Attention to important versus trivial tasks and salience of fatigue-related symptoms for coronary prone individuals

The present study tested the hypothesis that individuals with the Type A coronary prone behavior pattern focus their attention more on important tasks, and less on trivial tasks than do Type B's. The study used a paradigm in which some subjects worked on math problems (important task) and rated intervening mood items (trivial task), whereas others rated mood items they were to memorize (important task) and worked on intervening math problems (trivial task). All subjects were later tested on recall of mood items. Results indicated that Type A's performed better on math problems and recalled more fatigue-related mood items when the task was important than when it was trivial; for Type B subjects, there was no difference in the number of math problems solved correctly or number of mood items recalled between important and trivial task conditions. Moreover, Type A's reported greater fatigue when mood recall was the important task than when math was the important task, whereas fatigue ratings of Type B's did not differ across these conditions. The findings suggest that Type A's suppress their attention to fatigue-related symptoms only when symptoms are not the objects of focus.     

Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: Implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

The effect of information integration on the recall of ambiguous prose passages was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects read ambiguous passages that were difficult to comprehend without titles. In judging the relative positions in the passages of pairs of test sentences, subjects performed better when they read passages headed by a suitable title than when they read untitled passages or received a title at the time of testing. In Experiment 2, subjects provided with a title at encoding also better discriminated complete old sentences from foils composed of fragments of two different old sentences than did subjects provided with no titles or with titles at the time of testing. These two tests index the degree of inter- and intrasentence information integration, respectively. Two findings indicated that integration affected free recall of an ambiguous passage. First, when the degree of integration of the passage's propositions was controlled, free recall of the passage was no different for subjects who did or did not know the passage's title at encoding. Second, inducing subjects to comprehend the passage's sentences individually, without relating them to one another, reduced free recall of the passage.     

Word superiority in word detection

Observers searched for a single precued word or its nonword anagram under conditions of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). A word advantage was found over a wide range of presentation rates (32-160 msec/frame), under yes-no as well as forced choice conditions, and with both one or two input “channels.” These results suggest that word superiority in word detection occurs at a perceptual locus.     

The effects of self-exposure instructions on agoraphobic outpatients

Nineteen agoraphobic outpatients were randomly assigned to four sessions of either (1) Exposure: planning and discussion of exposure homework tasks requiring patients to enter and remain in phobic situations hitherto avoided; or (2) Control: discussion of marital, family and social difficulties and strategies for dealing with these.A small but significant effect was found at post-test and at one month follow-up in favour of the exposure condition. It is suggested that this variable should be controlled in future relevant experiments and is worth including as an inexpensive expedient of active treatment of phobias.     

Skill-set,success outcome,and mania as determinants of the illusion of control

The illusion of control, the tendency for individuals to approach chance tasks with skill-appropriate strategies, was studied. Subjects premeasured on a mania scale were classified as either high (HM) or low (LM) in mania. In the first phase of the study, HM and LM subjects performed 30 trials on either a skill (verbal associates) or chance (coin-toss) task and were given either 20, 50, or 80% success feedback. After Task 1 was completed, subjects filled out an attribution questionnaire. In the final phase of the study, subjects anticipated 30 more trials either on a skill or chance task. Subjects' predicted successes were measured. It was hypothesized that predicted successes on anticipated skill and chance tasks would be affected more by outcomes on a previous skill task than by outcomes on a previous chance task. The results for the anticipated skill task directly supported the hypothesis. On the anticipated chance task, the hypothesis was confirmed for HM subjects only. The results are discussed in terms of how previous skill experiences may induce a set to control ungovernable situations for individuals with manic reactions.     

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.

     

History of psychotherapy in Russia and the Soviet Union]

Previously, articles on and contributions to the history of psychotherapy proceeded on the assumption that the most essential sources were to be found in Anglo-Saxon and German literature. Developments in other civilizations were usually treated as undeserving of consideration. It is important to note that a large amount of specialized literature on psychotherapy has been published in the Soviet Union, and this shows that a great importance is attached in that country to the treatment of nervous and mental disorders by psychological methods. A review of the writings of S. S. Korsakov and V. M. Bekhterev shows that the essential principles of group psychotherapy had been recognized by those authors already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. Results achieved by Makarenko appear valuable in the light of what we know today. The method of "collective psychotherapy", which was first described by Libch, is discussed in detail. This method is being widely used in the Soviet Union. The concern of this paper is to describe developments which have not so far been covered in our literature, thus attempting to make an addition to psychotherapeutic activity in this country.     

Two kinds of adaptation in the constancy of visual direction and their different effects on the perception of shape and visual direction

Adaptation in the constancy of visual direction can be obtained under two radically different conditions, called eye-movement adaptation and field adaptation. Adaptation resulting from these conditions and from a “normal” condition was measured with a newly developed estimation test. Eye-movement adaptation was found to cause an alteration of compensatory eye movements. It apparently consists of a changed evaluation of eye movements, as demonstrated by two different pointing tests. A form test where the shape of a large oblong is set to look square also confirmed this interpretation. After field adaptation, a pointing test did not register a change, but an adaptation effect could be measured with a forward direction test. This test and a square test where no eye movements were permitted proved to be specific to field adaptation; they measured no effect after eye-movementadaptation. The normal adaptation condition Was apparently equivalent to the eye-movement adaptation condition. Its effect could be measured only with a pointing test. When we changed the normal adaptation condition so that frequent saccades were made during head turning, strong effects were measured with the two tests that were specific to field adaptation.     

Stimulus and response factors in mirror-image discrimination

Two choice-reaction time studies assessed the influence of stimulus-response mapping, stimulus complexity, and stimulus alignment on adults’ discrimination of mirror-image and nonmirror-image stimulus pairs. Half the subjects in Experiment 1 were instructed to treat nonmiiTor pairs as “same” and mirror pairs as “different”; the other half responded in the opposite manner. The first group responded more quickly to nonmirror pairs, while the second group responded more quickly to mirror pairs. This result, which held for horizontal stimuli (side by side) as well as for vertical stimuli (one above the other), confirms the importance of experiential factors in mirror-image “confusions. “ In Experiment 2. stimuli were drawn from a population of patterns whose complexity could be objectively defined. In general, the more complex the pattern, the slower the response and complexity seemed to influence the qualitative nature of pattern processing. In both experiments, subjects responded more quickly to horizontal stimuli than to vertical stimuli.