Imagery, encoding specificity, and prose recall in 6-year-old children

Partial pictures depict only selected portions of prose passages. Partial pictures hypothetically aid retention by inducing young children to generate imagery for nonpictured prose. Results from two hundred eighty-eight 6-year-old children indicated that (a) partial pictures at study facilitate recall, (b) identical study and retrieval prompts facilitate recall, and (c) imagery instructions and training do not affect retention. Partial pictures apparently help children to encode information more efficiently at study, but there is no evidence that young children generate images with the aid of the partial picture cues, nor that they have a retrieval deficit for these images as suggested by M. Ruch and J. Levin.     

Mechanisms used by young children in the making of empathic judgments

Forty-four preschool children ranging from three to five years of age received a series of stones in which the protagonists experience happiness, sadness, or fear These protagonists were portrayed as either similar or dissimilar to the child, and the situations depicted were either familiar or unfamiliar to him/her as well The children's task was to infer the emotions experienced by the protagonists Results indicate that children were more accurate in judging the emotions of similar target persons than they were for dissimilar ones Familiarity with the situation, on the other hand, had no effect on accuracy Children were more accurate in identifying happiness and sadness than they were in judging fear, and age was positively related to judgmental accuracy for the former two but not for the latter These results help to resolve the controversy arising from earlier studies of empathy development which failed to disentangle the similarity and familiarity dimensions     

The effect of standard, motivation, and strategy instructions on the facial processing accuracy of internal and external subjects

In the present study, it was hypothesized that poorer performance of externals in cognitive and interpersonal tasks also would be found in the processing of nonverbal information in the form of a facial affect recognition task. It was further hypothesized that the poorer nonverbal processing performance of externals was due to either their lower motivation or their use of less effective processing strategies. Subjects (N = 70) were divided into internal and external groups and then further subdivided into groups that received standard, motivational, or strategy instructions. Analysis of subjects' responses to the facial affect recognition task showed internals performed significantly better than externals under standard conditions. However, neither motivational nor strategy instructions improved the performance of externals. The implications for interpersonal functioning of the poorer nonverbal processing ability of extenrals was discussed from both theoretical and methodological perspectives.     

Pornography and Degradation

I have taken a Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation. My thesis is that by perpetuating derogatory myths about womankind, for the sake of financial gain, the pornography industry treats the class of women as a means only, and not as composed of individuals who are ends in themselves. It thus de-grades all women, as members of this class, imputing to them less than full human status.     

Attitudes to new technology in relation to social beliefs and group memberships: A preliminary investigation

Though the term “new technology” is widely used and discussed, there has been very little systematic study of attitudes to technology and their relation to other beliefs and group memberships. This article describes an initial investigation into the nature of attitudes towards new technology (n=534 undergraduates) and demonstrates that, as yet, these attitudes are only weakly structured and are not fully integrated with other social beliefs. General evaluations of the benefits of technological advance appear to be almost unrelated to beliefs about the inevitability of these advances or the desire to acquire training to deal with them. Contrary to popular expectations, evaluations of video games are unrelated to other beliefs about technology while other social beliefs are, as yet, only weakly integrated with these attitudes. This study also identifies gender differences in the assessment of potential benefits and highlights other differences attributable to academic group memberships. These finding are discussed with reference to the literature on sex-role stereotyping and group socialization processes.     

Spontaneous alternation behavior in animals: A review

Factors affecting spontaneous alternation behavior (SAB) in animals, for example, age, gender and species studied; type of apparatus and cues employed; and neuro-anatomical, neuro-chemical and motivational status of the organism, were reviewed. Despite a myriad of experiments showing interesting main effects of such variables, little research has been performed assessing the interactive affects of these factors on alternation behavior. For example, psychologists test rats in central nervous system (CNS) lesion studies, whereas psychopharmacologists tend to assess SAB in mice. Most importantly, studies have not been reported investigating the possible interactions among species, brain lesions and drugs. This is an unfortunate omission since several important alternation models include propositions relating to cholinergic and/or serotonergic coding in the hippocampus. Examination of behavioral studies revealed the primary cue for alternation among invertebrates to be body turn, whereas vertebrates rely primarily on directional and odor cues. Reference to the seeking of stimulus change remains the most compelling motivational account of why animals manifest this ubiquitious and reliable behavior pattern. This review and the unpublished studies were supported by Research Grants MH16962, MH21288, and MH36491 from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Wake Forest University Research and Publication Fund.     

Observer bias in scoring boys' and girls' aggression

In order to examine the possibility that the attribution of more aggression to boys may be in part a function of observer bias, 40 adults were asked in Study 1 to record the degree of aggression in a series of line drawings that showed children interacting. It was found that a significant subset of both males and females recorded more aggression for boys than for girls when they scanned scenes that showed numerous children interacting. When they rated a series of drawings of two children interacting, males rated boys as significantly more aggressive than girls. Study 2 examined 48 adults' responses under one of three instruction conditions. The findings of Study 1 were replicated. Additionally, it was found that some forms of instruction eliminate sex-typed biases while others yield significant biases among both male and female untrained observers. These results are interpreted in light of the literature on schematic processing. Implications pertaining to the socialization of aggression and to research on sex differences in aggression are discussed.     

Child of divorce: An overview

Children of divorce represent a diverse population at risk for subsequent psychological problems, whose interests are insufficiently understood or protected by the legal system or the mental health community. Although many children weather the stress of marital breakdown without psychopathological sequelae, a significant number show lasting difficulties. Information concerning the psychological adaptation of these children has increased rapidly during the past decade, but it remains unequel to the task of guiding family policy in this arena. Current knowledge identifies child gender and developmental stage as crucial factors that interact with the chronic stresses of postdivorce family life to produce short-and long-range impediments to the maturation of these vulnerable young people. There is a critical need to facilitate understanding and cooperation between the behavioral sciences and the legal profession on behalf of children in divorced families. The major research tasks relevant to enlightened public policy lie ahead.