A reflection: Howard Scott Liddell, 1895-1962

Howard S. Liddell, Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, was one of the earliest American students and developers of I.P. Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex and an early researcher on stress. The significance of Liddell's work on stress was fully recognized when he was sent, as a member of a commission, to the battlefront at the height of the Korean War to study stress and self-control in the soldiers. This profound experience convinced Liddell that behavioral research must ultimately be made relevant to the understanding and elevation of human behavior. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in efforts to implement this conviction through research, writing, and lectures before scientific and lay groups.     

Induction of depressive affect after prolonged exposure to a mildly depressed individual

Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were periodically obtained from the roommates of college students who exhibited a persistent mild depression over a 3-month period. For comparative purposes, BDI scores were also obtained from roommates of individuals who were transiently depressed and from subjects with nondepressed roommates. In comparison with control subjects, the roommates of persistently depressed persons displayed a progressive increase in BDI score over the course of the study.     

Preference for decision structures in a social dilemma situation

Additional results from Rutte and Wilke's (1984) study are presented. In the context of a social dilemma situation two variables were manipulated: use and variance. Preference for various decision structures is the issue of the present paper. It appeared that a large majority structure and an unanimity structure were mast preferred. A small majority structure and a structure in which each decides for him/herself were intermediately preferred. Whereas a structure in which one person, a leader, decides for all was least preferred. Further analysis of these data suggested that only the latter two decision structures were influenced by the use and variance manipulations.     

Estimating social and nonsocial utility functions from ordinal data

This paper reports an experiment testing two hypotheses. The first is that the value or utility associated with a payment to one's self and a payment to a co-worker can be represented as an additive function of a utility for own payment (nonsocial utility) and a utility for the difference between own and other's payment (social utility). The second hypothesis is that changes in the amount of work accomplished by one's self and/or the other should influence the social, but not the the nonsocial utilities. Support for both hypotheses is reported.     

Symbolic comparisons with and without perceptual referents: Is interval information used?

In an attempt to investigate the range effect obtained by Moyer and Bayer (1976), two groups of subjects were taught to associate colors with circles that differed in size by larger or smaller intervals and then participated in a symbolic comparison task, in which they determined which of two simultaneously presented symbols (the first letters of two colors) represented the larger magnitude. A third group of subjects, who merely learned an arbitrary ordering of the colors along the dimension of size, also participated in the symbolic comparison task. Despite the fact that no practice trials were given, there was no effect of interval size in either early or late blocks, and the circle-learning groups did not differ in performance from the group who only learned an arbitrary ordering of colors, even when pairs containing end terms were removed from the analysis. It is concluded that subjects do not use analogue codes in symbolic comparison tasks involving small, repeated sets of arbitrarily defined symbols.     

Reading with partial phonology: Developmental phonological dyslexia

Recent psycholinguistic investigations have advanced our understanding of the acquired dyslexias. Developmental analogues have been described to some of these disorders. A new case of developmental phonological dyslexia is described here. A.H. is an intelligent 10-year-old boy with no neurological abnormality. Reading and spelling are below age level. A.H. is poorer at reading words than nonwords. The majority of his errors are paralexias: visual, derivations, or visuosemantic. Spelling-to-sound regularity does not affect the ability to read aloud. A.H.'s reading performance is significantly impaired when words are presented typed in reverse order, thereby prohibiting global strategies. Spelling of nonwords is no better than reading of nonwords. Only one-fifth of spelling errors are phonologically valid. A.H. has imperfect development of both the phonological route to reading and the phonological route to spelling.A shortened version of this paper was presented at the European meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Lisbon, Portugal, June 1983.     

Nonprofessional counselors: Revisiting selection and impact issues

This study examined two issues related to the use of nonprofessional counselors (n = 159) within the context of a diversion program for juvenile offenders. First, the relationship of the nonprofessionals' personality traits and general attitudes to client outcome was examined. No statistically significant correlations were observed. Second, the differential impact of various training and supervision factors was examined in terms of nonprofessional satisfaction, attitudes, and locus of control. Results suggested that training intensity, training content, and supervision setting may influence nonprofessionals' attitudes towards various social groups and their satisfaction with the nonprofessional experience.