provide data on the construct validity of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory lie scale. In Study One, 187 male and female undergraduate students were administered either the Child Abuse Potential Inventory, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, or the Unlikely Virtues Scale. Three instructional sets were provided: respond honestly, distort responses in a positive manner, and distort responses in a negative manner. Each scale successfully discriminated between subjects in the honest and faking good conditions. Only the Marlowe-Crowne scale discriminated subjects in the faking bad condition through their low scores. No gender differences were observed as a function of instructional set or test employed. In Study Two, 31 male and female parents were given the CAP-Inventory under the same instructional sets provided in Study One. The findings for the parent group, the population the CAP-Inventory was designed to be employed with, replicated the results found in Study One.     

A factor analysis of the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory using an alcoholic population

The present study reports a factor analysis of the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory using 103 alcoholic men. Kirton in 1976 and we in an unpublished work in 1986 noted identical factor structures when responses from nonalcoholic populations to the inventory were factor analyzed. Recent reviews regarding personality characteristics of alcoholics suggest characteristics similar to the adaption-innovation concepts of Kirton. This factor analysis for an alcoholic sample supports the validity of the inventory as a measure of problem-solving style of alcoholics.     

Reference frames in mental rotation

Four experiments are reported that investigate whether images or reference frames are transformed during a mental rotation task. In all experiments a display of four identical letters (P1) was presented at either +90 degrees or -90 degrees from upright, and subjects had to decide whether the letters were normal or mirror-image reflections. A single letter (P2) was then presented 100 ms later in a variable orientation with the same task instructions. Reaction times to P2 were assessed to determine whether an image of P2 was rotated to upright or whether an internal reference frame was rotated into congruence with P2 from the orientation of P1. The results as a whole suggest that transformations of P2 can be initiated either relative to upright or relative to the orientation of P1. They further indicate that the probability of using each reference orientation can be changed by procedural variations. The findings are most parsimoniously interpreted as suggesting that mental rotation involves the transformation of reference frames rather than the transformation of template-like representations.     

The degree of control exerted by phobic and non-phobic verbal stimuli over the recognition behaviour of phobic and non-phobic subjects

Four groups of subjects comprised of one control group, two analogue phobic groups and one clinical phobic group were exposed to a dichotic listening experiment in which they were required both to shadow one message to the exclusion of the other and recognize the occurrence of target words appearing in both the attended and rejected messages. Target words were either phobic-relevant or neutral. It was found that the clinical phobic group recognized significantly more target words than any of the other groups. This difference was due to their superior recognition of phobic-relevant targets from the rejected message. The results were interpreted within a combined framework of Staats's (1968, 1975) social behaviour theory and the Rescorla and Wagner (1972) model of classical conditioning.     

Concurrent-schedule performance in dairy cows: persistent undermatching.

Performance of dairy cows responding under concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules of food delivery was examined, with results analyzed in terms of the generalized matching equation. In Experiment 1, bias measures indicated that crushed barley was preferred over meatmeal when these foods were available under the alternative schedules. For whole-session data, substantial undermatching of response and time-allocation ratios to obtained reinforcement ratios was evident. Postreinforcement pause time ratios approximately matched obtained reinforcement rates. Subtracting these times from total time-allocation values yielded net time-allocation ratios that undermatched obtained reinforcement ratios to a greater degree than did whole-session time-allocation ratios. In Experiment 2, substantial undermatching was evident when the same foods (hay for 2 cows, crushed barley for 2 others) were available under the alternative schedules. Food-related activities and other defined behavior not related to food were quantified by direct observation, and were found to occupy a substantial proportion (roughly 40% to 80%) of experimental sessions. Subtracting the time spent in these activities from the time allocated to each component schedule did not reduce the degree of undermatching obtained. Across all conditions in both experiments, slopes of regression lines relating behavioral outputs to environmental inputs characteristically were below 0.6, which agrees with prior findings and suggests that, contrary to suggestions in the literature, undermatching in dairy cows is not the result of using different foods under alternative schedules or differential pausing under those schedules.     

READING SKILL AND SUPPRESSION REVISITED

Abstract— In a previous issue of Psychological Science, we (Gernsbacher, 1993) reported that less skilled readers are less able than more skilled readers to quickly suppress irrelevant information (e.g., the contextually inappropriate meaning of a homonym, such as the playing-card meaning of spade, in the sentence He dug with the spade, or the inappropriate form of a homophone, such as patience, in the sentence He had lots of patients). In the current research, we investigated a ramification of that finding. If less skilled readers are less able to suppress a contextually inappropriate meaning of a homonym, perhaps less skilled readers might be better than more skilled readers at comprehending puns. However, intuition and previous research suggest the contrary, as do the results of the research presented here. On a task that required accepting, rather than rejecting, a meaning of a homonym that was not implied by the sentence context, more skilled readers responded more rapidly than less skilled readers. In contrast, on a task that required accepting a meaning of a homonym that was implied by the sentence context, more and less skilled readers performed equally well. We conclude that more skilled readers are more able to rapidly accept inappropriate meanings of homonyms because they are more skilled at suppression (which in this case involves suppressing the appropriate meanings).