Developmental changes in children's abilities to match and label emotionally laden situations

In two studies, male and female preschoolers and third- and fourth-graders were tested on their abilities to match and generate affective labels for 19 types of emotionally laden situations. Age changes were found in the accuracy with which situations were both labeled and matched; the ability to match similar situations was more strongly related to age than was the ability to label emotions. Matching and labeling abilities were positively related to each other. Both age groups were best at labeling situations depicting happiness, anger, and sadness, and at matching situations depicting sadness, anger, and disgust, but both age groups were capable of matching a wide variety of emotions depicted in situations at a better than chance rate. Only situations depicting fear, nervousness, and embarrassment were not matched better than chance by either preschoolers or third- and fourth-graders.This research was supported by a grant to the first author from Boston University Graduate School, No. GRS-661-PS. Portions of this paper were presented in Toronto at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, April 1985. The authors would like to thank Gail Desmond, Lesley Landau, Ana Ortiz, Phyllis Sternlight, Mark Steward, and Orna Wolfson for their help in various phases of this project, and especially the Lowell Day Nursery for its cooperation.     

Spatiotemporal continuity and the perception of causality in infants

Infant perception of a Michottean launching event in which one object causes another to move through collision is examined in a series of habituation-test experiments. A number of hypotheses concerning how infants aged around 30 weeks might perceive and encode launching and its noncausal variants are identified and tested. The results of the first experiment indicate that infants can perceive direct launching as an event with internal structure, that is, as composed of two temporally ordered movements. The nature of the encoding by the infants is perceptual and not specifically motor-based. The second experiment makes it seem unlikely that the infants encode independent spatial and temporal features (for example, contact and successivity), while the third experiment suggests a spatiotemporal continuity gradient. Some implications for the origins of causality are discussed.     

Androgyny,depression, and self-esteem in irish homosexual and heterosexual males and females

An examination was made of the following research questions: (a) Do Irish homosexuals and heterosexuals differ in the frequency of their classification in sex-role categories? (b) Is sexual orientation related to psychological adjustment? (c) Is androgyny related to psychological adjustment? Subjects were 112 Irish men and women who were administered Bem's Sex-Role Inventory, Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale, Zung's Self-Rating Depression Scale, and a questionnaire. Results indicated that Irish homosexuals were classified more frequently than Irish heterosexuals as androgynous. Homosexuals did not differ from heterosexuals in self-esteem or depression scores. Among these Irish subjects, psychological sex-role category is a more powerful influence on psychological health than actual sexual orientation. It is not whether you are homosexual or heterosexual that affects your psychological health, but how you perceive your own psychological masculinity and femininity.     

Separating response dependency and response-reinforcer contiguity within a recycling conjunctive schedule

A procedure is described which disrupts response-reinforcer contiguity and response dependency and which demonstrates how the location of the response dependency in interval schedules can be regarded as a controlling variable in its own right. Rats' lever pressing produced sucrose on a recycling conjunctive fixed-time 30-second fixed-ratio 1 schedule of reinforcement. Reinforcement occurred only at the end of the fixed-time component on this schedule and only if a response had occurred during that component. This produced a pause-respond-pause pattern during the interreinforcer interval for all animals. When the location of the response dependency was then restricted to a 10-second period in the middle of the fixed-time component, the pattern was accentuated and response rates increased for all animals, while postreinforcement pauses decreased sharply for two animals. When responding was required in the first 10 seconds of the fixed-time component, responding peaked earlier in the interval for all animals. Response rates were slightly below those in the previous conditions, while postreinforcement pauses were between 2 and 6 seconds across animals.     

Spatial and verbal codes and the capacity of STM

Subjects were required to report an array of consonants presented tachistoscopically for various durations. Concurrently, they held in memory a load of auditory digits, a load of spatial locations or no load. These several forms of information did not seem to compete for a fixed capacity short term store. Consonant report was unaffected by carrying a spatial load and barely affected by carrying the auditory digit load. An auditory-verbal loop cannot play a mandatory role in the coding and storage of visual information. Some criticisms of structural interpretations of immediate memory are suggested.     

The effects of lexical and semantic information on same-different visual comparison of words

Previous research has indicated that phonemic and orthographic factors cannot account for the fact that words (clear/clear) are responded to more rapidly than orthographically legal nonwords (creal/creal) in a same-different visual comparison task. However, the role of semantic and lexical factors is less certain. The effects of semantic similarity on both same and different judgments were evaluated in several experiments. In the first experiment, subjects were not any slower on semantically related (rang/rung) than on unrelated (rang/rank) different judgments even with a 3,000-msec interval between the first and second word. In Experiment 2, subjects based their judgments on whether or not the first letter of each word was visually identical. Same judgments were not any faster for semantically related than unrelated items even though other evidence indicated that subjects were processing the whole word and not just the first letter. Experiment 3 showed that the word/orthographically legal nonword difference could be replicated with the first-letter visual comparison task employed in Experiment 2. These and related results were discussed with reference to the idea that the word/orthographically legal nonword difference is due to the facilitating effects of a lexical entry upon the encoding, but not the comparison of an item.     

Effects of fixed-time shocks and brief stimuli on food-maintained behavior of rats

When a fixed-time schedule of shocks was presented to rats lever pressing for food on a random-interval schedule, a pattern of behavior developed with a high rate of pressing after shock declining to near zero before the next shock was delivered. Once this pattern had stabilized, one-quarter of the shocks were replaced with brief auditory stimuli (tones) in a random sequence. Tone maintained behavior similar to shock, although tone was never paired with shock. Both tone and shocks elicited responding when presented at various times as probe stimuli, and responding was usually totally suppressed if neither stimulus occurred at the beginning of the fixed-time interval. When other stimuli were paired with tone and shock, only those paired with tone gained discriminative control and elicited responding. These findings suggest that stimuli that signal a shock-free, or safe, period will maintain the pattern of behavior generated by shock on a fixed-time schedule. There is a parallel between this phenomenon and the control of behavior on second-order schedules of positive reinforcement with nonpaired brief stimuli.