Effects of Computer Privacy on Help-Seeking1

Subjects (N= 28) performing a complex disjunctive concept-formation task on a microcomputer were given the opportunity to seek help following failure to correctly identify concepts. The proportion of those seeking help was significantly greater when the source of help was the computer itself (86%) rather than another person (36%). Consistent with past research, those who did not ask for help gave reasons other than the potential negative social consequences of doing so. Self-report data and a systematic test for the presence of experimenter-induced demand ruled out several possible sources of confounding. The results have implications for designers of time-sharing and networked computer systems.     

Disarmament Decisions as Social Dilemmas1

The individual deciding on a nuclear weapons production policy is faced with a dilemma in which a choice must be made to support one of several conflicting defense policies. In order to investigate the social-psychological variables that are related to armament policy decision making, a telephone survey was conducted in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Adult subjects (N= 110) responded to questions concerned with cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional responses to nuclear arms. Participants were also asked to choose a weapons production policy for the United States under conditions of continued and decreased Soviet nuclear arms production. Results indicated that respondents decisions about nuclear weapons production were related to their support for deterrence, the availability of their nuclear-related images, their emotional response to nuclear war, their attributions of responsibility for the prevention of nuclear war, and their political party affiliation. Distinctions between antinuclear decision-makers and pronuclear decision-makers are discussed.     

The effects of contextual information and gender on the prediction of hypnotic susceptibility

Council, Kirsch, and Hafner (1986) obtained empirical support for the hypothesis that significant correlations between questionnaire measures of absorption and hypnotic susceptibility are an artifact of subjects' beliefs about their own hypnotizability. We tested this hypothesis in a two-session experiment. During Session 1, subjects completed questionnaire measures of absorption, mystical experience, daydreaming frequency, and paranormal beliefs. During Session 2, subjects were tested for hypnotic susceptibility. Subjects were also exposed to one of three information manipulations: They were told about hypnotic testing either before or after filling out the questionnaires or were not told about hypnotic testing. The information manipulation moderated the prediction of susceptibility by the questionnaire measures for women, but not for men. For women, scores on the absorption questionnaire predicted susceptibility only when subjects were informed about hypnotic testing. In the told-after condition, this effect generalized to all of the remaining questionnaire measures. For men, none of the questionnaires was a reliable predictor of susceptibility.     

Conceptions of states and traits: dimensional attributes with ideals as prototypes

Traits and states are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others. We show that people view these concepts as prototype-based categories that have a graded internal structure and fuzzy boundaries and identify a set of attributes that define the prototypical cores of two categories: traits and states. Prototypical traits are stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. Prototypical states are temporary, brief, and caused by external circumstances. These prototypes are not defined by averages, as the family-resemblance principle would suggest, but by ideal (or extreme) attribute values. Like other ideal-based categories, traits and states serve particular goals. Trait concepts permit people to predict the present from the past; state concepts identify those behaviors that can be controlled by manipulating the situation. These two complementary schemas are part of the extensive theory of psychological causality that is implicit in language. Abstract social concepts differ from object categories in their category standards, the nature of their attributes, and the interrelations among those attributes.     

Some observations on control by spoken words in children's conditional discrimination and matching by exclusion

This study examined matching-to-sample procedures that might result in the emergence of conditional behavior never explicitly taught. Subjects were preschool children. Two pictures were displayed as comparisons on every trial, and samples were spoken words. In baseline training preceding each of three experiments, children learned to select pictures of a dog, a table, and a banana in response to their spoken English names. Thereafter, probe trials displayed novel comparisons with baseline comparisons: one novel comparison was displayed with the dog and another with the table. The three experiments differed primarily in the nature of the samples presented on probe trials. In Experiment 1, probe samples were novel words, "JAIJAI" and "BREEL." On the probes, each of seven subjects reliably selected the novel comparisons, apparently "excluding" the familiar ones. In Experiment 2, probe samples were from the subjects' baseline. On one probe, for example, the sample was "TABLE," and the subject had to choose either the dog or the novel picture. Exclusion was logically possible because the dog had always before been incorrect in the presence of "TABLE." Under these conditions, however, only two of nine children excluded reliably. In Experiment 3, probe samples were words that had never been samples on any matching-to-sample trial, but that had controlled the children's behavior in other settings. On one probe, for example, the sample was "PENCIL," and the subject had to choose either the dog or a novel picture. Subjects virtually always excluded the former and selected the latter. Unreliable exclusion in Experiment 2, therefore, apparently resulted because the probe samples had previously served also as samples on baseline trials. Spontaneous verbalizations recorded during probing provided further data consistent with this interpretation. The study helps to define variables controlling exclusion performances by showing that such performances are more likely to occur if the sample has no prior experimental history.     

The impact of the therapeutic environment

This paper emphasizes the impact of the setting, space, and general physical properties of the clinic upon the difficult patient's profound neediness and absence of inner regulatory structure. Moreover, the clinic's administrative style and requirements often related to fiscal restraints, demands for accountability for both how funds are spent and treatment outcome, all impinge upon the patient. Humanizing clinics so they have the capacity for psychotherapeutic holding and provision of safety for difficult patients are discussed in detail in this contribution.