Cognitive styles in the development of medical careers

Recent research has shown that academic choice and achievement may be partly a function of the student's standing on the field-dependence-independence cognitive-style dimension. The results of two longitudinal studies suggest that information about field dependence-independence may be of value for student guidance in the medical setting. The first, a study of college undergraduates who early expressed an interest in medicine, showed that these cognitive styles play a discernible role in determining who will eventually enter medical school. The second, a study of medical students, showed that field-dependent and field-independent students subsequently tend to choose different medical specialties. These results are consistent with cognitive-style theory, which proposes that field-independent people will choose vocations that require cognitive restructuring skills, whereas field-dependent people will choose vocations that require greater social-interpersonal involvement.     

The interactive effects of facial expressions of emotion and verbal messages on perceptions of affective meaning

The influence of facial expressions of emotion on perceptions of affective sentence meaning was investigated by pairing happy, angry, suprised, and sad faces of “teachers” with sentences of varying affective tone. Ninety-five students judged the overall meaning communicated by these paired stimuli. The design allowed exploration of unique facial-verbal combination effects, overall cue integration effects, and sex differences. Clear effects of cue combinations emerged. Perceived sincerity was found to be a function of the consistency of evaluative (positivity) but not dominance cues. Perceived positivity was an interactive function of both evaluative cues and dominance cues. Perceived dominance was affected by the interaction of evaluative cues. The subtleties of cue combination were clarified through open-ended dependent measures. Also, as expected, females were found to be more sensitive than males to verbal-nonverbal cue conflict in perceptions of sincerity. However, no other sex differences were found. The findings were discussed with regard to the need for a firm empirical base upon which to integrate verbal and nonverbal research traditions in the communication of affective meaning.     

An unlabeled bracketing solution to the problem of conjoined phrases in Montague's PTQ

Conclusions Although Montague claims that the system of The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English includes some conjunction and disjunction, the rules for other grammatical constructions do not take conjunction or disjunction into account, and in general fail either syntactically or semantically when one of their arguments is so formed. Using an unlabeled bracketing of syntactic structure and recursive definitions, we have been able to rewrite the rules so that correct results are obtained.These results should provide a firmer basis for extension of PTQ.This research was supported in part by NSF Grants GS-31309 and BNS 76-23840. Our observations were made with the aid of several computer programs for PTQ: a sentence generator for the bracketed syntax, a parser, and a translator. I should like to thank Philip Tedeschi, David Warren, and David Lewis for helpful discussions. Warren is also acknowledged as co-author of the section on the semantic role of conjunction.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.     

Parental Visitation of the Institutionalized Retarded

An inverse relationship was found between the number of parental visits an institutionalized retarded child received and the distance of the parental home from the institution. When the natural parents were living together, the retarded child was shown to receive more visits than when the child's parents were separated or one parent was deceased. Single mothers were found to be living significantly closer to the facility than single fathers. Single fathers appeared to put more effort into visiting, since they visited just as often as the mothers, but had to travel further distances than the mothers to do so. Visitation frequency followed a curvilinear pattern, decreasing uniformly from 20–60 miles (from 0–20 miles visitation frequency is uniform), and then leveling off.     

The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes

Evidence from four studies demonstrates that social observers tend to perceive a “false consensus” with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses. A related bias was shown to exist in the observers' social inferences. Thus, raters estimated particular responses to be relatively common and relatively unrevealing concerning the actors' distinguishing personal dispositions when the responses in question were similar to the raters' own responses; responses differing from those of the rater, by contrast, were perceived to be relatively uncommon and revealing of the actor. These results were obtained both in questionnaire studies presenting subjects with hypothetical situations and choices and in authentic conflict situations. The implications of these findings for our understanding of social perception phenomena and for our analysis of the divergent perceptions of actors and observers are discussed. Finally, cognitive and perceptual mechanisms are proposed which might account for distortions in perceived consensus and for corresponding biases in social inference and attributional processes.     

A view of the background of Freudian theory.

A major concern of nineteenth century scientists was to delineate the objective units or entities with which science deals. While some philosophers of science abandoned the search as futile and tried to redefine science, investigators in the biological sciences and the sciences of man attempted to discover new entities upon which to base their disciplines. A new understanding of hypnotism gave Freud the opportunity to isolate objective entities within the mind and to found a psychology on that basis.     

A digital encoder for field recording of behavioral,temporal, and spatial information in directly computer-accessible form

Digitorg is an inexpensive, portable, field-operable event recorder for recording both behavioral and spatial information in real-time on audiotape. Its capacity is 256 codes. Behavioral information is recorded by pressing buttons on a keyboard and spatial information is recorded by touching a magnetic wand to a paper map overlying a matrix of switches. The audiotape recordings are played through a simple interface into a small computer, producing a permanent record of the time and identity of each event. The record is then available for analysis. Digitorg is discussed in relation to the general value of analyzing spatially differentiated behavior sequences.