Extraversion and sleep: A psychophysiological study of the arousal hypothesis

In order to examine Eysenck's (1967) hypothesis concerning the relationship between extraversion and arousal, autonomic measures were taken from introverts and extraverts immediately before sleep and during 6 hr of sleep. Introverts and extraverts did not differ in heart rate (HR) or skin-potential response rate (SPR) during the pre-sleep period. A variety of sleep-related measures of arousal provided no strong support for the hypothesis that introverts are more aroused than extraverts. The only consistent autonomic difference between introverts and extraverts during sleep was a tendency for introverts to have higher SPRs in the second 3 hr of the night. The results are discussed in terms of the level of environmental stimulation present in the experimental conditions, and suggestions are made for future sleep studies of the relationship between extraversion and arousal.     

Male Partners' Appraisals of Undesired Pregnancy and Abortion: Implications for Women's Adjustment to Abortion

The impact of men's attributions for pregnancy and expectations for coping with abortion on their partner's post-abortion adjustment was examined. Men's and women's attributions and coping expectations were assessed in a sample of 73 couples prior to obtaining a first-trimester abortion of an undesired pregnancy. Women's depression was assessed 30 minutes post-abortion. Partners did not differ in their coping expectations or attributions of the pregnancy to chance, situation, another person, or their own behavior, but men blamed the pregnancy more on their own character than did their partners. Male partner's coping expectancies affected women's adjustment only if the women themselves had low coping expectancies. Among women with low coping expectancies, those accompanied by partners who also had low coping expectancies were the most depressed. Men's attributions were unrelated to their partner's adjustment.     

Test anxiety and reaction time for matching decisions

Subjects selected by test-anxiety level were presented pairs of words and asked to make judgments of physical identity, acoustic matching, or taxonomic category membership. Experiment 1 varied type of judgment between subjects; in Experiments 2 and 3, each subject made all three decisions. There was no consistent support for the hypothesis that, relative to low-anxiety subjects, high-anxiety subjects would show a more pronounced decrement in reaction times for semantic decisions than for nonsemantic decisions.     

The effects of humor-induced arousal upon aggressive behavior

The present experiment attempted to reconcile previous results in the area of humor and aggression. It was hypothesized that humor serves two functions, arousal and attentional shift, with regard to its influence on the relation of prior anger arousal and aggression. As a test of this assumption, subjects in the present experiment were subjected to three forms of humor (high arousing, low arousing, nonhumor) after being angered or treated in a neutral manner by a confederate. In an analysis on subsequent aggression toward the confederate, it was found that female subjects reduced their aggression after exposure to low arousing humor while maintaining aggression at a high level for high arousing stimuli. Male subjects were not influenced by humor exposure. Possible reasons for this sex difference are examined in light of the arousal and attentional shift properties of humorous stimuli.     

Depth of processing and anxiety in facial recognition

Subjects selected on the basis of test anxiety scores made a judgement about each face in a series of slides. These orienting tasks involved either abstract traits (e.g. dependability) or physical features (e.g. weight), and decisions were made relative to either an absolute criterion or self-reference. A subsequent recognition test revealed superior performance by low-anxiety subjects and by subjects who evaluated abstract features during study, but there were no depth by anxiety interactions. The reference point for the decision had little effect overall, but the anxiety deficit was more apparent when the absolute reference point was involved.