Enhancing the social skills of an unpopular girl: A social learning intervention

The use of a social learning approach to reduce the unpopularity of an 11-year-old girl, Rene, at a summer camp was studied. Two social skill deficiencies were suggested to be the cause of Rene's unpopularity by her bunk house counselors: her lack of contact with bunkhouse members during free choice times, and her negative, interfering conversational style. A multiple baseline design was used by the counselors to successively implement reinforcement contingencies on each class of social skill. Substantial improvements in performance were noted concurrent with the application of each contingency. These outcomes were maintained after reinforcement contingencies were withdrawn. Sociometric ratings of Rene's popularity by her bunkhouse mates improved after intervention. These outcomes are discussed from a social learning perspective.     

Isolating the interference caused by cue duration in partial report: A quantitative approach

In bar-probe partial report experiments, subjects are presented with a brief array of letters, followed by a cue that singles out a target letter. Using this procedure, V. M. Townsend (1973) reported a counterintuitive effect: As the duration of a cue was increased, target performance decreased dramatically. The aim of the present study was to isolate the locus of the cue-duration effect. To this end, several characteristics of the bar-probe display were manipulated in a single experiment: the interstimulus interval between the array and the cue, array density, the number of letters, and the number of symbols adjacent to the target. These factors were manipulated on a priori grounds so as to affect the different sources of information used in the bar-probe task--namely, durable storage, abstract identity information, and feature level information. The data were accurately fit by a simple quantitative, multinomial model that assumes that the different sources of information used in the bar-probe task make independent contributions to performance. The critical assumption of the model is that cue duration interferes with only one source of information--namely, feature level information.     

Rape Perceptions as a Function of Gender-Role Traditionality and Victim-Perpetrator Association

Perceptions of stranger, acquaintance, date, andmarital rape scenarios and their relation to observers'gender-role traditionality were examined. PrimarilyCaucasian (81%)male and female undergraduates reported their reactions to one of four rapescenarios, attitudes toward men's and women's genderroles, and tendency toward a socially desirable responsestyle. The marital rape scenario was characterized less often as rape and considered less violent,less of a violation of the victim's rights and lesspsychologically damaging to the victim as compared tothe other scenarios. Observers holding less traditional gender-role stereotypes perceived rapescenarios overall as more serious and were less likelyto blame the victim. Also, an exploratory regressionanalysis revealed that gender did not add significantly to the prediction of rape perceptions beyondthe contribution of gender-role beliefs.     

Asymmetric dependencies in perceiving identity and emotion: Experiments with morphed faces

We investigated whether an asymmetric relationship between the perception of identity and emo-tional expressions in faces (Schweinberger & Soukup, 1998) may be related to differences in the rela-tive processing speed of identity and expression information. Stimulus faces were morphed across identity within a given emotional expression, or were morphed across emotion within a given identity. In Experiment 1, consistent classifications of these images were demonstrated across a wide range of morphing, with only a relatively narrow category boundary. At the same time, classification reaction times (RTs) reflected the increased perceptual difficulty of the morphed images. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of variations in the irrelevant dimension on judgments of faces with respect to a relevant dimension, using a Garner-type speeded classification task. RTs for expression classifica-tions were strongly influenced by irrelevant identity information. In contrast, RTs for identity classifi-cations were unaffected by irrelevant expression information, and this held even for stimuli in which identity was more difficult and slower to discriminate than expression. This suggests that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between identity and emotion per-ception. Theoretical accounts proposing independence of identity and emotion perception are dis-cussed in the light of these findings.     

Food-related stimuli increase desire to eat in hungry and satiated human subjects

In the present study, the effect of food-related cues on the desire to eat chocolate in hungry and satiated subjects was investigated. Subjects (n=46) were randomly assigned to either a hungry or satiated group and then assigned to a group receiving one of the following stimuli: taste (2 M&Ms), sight (a photograph of M&Ms), cognition (a passage describin M&Ms), or control (no stimulus). In each testing session, subjects rated their desire to eat chocolate before and after the 90-s presentation of the particular stimulus. Each subject was then given a half pound of M&Ms so that actual consumption could also be measured. Results indicated that, following the presentation of the sight and taste stimuli, the subjects’ desire to eat chocolate was significantly increased. Furthermore, no differences in chocolate consumption due to state of hunger or type of food-related stimulus presented were found.