The Cost-Reward Model of Helping Behavior: A Nonconfirmation1

A field experiment was designed to test several predictions derived from the Piliavin and Piliavin cost-reward model of helping behavior. Female and male subjects' reported intent to help a hemophiliac in a nearby hospital was unrelated to the costs for helping, the costs for not helping, and the order in which the subjects received the costs' manipulations. The obtained rates of helping were also unrelated to whether or not subjects reported having donated previously. Failure to obtain the predicted results is discussed.     

Normative location theory: Placement in continuous space

This paper selectively reviews an area of operations research, refered to as normative location theory, that deals with the placement of objects in continuous space. The computational procedures discussed in this literature require initially that a certain set objects be located a priori; the placement of the objects in a second set is then determined in such a way that the total “interaction” among the fixed and variable objects is minimized. A number of strategies appropriate for different distance functions are surveyed and a numerical example is given illustrating one particular iterative algorithm. Although the current versions of these location methods depend upon more than the nonmetric information contained in the proximity measures defined for all pairs of objects, they can be generalized, and consequently, several possible connections to nonmetric multidimensional scaling are pointed out.     

Effects of schedule and magnitude of reinforcement under conditions of thirst motivation

In contrast to a recent finding (Macdonald, G. E., & De Toledo, L. Learning and Motivation, 1974, 5, 288–298.) the results of three experiments investigating various partial reinforcement (PRF) manipulations under conditions of thirst motivation demonstrated strong similarity to analogous manipulations involving food reward. Specifically, for animals receiving water reinforcement, PRF was shown to generate greater resistance to extinction than continuous reinforcement (Expt 1 & 3), the schedule of reinforcement was shown to interact with level of acquisition (Expt 1 and 2), and the magnitude of the partial reinforcement extinction effect was shown to be a function of reward magnitude (Expt 3). These results provide strong evidence that mechanisms which operate in partial reinforcement situations are highly similar, regardless of the type of appetitive reinforcement.     

Sex-related effects on clinicians' attributions of parental responsibility for child psychopathology

An attempt was made to reproduce and extend previously reported data suggesting the operation of sex-related bias in clinicians' attributions of parental involvement in children's psychopathologies. More and less sex-role traditional male and female family-oriented practitioners were shown contrived profiles in which a boy or girl was described as masculine or feminine role-deficient, and apportioned maternal versus paternal blame, treatment focus, adjunctive therapy need, and likelihood of sabotage. As in the previous study, mothers were implicated slightly more than fathers and also were viewed as requiring relatively greater therapeutic attention by female than by male clinicians. However, several earlier findings were not replicated. Overall, the results offer only marginal support for the notion of sex-related practitioner bias.     

Correction to: Suicidal Mental Imagery in Psychiatrically Hospitalized Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00827-8     

The Ethical Community in Kant’s Pure Rational System of Religion: Comments on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History

Philosophia - This commentary on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History will address three points of interpretation related to Kant’s conception of the ethical...     

Dynamic relationships between phonological memory and reading: A five year longitudinal study from age 4 to 9

We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics‐educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short‐term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word‐level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial‐order memory for letter‐by‐letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme‐level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE .