Attributing Responsibility to Female Victims After Exposure to Sexually Violent Films1

We investigate the possibility that the degree to which female abuse victims are held accountable by other women who have been exposed to sexually violent mass media is primarily dependent upon 3 factors: situational relevance, personal similarity, and emotional arousal. Female subjects participated in an experiment. Factors were: film dose; film viewing/victim judgment time interval; victim-subject similarity; and situational relevance of the assault. The results showed less attribution of responsibility to similar victims and high attributions of responsibility to dissimilar victims in the personally relevant assault situation (rape). Women identified least with dissimilar rape victims and most with similar victims when they had not been desensitized. When subjects were desensitized, the defensive attribution effect failed to emerge. There was also a significant tendency among low film dose subjects to perceive more psychological injury and to attribute more distress to the victim than among high film dose subjects.     

Conditional discrimination in mentally retarded adults: the development of generalized skills.

The development of generalized conditional discrimination skills was examined in adults with retardation. Two subjects with histories of failure to acquire arbitrary matching under trial-and-error procedures were successful under procedures that trained one or more prerequisite skills. The successive discrimination between the sample stimuli was established by training the subjects to name the stimuli. The simultaneous discrimination between the comparison stimuli was established using either (a) standard simple discrimination training with reversals or (b) a procedure in which each of the two sample-comparison relations in the conditional discrimination was presented in blocks of trials, with the size of the blocks decreasing gradually until sample presentation was randomized. The amount of prerequisite training required varied across subjects and across successive conditional discriminations. After acquiring either two or three conditional discriminations with component training, both subjects learned new conditional discriminations under trial-and-error procedures. In general, each successive conditional discrimination was acquired more rapidly. Tests showed that conditional responding had become a generalized skill. Symmetry was shown for almost all trained relations. Symmetry trial samples were ultimately named the same as the stimuli to which they were related in training.     

The impact of generic word choices: An empirical investigation of age- and sex-related differences

Previous studies of receivers' responses to generic words have found that adults generally develop masculine imagery for neutral words and that men do this more than women. The present investigation of school-aged children (n=471) found that they, like adults, develop sex-specific masculine imagery in response to apparently neutral messages. Early adolescents, however, reported significantly more inclusive imagery than 6–7-year-olds. Different pronoun conditions elicited different mental imagery for the receivers of the messages with he/she eliciting more of a balance between male and female images and they eliciting more inclusive imagery.This work was supported by a grant from the Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne Research and Instructional Development Support Program.     

Four process studies in the behavioral treatment of chronic headache

Four studies of ‘process’ variables in the behavioral treatment of chronic headache are examined. No relation between headache activity-level reduction and therapist variables such as level of experience (study 1) or warmth, competence or helpfulness as perceived by the patient (Study 2) was found from treatments using relaxation training and/or biofeedback. A significant relation was found, however, between regularity of relaxation practice at home (Study 4) and headache-activity reduction and between regularity of showing some degree of hand warming in thermal biofeedback treatment for vascular headache and headache activity-level reduction (Study 3). Finally, no relation was found between changes in EMG and headache activity-level for tension-headache sufferers treated with frontal EMG biofeedback.     

“Higher” and “lower”: Comparative and categorical interpretations by children

Three-, four-, and five-year-old children's categorical and comparative understanding of high and low were examined in two experiments. Categorical knowledge was assessed by presenting subjects with a single object at varying heights (from 0 to five feet above the ground), and asking if the object was high or low. Comparative understanding of the terms was assessed by showing children two objects at a time and asking which was higher or lower. We observed two patterns of performance in children's categorical treatments: younger children in particular defined disjoint categories for high and low such that they only labelled the extreme heights as high or low, and maintained that middle heights were neither high nor low. Older children defined either-or categories such that all heights were labelled either high or low. We also found that children who defined either-or categories made correct comparative judgments across the entire range of variation whereas children who defined disjoint categories could only judge which of two objects was higher if the objects were not low (at 0 and 1 feet) and which of the objects was lower if the objects were not high (at 4 and 5 feet). The results were interpreted as reflecting a lack of appreciation that the terms are interdefined as negations of each other, and were discussed in terms of the similar semantic-congruity effects found in adults.     

Relationship between conjugate lateral eye movements, brain organization, and cognitive style

The relationship between individual differences in conjugate lateral eye movements (CLEMs) and inferential reasoning was investigated in two experiments. Subjects were given inference tasks in sentence and pictorial form and were later tested for recognition of correct inferences as well as literal recognition of the acquisition items. In Experiment 2, for example, subjects were given logical syllogisms during acquisition. Theoretically, right-eye movement/left-hemispheric (REM/LH) subjects should have excelled at this highly logical task but no significant differences between eye-movement groups were found. However, support for previous research showing the moderating effects of gender on hemispheric activation (measured by CLEMs) and hemispheric competence came from the memory data of Experiment 2. These data indicated that male REM/LH subjects recognized more acquisition sentences than the other eye movement/gender groups. It was suggested CLEMs and other measures of hemispheric activation and competence, coupled with data collected using complex cognitive tasks, can eventually lead to explanatory brain models of cognitive processing.