Saccade latency and warning signals: Effects of auditory and visual stimulus onset and offset

Previous studies have found that a nonspecific visual event occurring at the fovea 50–150 msec after the onset of a peripheral target delayed the initiation of the saccade to that target. The present studies replicated and extended this finding by studying the effects of both visual and auditory warning signals, by examining the effects of onset and offset warning on manual response latency, and by investigating the effects of presenting the warning events in the periphery of the visual field. The results indicated that the interfering effects occur with visual but not auditory stimuli, with saccades but not motor responses, and when the visual warning event occurs either foveally or in the subject’s periphery. Implications for the processes involved are discussed.     

Effects of food priming on instrumental acquisition and performance

Four experiments investigated the effects of a priming food reinforcement, given 0 or 75 sec pretrial, on runway performance of rats. The studies differed in the use of between-versus-within-subject designs, and by using food or water as the goal reinforcer. In Experiment 1, using food as the goal reward, subjects primed with food 0 sec pretrial conditioned slower than subjects primed 75 sec pretrial. In Experiment 2, using water as the goal reward, subjects primed with food 0 sec pretrial conditioned faster. These differences were evident on both prefed trials and on nonprefed test trials. Experiments 3 and 4 showed an opposite pattern of results when within-subject comparisons of 0- and 75-sec pretrial intervals were used: Food priming immediately pretrial facilitated food-rewarded running but inhibited water-rewarded running. The results suggest prefeeding has differential effects on acquisition and performance of instrumental behavior, and also depending upon the similarity of the priming and goal reinforcers.     

Exposure to pornography,permissive and nonpermissive cues,and male aggression toward females

The present study examined the role of permissive and nonpermissive cues in mediating the relationship between exposure to erotica and aggression. Male subjects viewed either neutral slides with a silent female or erotic slides with a female who made permissive, nonpermissive, or no comments about the slides. The males rated the slides and subsequently rated the female confederate. Male subjects were then given an opportunity to administer their choice of several intensities of shock to the female in a competitive reaction-time task. Subjects in the permissive cues condition rated the erotic slides as more arousing, saw the female as more reasonable and accepting, and selected more intense shocks for the female than did subjects in the other conditions. One explanation of these results is that permissive cues in the presence of erotica led the male to believe that other normally inappropriate behaviors would be tolerated.     

A Test of the Consensus and Distinctiveness Attribution Principles in Victims of Disaster1

The present research was designed to test the hypothesis that perceptions of consensus about the collective experience of psychological problems, as well as the distinctive presence of a community disaster, would affect attributions of externality about such problems. Specifically, it was hypothesized that (1) higher levels of consensus would be associated with greater external attributions of causality, (2) attributions would be more external if the problem began after the disaster (high distinctiveness) than before the disaster, and (3) the occurrence of the disaster would magnify the positive relationship between high consensus and external causality attributions, because of the presence of a distinctive and salient external event. These hypotheses were tested with victims of a flash flood. Results supported the interaction prediction (Hypothesis 3) for the problem of depression, but not for anxiety. In addition, for depression and anxiety, greater consensus was indirectly associated with greater externality, regardless of distinctiveness (Hypothesis 1). However, for somatization, none of the hypotheses were supported. The results are discussed in terms of the applied implications for postdisaster intervention programs to reduce psychopathology.     

Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: Implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

The effect of information integration on the recall of ambiguous prose passages was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects read ambiguous passages that were difficult to comprehend without titles. In judging the relative positions in the passages of pairs of test sentences, subjects performed better when they read passages headed by a suitable title than when they read untitled passages or received a title at the time of testing. In Experiment 2, subjects provided with a title at encoding also better discriminated complete old sentences from foils composed of fragments of two different old sentences than did subjects provided with no titles or with titles at the time of testing. These two tests index the degree of inter- and intrasentence information integration, respectively. Two findings indicated that integration affected free recall of an ambiguous passage. First, when the degree of integration of the passage's propositions was controlled, free recall of the passage was no different for subjects who did or did not know the passage's title at encoding. Second, inducing subjects to comprehend the passage's sentences individually, without relating them to one another, reduced free recall of the passage.     

Use of the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scales in child clinical research

Although the FACES has become a widely used instrument for assessing children's family relations, the possible linearity vs. curvilinearity of its cohesion and adaptability scales has been treated inconsistently by investigators. This study evaluated whether samples of adolescent repeat offenders, young adult prisoners, and adolescent nonoffenders were discriminated better by a linear or curvilinear treatment of the FACES scores. Between-groups comparisons showed that significant effects were observed for each of the three curvilinear measures (cohesion-curvilinear, adaptability-curvilinear, distance-from-center) and only one of the two linear measures (cohesionlinear). These findings support the superiority of a curvilinear treatment of the FACES. In light of these findings, it is suggested that investigators who use FACES evaluate the linearity of the scales and determine whether a linear or curvilinear treatment of the data produces more meaningful results.