358,534 nonwords: The ARC Nonword Database

The authors present a model of the phonotactic and orthographic constraints of Australian and Standard Southern British English monosyllables. This model is used as the basis for a web-based psycholinguistic resource, the ARC Nonword Database, which contains 358,534 monosyllabic nonwords--48,534 pseudohomophones and 310,000 non-pseudohomophonic nonwords. Items can be selected from the ARC Nonword Database on the basis of a wide variety of properties known or suspected to be of theoretical importance for the investigation of reading.     

A cry unheard: Sudden reductions in blood pressure while talking about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness

This paper describes sudden extreme drops in blood pressure in both experimental and clinical situations when a person is talking about or describing situations of hopelessness and helplessness. These changes are discussed in the context of historical perspectives about the cardiovascular system. A new perspective is introduced, one in which these blood pressure changes are seen as part of an unheard cry for understanding. It is hypothesized that such changes do not occur in response to a person’s attempts to communicate a sense of hopelessness, but rather are the biological foundations of the hopelessness itself. Viewed from such a context an entirely new therapeutic approach is outlined regarding the treatment of patients suffering from a wide variety of psychosomatic as well as psychological disturbances.     

Childhood tomboyism and adult androgyny

Female university and community college students (N =194) completed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and a 12-item tomboyism index. Subjects were predominantly Euro-American (71%). A multiple regression analysis was used to test the prediction that androgyny and masculinity would significantly predict tomboyism scores. The proportion of variance in tomboyism accounted for by masculinity was significant, but once masculinity was entered, no additional predictive value was added by the entry of androgyny or femininity. Tomboyism was not related to the development of expressive qualities such as compassion and sensitivity to the needs of others. However, tomboyism was positively related to some desirable instrumental qualities such as assertiveness and self-reliance. Tomboyism was common and generally declined at puberty due to social pressure. To whom correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed at Department of Psychology & Human Development, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407.The second and third authors were senior undergraduates at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo when this research was conducted.     

Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts

When listeners follow spoken instructions to manipulate real objects, their eye movements to the objects are closely time locked to the referring words. We review five experiments showing that this time-locked characteristic of eye movements provides a detailed profile of the processes that underlie real-time spoken language comprehension. Together, the first four experiments showed that listerners immediately integrated lexical, sublexical, and prosodic information in the spoken input with information from the visual context to reduce the set of referents to the intended one. The fifth experiment demonstrated that a visual referential context affected the initial structuring of the linguistic input, eliminating even strong syntactic preferences that result in clear garden paths when the referential context is introduced linguistically. We argue that context affected the earliest moments of language processing because it was highly accessible and relevant to the behavioral goals of the listener.We thank D. Ballard and M. Hayhoe for the use of their laboratory (National Resource Laboratory for the Study of Brain and Behavior). We also thank J. Pelz for his assistance in learning how to use the equipment and K. Kobashi for assisting in the data collection. Finally, we thank Janet Nicol and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions. The research was supported by NIH resource grant 1-P41-RR09283; NIH HD27206 (M.K.T.); an NSF graduate fellowship (M.J.S.-K.); and a Canadian SSHRC fellowship (J.C.S.).     

Adherence to the Super Woman ideal and eating disorder symptoms among college women

The degree to which three components of the Super Woman construct of femininity [C. Steiner-Adair (1986) “The Body Politic: Normal Female Adolescent Development and the Development of Eating Disorders” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 14, pp. 95–114], valuing physical appearance, striving for success in multiple roles, and insecure parental attachment, are related to eating disorder symptoms was examined for a sample of 156 college women (84% white, 6% African American, 6% Asian, 3% Latina, 1% another race). Canonical analysis yielded three significant roots, suggesting a complex relationship between components of the Super Woman model and eating disorder symptoms. The first root supports the hypothesized relationship between the three components of the Super Woman model and eating disorder symptoms. The second root suggests that striving for success, when accompanied by a context of secure parental attachment, is positively associated with measures of social competence. The third root highlights the contribution of an emphasis on physical appearance to weight concern, dieting, and bulimic behavior.     

LISTENING TO SMOKING RESEARCHERS:

Abstract— The work of Baker and his colleagues indicates that a broadened view of withdrawal that recognizes its probable affective bases will suggest new treatment strategies for the treatment of smoking and, by extension, drug dependence. This commentary briefly reviews the current status of treating drug dependence by addressing negative affect and emphasizes that clinical research which allows for building more complex models, of individual change over time holds promise for clearer understanding of the role of negative affect among drug abusers and thus more effective treatments. Although clinical treatments for drug dependence have long recognized the significance of negative affect we are far from a thorough understanding of the role of negative affect in withdrawal, craving, and relapse to drug use.     

Distinguishing between social reinforcement and social elicitation

The theoretical, procedural, analytic, and interpretive components of Poulson's (1983, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 36, 471–489) study were considered in an effort to clarify the distinction between social reinforcement and social elicitation. Contrary to Poulson's contention, DRO was not, and cannot by definition be, a control for reinforcement. More importantly, the speciestypical, social nature of the infant probably reflects the collaborative influence of elicitation and reinforcement. By carefully unravelling these two interacting processes, future conditioning studies might specially enhance our knowledge of early social development.     

Factors affecting the social validity of a role-play test of children's social skills

The social validity of a role-play test of children's social skills, the Social Skills Test for Children (SST-C), was evaluated by 63 subjects (33 adults and 30 children) who subjectively judged the quality of three children's role-play performances. The three children were selected as having high, medium, or low social skill based upon their performance on the SST-C. Assessment of the effects of subject characteristics upon judgments of social skill suggested that similarities in age and race between the subjects and the three children tended to diminish perceived differences in social skill among the three children. It was concluded that the social validity of the role-play test was supported only if the persons evaluating social behavior were dissimilar in age and racial characteristics from the persons who were being evaluated.