The future case: An alternative to single case study

Traditional single case studies have tended to focus on the individual's past and/or present with minimal reference to one's future. This allows for an incomplete assessment of the reality in which humans participate as organisms-in-process. The future case is advanced as a complement to traditional single case designs. Emphasis is upon imaginative and creative involvement with one's future in the clinical setting. The rationale and concrete outline for this future invention process reflect how individuals can move beyond restricting conditions to higher levels of emotional growth and satisfaction.     

The salience of the self in responses to inequity

Previous research has shown that people strive to conform with the standards of significant others in distributive justice. The present research was concerned with the role of attention to the self in the same paradigm. If people are motivated to personally evaluate their own behavior as fair, then self-focus should result in heightened attempts to redress an overpayment inequity. After the subject's criterion of a fair wage was assessed, they were paid either that amount or double it. Orthogonal to this manipulation, subjects were either made objectively self-aware (OSA) or not, by the presence or absence of a mirror. Consistent with the hypothesis, overpaid OSA subjects did more work, but of a poorer quality, than overpaid not-OSA subjects. This was taken as evidence of more zealous attempts to restore a sense of equity, implicating a greater personal need to eliminate the injustice when the discrepancy between pay level and a personal standard of fairness was made more prominent to the self.     

Behavior analysis of cigarette smoking

Patterns of cigarette smoking, treated as series of discrete events in time, were investigated with a variety of quantitative techniques designed to characterize individual subject smoking series and to illuminate the relationship between cigarette smoking and environmental events. Data were collected from a total of 35 subjects who were either participants in residential laboratory studies or in a smoking cessation program. Cigarette smoking events were found to be fairly irregularly distributed with respect to time within individual subject series. However, strong dependencies were found between the occurrence in time of individual acts of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. In addition, the distribution and frequency of smoking events throughout one-hour activity sequences were found to be dependent upon the nature of the activity, and the temporal scheduling of activities was found to affect several quantitative indices of smoking patterns.     

Background and Focal Environmental Conditions of the Home and Attention in Young Children1

A conceptual distinction is drawn between two aspects of the perceptual field, focal features which the individual selectively engages and extraneous background conditions which serve as a context within which these activities occur, and a study is described which examined the relationship between these aspects of the home environment and attentional skills in young children. Ninety-four families with kindergarten age children participated in the project. Interviews and observations were conducted in the homes in order to assess background conditions (e.g., noise and activity levels) and variation and patterning of focal features (e.g., furnishings), and tasks designed to assess attentional skills were administered to the children. The results indicated that children from homes with high noise levels had longer response latencies on a visual search task and also subsequently recognized fewer incidental aspects of the task than did children from quieter homes. Furthermore, the former group appeared to be less distractible, i.e., less responsive to an auditory distractor. Neither variation nor patterning of focal features was found to be associated with task performance. In general, the findings are interpreted as indicating the adverse effects of high noise levels in the home on attentional skills in spite of apparent adaptation, i.e., lower distractibility, to these conditions.     

Reinforcement as positive or negative meaning-extension: An empirical demonstration

According to logical learning theory, a reinforcement involves the extension of meanings predicated by subjects who are asked to perform in a learning task. Based on this theoretical position, it is predicted that subjects who are administered a reinforcement following their successful anticipation of the second member of a paired-associates unit will acquire their liked trigrams more readily than their disliked trigrams (mixed lists). Conversely, it is predicted that subjects who are reinforced following their incorrect anticipations of the second paired-associates member will acquire their disliked trigrams more readily than their liked. College students (divided equally by sex) were exposed to one of three reinforcement conditions: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and no reinforcement (control). Trigrams reliably rated for likability by each subject were used as learnable materials. Although the control condition did not perform as expected, the remaining experimental conditions support the hypotheses.     

Cognitive and physiological indices of sexual arousal in homosexual,bisexual, and heterosexual males

Cognitive and physiological indices of sexual arousal were investigated utilizing groups of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual subjects (ten subjects per group) who were presented both homosexual and heterosexual films and slides. The results indicated that both homosexual and heterosexual subjects were able to estimate accurately their degree of erection to the erotic stimuli. Bisexual subjects, however, showed a large discrepancy between the magnitude of actual erection and verbally reported estimates of penile tumescence. In terms of physiological arousal, the erectile responses of the homosexual and bisexual groups were indistinguishable, a finding which questions the existence of male bisexuality as distinct from homosexuality or as a different sexual orientation in males.     

Differential effects of person in the dog and in the human

People have marked effects on dog’s heart rate, with great individual variations for different persons. Apparently people to which the dog is attached have the greatest effect upon heart rate. Replications of the animal experiments using the psychotherapist and two other people revealed no effects upon the heart rate of a schizophrenic human. In the human the effects of people are probably best demonstrated in connection with verbal communication.     

Parallel between antianxiety and cardiovascular effects of chlordiazepoxide in genetically nervous dogs

There is evidence that cardiac arrhythmias are partially of CNS origin, and that certain drugs affect arrhythmia, both positively and negatively, through CNS action. We hypothesized and confirmed that chlordiazepoxide diminished the well-established incidence of arrhythmias (A-V blocks and nodal escapes) in five nervous pointer dogs. It is known that this drug normalizes behavior and aids in the bar-pressing performance of nervous dogs. Nervous dogs tend to have low heart rates (HRs) while normals have higher HRs. Chlordiazepoxide increased HRs in our five nervous dogs, and we postulated that HR increase would be less or none in normals. This was confirmed in a later study of five normals. A further study of eight normal dogs and eight nervous dogs essentially reproduced these findings, suggesting the possibility that the slow heart rates and the behavioral abnormality have a common basis, expected to be some CNS biochemical lesion.     

Word and nonword superiority effects in a letter detection task

Subjects searched for predesignated consonant letters embedded in strings of consonants, consonants and vowels, or consonants and numbers. In Experiments 1-3, detection was quicker in the consonant-vowel and consonant-number strings than in the consonant strings. Apparently, vowels and numbers were less confusable distractors than are nontarget consonants. Experiment 4 tested whether psychophysical or categorical information about letters and numbers enabled subjects to process consonant-vowel and consonant-number strings more quickly. Results indicated that psychophysical characteristics of target and distractor letters mediated both word and nonword superiority effects.