Marital interaction of agoraphobic women: a controlled,behavioral observation study

Married couples with a female agoraphobic spouse (n = 22) were compared with demographically similar community control couples (n = 21) on self-report and observational measures of marital interaction. Consistent with hypotheses, husbands of agoraphobic women were more critical of their wives than were control husbands, and clinical couples were less likely to engage in positive problem solution than control couples. Contrary to hypothesis, clinical husbands were not less supportive than control husbands. Where general measures of marital distress were concerned, clinical couples, relative to control couples, evinced more distress by self-report, by their higher rate of negative nonverbal behavior, and by their longer sequences of negative exchanges.     

Selective exposure and dissonance after decisions

Well-known literature reviews from the 1960s question whether cognitive dissonance underlies experimental participants' selective exposure of themselves to consonant messages and avoidance of dissonant ones. A meta-analytic review of 16 studies published from 1956 to 1996 and involving 1,922 total participants shows that experimental tests consistently support the supposition that dissonance is associated with selective exposure (r = .22, p < .001). Statistical power exceeded .99. Advances in statistical methodology and increased attention to selecting appropriate tests of dissonance theory were essential to finally resolving this question.     

Perception and production of rise-fall intonation in American English

At the segmental level, the rate of speaking affects the degree of physical undershoot of articulatory targets and the resulting perception. Little is known regarding evidence of these effects at the suprasegmental level, particularly in intonation. In this study, the effect of rate of speaking on fundamental frequency and on perceptual judgments of peak pitch in a rise-fall intonation pattern was investigated. First, speakers produced rise-fall intonations in sentence contexts at slow, normal, and fast speaking rates. Peak fundamental frequencies (F0) of the slow productions were significantly lower than those of the normal or fast productions. The mean normal rate production of the word Miami was used as a model for the target word in a series of subsequent perceptual experiments. Altering the duration of the target word to represent slow, normal, and fast rates of speaking did not affect listener judgment of peak pitch. Finally, the pitch of the target word was measured in a sentence context. No differences between peak pitch in isolation or in sentence context were found. It was concluded that the production and perception of this form of intonation was not subject to the effects of rate that are seen at the segmental level.     

Specificity of the MMPI-2 Fake Bad Scale as a marker for personal injury malingering

Psychologists who evaluate patients in medicolegal contexts should utilize objective assessment data with empirically established sensitivity and specificity for identifying negative response bias. The purpose of this study was to investigate the specificity of the Fake Bad Scale for identifying negative response bias in personal injury claimants. The cutoff scores proposed by Lees-Haley and colleagues were applied a federal prison, medical outpatients, and patients from to inmate volunteers from substance abuse unit. Half of the inmates were given instructions to malinger psychopathology to affect the adjudication process, and the remaining inmates and all of the hospital patients were given standard instructions. The original cutoff scores correctly identified the majority of inmates instructed to malinger psychopathology, but these scores resulted in unacceptably high rates of false positive classifications. The revised cutoff scores resulted in fewer false positives, i.e., 8%-24%.     

Stem homographs and lemma level representations

Previous studies have found that priming a target like cerr-o ("hill") with an unmasked stem-homograph (e.g., cerr-ar, "to close") or with an unmasked allomorph of a stem-homograph (e.g., cierr-a, "he/she/it closes") has an inhibitory effect on target recognition. We report evidence from stem-homograph priming studies that implicate both morphological parsing and lexical selection processes at the lemma level. We argue that stem-homograph inhibition is the product of lexical selection mechanisms that are engaged just when a fully ambiguous stimulus (here, an inflectional stem) must be assigned one of its viable interpretations in order to afford conscious perception of lexical identity.     

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T2 in parallel with the processing of T1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.     

Differential age effects for case and hue mixing in visual word recognition

The authors compare older adults' lexical-decision data with younger adults' data reported in P. Allen, A. F. Smith, et al. (2002). On the basis of their work, it was proposed that consistent-case wordswould be processed by the faster holistic (magnodominated) stream, but that mixed-case words would be processed by the slower analytic (interblob-dominated or blob-dominated) steams. Hue mixing was predicted to have no effect on consistent-case performance, but mixed-hue/mixed-case words were predicted to be recognized faster than monochrome/mixed-case words. Younger adults showed the predicted results, but older adults did not. These results suggest that holistic central processes are maintained, but that older adults exhibited an analytic decrement     

The automatic evaluation of novel stimuli

From classic theory and research in psychology, we distill a broad theoretical statement that evaluative responding can be immediate, unintentional, implicit, stimulus based, and linked directly to approach and avoidance motives. This statement suggests that evaluative responses should be elicited by novel, nonrepresentational stimuli (e.g., abstract art, "foreign" words). We tested this hypothesis through combining the best features of relevant automatic–affect research paradigms. We first obtained explicit evaluative ratings of novel stimuli. From these, we selected normatively positive and negative stimuli to use as primes in a sequential priming paradigm. Two experiments using this paradigm demonstrated that briefly presented novel prime stimuli were evaluated automatically, as they facilitated responses to subsequently presented target stimuli of the same valence just as much as did pictures or names of real objects. A final experiment revealed that exposure to novel stimuli produces muscular predispositions to approach or avoid them.