Self-consciousness,self-report of aggressiveness,and aggression

Private self-consciousness consists of attending to one's thoughts, feelings, and motives. Public self-consciousness consists of attending to oneself as a social object. The effect of dispositional self-consciousness on the accuracy of self-reports was studied in research on aggression. High- and low-private self-conscious subjects rated their own aggressiveness. Several weeks later their aggressive behavior was objectively measured. The correlation between self-report of aggressiveness and aggressive behavior was significantly higher for high-than for low-private self-conscious subjects. The correlation between self-report and behavior was unaffected by public self-consciousness. The implications of these findings for self-consciousness theory and personality dispositions are discussed.     

Prediction as a means of inducing tolerance

Female subjects were exposed individually to the attitude item responses of a similar or dissimilar stranger. They were asked either to copy down the stranger's attitudes or to predict (with accurate feedback) how the stranger answered each item. Predict subjects were found to be more tolerant of the dissimilar stranger than were Copy subjects, while both groups were equally attracted to the similar stranger. It was suggested that training people to anticipate disagreements may be a useful way of fostering tolerance.     

Interfacing the microcomputer: A component-level approach

A method is described for interfacing relatively inexpensive component- and chip-level devices to a standard Intel microcomputer board for providing an on-line physological monitoring system. The system demonstrates basic interfacing techniques and a highly simplified approach for integrating various state-of-the-art peripheral circuit components to a standard microcomputer configuration.     

Effects of visual familiarity on “same” and “different” decision processes

An experiment was conducted in which subjects matched upper and lower case versions of well-known abbreviations, such as BBC and etc, and meaningless controls. “Same” RT showed a familiarity effect for upper case versions of abbreviations such as BBC and GPO, but not for the lower case versions bbc and gpo. The converse did not occur for abbreviations such as etc, which were thought to occur most frequently in lower case. The “different” RT was inhibited by familiarity, with pairs such as IBM GPO being classified less rapidly than their lower case versions or controls. These effects occurred for subjects instructed to report “No” for “same” displays and “Yes” for “different” displays as well as for subjects given a conventional decision-report assignment. Some implications of these results for an account of the manner in which familiarity affects graphemic comparison processes are considered.     

Measurement of trace strength in memory for pictures

Four experiments using a yes-no recognition task with snapshots examined (1) the effect of presenting not one but two items simultaneously, either both targets or both distractors, for a single judgment at a retention test trial; (2) the rate of forgetting; (3) the interaction between retention interval and the exposure duration at acquisition; (4) acquisition as a function of the number of times a picture was presented. In each case performance was assessed by calculating the discriminability index d'. The results supported the hypotheses that trace strength is lognormally distributed, that forgetting is exponential, and that in acquisition trace strength is a linear function of the number of presentations.     

Effects of solution word attributes on anagram difficulty: A regression analysis

A sample of 45 student subjects provided solution scores for 80 five-letter anagrams. These scores were analysed as a function of solution word imagery, con-creteness, familiarity, objective frequency, age-of-acquisition and associative meaningfulness using multiple regression techniques. Two bigram measures together with number of vowels, nature of starting letter (vowel or consonant), anagram pronounceability and anagram-solution similarity scores were also entered into the regression equations. The bigram measures, the starting letter and anagram-solution similarity emerged as having significant associations with the solution scores. Previous reports of imagery effects in anagram are discussed in the light of the present results.     

Acquisition and discrimination of appetitively and aversively conditioned heart rate responses in rhesus monkeys

This report describes the acquisition of a conditional heart rate response to both classical aversive and appetitive conditioning in eight rhesus monkeys(Macaca mulatta). The behavioral paradigm consisted of two discrete one minute tones followed by the corresponding unconditional stimuli,i.e., electric shock or Purina monkey chow. A third tone followed by neither food nor shock served as a discriminative stimulus (DS). The conditional heart rate responses developed in two phases. The first phase was characterized by similar responses to both conditional stimuli and the DS. Control heart rate rose during this period. During the second phase, control heart rate decreased (five animals), the DS response disappeared, and different conditional heart rate patterns to food and shock emerged. The existence of distinct conditional response patterns indicates probable differences in the autonomic nervous regulation of the heart during aversive and appetitive conditioning.