An unobtrusive measure of personality?

The use of unobtrusive measures has been advocated for some time by methodologists and research workers. (Webb et al., 1966). Recently Wing and Baddeley (1978) used simple measures of handwriting as indices of stress. They found that the height of the letter and the length of ticks (check marks), indicating answers to questions, increased significantly after alcohol intake.It has been shown in the past that measures based on the dimensions of letters or digits provide a sensitive index of stress (Baddeley et al., 1969; Legge et al., 1964). However, it has not yet been shown whether there is any relationship between the size of circles around ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to a personality questionnaire, and the scale scores it is measuring.This paper reports an investigation whose aim it was to relate circle size to the scale scores of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Psychoticism, and the Lie-scale of the EPQ (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1978).     

A reconstructive-processing interpretation of the recognition failure phenomenon

The generality of the recognition failure phenomenon was the primary basis for the present research. It was hypothesized that the phenomenon obtains whenever an insufficient degree of compatibility exists between the task demands at recognition and those present during study. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that, despite a recognition task that was incompatible to conditions of encoding, subjects could actively reconstruct aspects of the initial situation, and hence recognition failure was minimized. It was assumed that the stimulus material — categorized word pairs — facilitated this reconstructive process. Experiment 3 was designed specifically to examine further the reconstructive process as well as recognition failure. The results indicated that (a) the nature of this process could be mathematically predicted, and (b) subjects seldom failed to recognize words they recalled. The results of the present study strongly suggest an important boundary condition of the phenomenon of recognition failure. Moreover, Tulving and Wiseman's (1975) quadratic function could not predict accurately the obtained magnitude of recognition failure.     

Retention of verbal information by rehearsal in relation to the fluency of verbal output in aphasia

The purpose of the present study was to determine if aphasic subject groups differentiated by the fluency of their verbal output employed rehearsal as a strategy for maintaining verbally coded information in primary memory. A task based upon the Brown-Peterson paradigm was administered to 10 fluent aphasic patients, 10 nonfluent aphasic patients, 10 right-brain-damaged patients, and 10 nonneurological patients. The findings indicate that the nonfluent aphasic patients did not rehearse the verbal information while the fluent aphasic, right-brain-damaged, and nonneurological patients did rehearse. In addition, both fluent and nonfluent aphasic patients encoded significantly less information into the memory system initially and performed worse on the task overall than right-brain-damaged and nonneurological patients.     

The lateral coding of rotations: a study of the simon effect with wheel-rotation responses

A number of experimental studies have consistently shown the locus of spatial S-R compatibility effects to be the selection of the response within an abstract memory code. The purpose of the present study was to test, in the particular case of wheel rotations, the general proposition that any response that a subject internally codes in terms of left and right may be interfered with by the lateral location of the stimuli in a Simon paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that the auditory Simon effect occurred in a task where the subjects had to rotate a steering wheel bimanually either clockwise or counterclockwise according to sound pitch, despite the fact that responses of this kind are undefined with respect to laterality. Experiment 2 confirmed this result in a unimanual rotation condition and suggested that the ear-rotation compatibility effect may be added to the effect of a biomechanical factor, pronation versus supination, supporting the idea of an abstraction motor code. In Experiment 3, subjects rotated the steering wheel with their hands on the lowest part of the wheel. When the response movement made the spot of a C.R.T. move laterally in accordance with the performed rotation, the subjects coded their response directly in terms of its effect on the visual display. For subjects not receiving visual feedback, no compatibility effect occurred. however, the individual data were compatible with the notion that some subjects in this group coded their responses in terms of wheel rotations, and others in terms of hand movements.     

The dimensionality of attributions of causality and responsibility for an accident

Effects of the dimensionality of responsibility and causality attributions were investigated. An accident was described. Subjects cued to respond with causality attributions increased their attributions with event severity. Subjects cued to respond with moral responsibility attributions decreased attributional levels with increasing severity. Assignments of guilt varied specifically with the cued attributional concept.     

Are introverts still more religious?

The JEPQ and a religious attitude scale, ASC 4B, were completed by 1715 school children aged 11–17 yrs. Attitude to religion was found to decline across the age range, girls were found to be more religious than boys, and introverts more religious than extraverts. The relationship between introversion and religiosity is consistent with previous research and the present study adds substance to this relationship with the use of a more recent E scale on an extended age range.     

Mouse killing in rats induced by lesions of the medial hypothalamus or medial accumbens: short-term preoperative exposure to a mouse does not suppress the killing

Rats were either exposed or not exposed to a mouse in their living cage for a 48-hr period. At the end of this time a bilateral lesion was made in the medial accumbens region or in the medial hypothalamus. When tested 2 days postoperatively, the killing frequency among rats that had been exposed to mice preoperatively was not significantly lower than that of rats that were not preoperatively exposed. The ineffectiveness of preoperative experience in suppressing the mouse killing induced by medial accumbens and medial hypothalamic lesions is similar to that found previously with dorsal-median raphe lesions and olfactory bulb lesions and is in contrast to the ease with which preoperative experience prevents mouse killing induced by septal lesions and serotonergic lesions induced by 5,7-dihydroxytryptamine.     

Strategy changes in human contingency judgments as a function of contingency tables.

Judgment strategies of 169 undergraduate students on problems to judge the contingency between two binary events were identified by the method of rule-based analysis to clarify whether or not the strategies the subjects used would be affected by the concrete nature of the contingency table. Problems were constructed along two factors: total cell frequency and width of range of objective contingencies. Although the factor of total cell frequency had no effect on subjects' strategies, the number of subjects who changed strategies corresponding with problem instances increased when the objective contingencies were set closer to zero or when problems became more difficult. These results are discussed in the context of previous studies of this issue in the literature.