Geophysical variables and behavior: XXIX. Impact of atmospheric conditions on occurrences of individual violence among Canadian penitentiary populations

This project studied the effects of weather variables and size of the population on minor and major violence rates within six prisons in the Kingston, Ontario, Canada area from January, 1980 through December, 1983. While weather variables have been studied in relation to mood changes within the general population, this study was the first to analyze the impact of weather variables on rates of violence within the prison setting using forward inclusion multiple regression. Analysis showed that population size consistently appeared positively correlated with assaults on other inmates among the male medium-security prisoners during the summer months. In the summer months, temperature tended to be positively related to some minor kinds of offenses, but in the winter months the relationship was negative. Humidity, rain, sunshine hours, snow, and snow on the ground were not consistently related to incidences of minor and major violence. Indices of geomagnetic disturbances had statistically significant inverse relationships with attempted suicide/self-inflicted injury rates among the male prisoners during the summer months. Over 12 months, wind was generally negatively correlated with incidences of major and minor violence among the male inmates. For 6-mo. periods, wind was generally positively correlated with violence rates during the winter months and negatively correlated during the summer months among the male inmates. The findings relating weather variables to violence rates in the women's prison were consistently in opposition to those found for male prisoners during the 4-yr. period.     

A reflection: Howard Scott Liddell, 1895-1962

Howard S. Liddell, Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, was one of the earliest American students and developers of I.P. Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex and an early researcher on stress. The significance of Liddell's work on stress was fully recognized when he was sent, as a member of a commission, to the battlefront at the height of the Korean War to study stress and self-control in the soldiers. This profound experience convinced Liddell that behavioral research must ultimately be made relevant to the understanding and elevation of human behavior. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in efforts to implement this conviction through research, writing, and lectures before scientific and lay groups.     

Detection errors in a task with articulatory suppression: Phonological receding and reading

In two experiments, subjects read passages of text and circled instances of a target letter under normal conditions or while engaged in articulatory suppression. In Experiment 1, subjects searching for the letter e made a disproportionately large number of errors on the word “the” and more errors when e occurred in unstressed than in stressed syllables of three-syllable words. In Experiment 2, subjects searching for the letter f made an exceedingly large number of errors on the word “of.” Articulatory suppression significantly reduced the stress effect in the three-syllable words but did not reduce the tendency to make errors on “the” or “of,” suggesting that phonological recoding is responsible for this effect of stress but does not influence the unitization processes of reading.     

Selective association in conditioned stress-induced analgesia: functional differences in interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory pathways

Rats were used to determine whether stress-induced analgesia (SIA) can be produced by conditioning with interoceptive stimuli (LiCl) as with exteroceptive stimuli (footshock). SIA was measured using a tail-flick test. As expected, unavoidable footshock as well as conditioning with footshock produced SIA. In contrast, conditioning with LiCl failed to cause SIA. The findings support the notion of functional differences in neural substrates for conditioning by exteroceptive and interoceptive cue.     

A secondary-task analysis of a word familiarity effect

In three experiments we examined aspects of the word inferiority effect and word frequency disadvantage for letter detection. In Experiment 1 we tested a prediction derived from a hypothesis based solely on attentional factors. Adult subjects performed one of two secondary detection tasks while reading for comprehension. The inferiority effects were obtained only when the secondary task was letter detection, not when nonletter targets were used in the secondary task. This finding is inconsistent with the attentional hypothesis, but is consistent with the unitization hypothesis of Healy and Drewnowski (1983). In Experiments 2 and 3 we found that manipulation of the need to read for comprehension had little influence on the letter-detection inferiority effects, but a strong influence on the effects involving the detection of nonletter targets. These results are discussed in terms of their implications concerning processing system flexibility.     

Different methods of lexical access for words presented in the left and right visual hemifields

Right-handed adults were asked to identify by name bilaterally presented words and pronounceable nonwords. For words in the normal horizontal format, word length (number of letters) affected left visual hemifield (LVF) but not right visual hemifield (RVF) performance in Experiments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. This finding was made for words of high and low frequency (Experiment 6) and imageability (Experiment 5). It also held across markedly different levels of overall performance (Experiments 1 and 2), and across different relative positionings of short and long words in the LVF and RVF (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the variable affecting LVF performance is the number of letters in a word, not its phonological length. For pronounceable nonwords (Experiment 7) and words in unusual formats (Experiment 8), however, length affected both LVF and RVF performance. The characteristics identified for RVF performance in these experiments also hold for the normal reading system. In this (normal) system the absence of length effects for horizontally formatted words is generally taken to reflect the processes involved in lexical access. Length effects in the normal reading system are thought to arise when lexical access for unusually formatted words and for the pronunciation of nonwords requires the short-term storage of information at a graphemic level of analysis. The characteristics of LVF performance indicate that horizontally formatted words presented to the right cerebral hemisphere can only achieve lexical access by a method that requires the short-term storage of graphemic information. This qualitative difference in methods of lexical access applies regardless of whether the right hemisphere is seen as accessing words in the left hemisphere's lexicon or words in a lexicon of its own.     

Visual information processing speed in hypnotized and nonhypnotized subjects

Using a backward-masking paradigm with a bias-free and ceiling-free psychophysical task, we tested hypnotized and control subjects for speed of visual information processing. Approximately half of each group received visual imagery suggestions in an attempt to influence attention. Imagery produced no significant differential effect. Although an absence of a hypnotizability-performance relationship was in keeping with findings of a previous study, those subjects in the present study who performed under hypnosis were, as a group, significantly superior to the other subjects in speed of information processing.     

A Psychoneuroimmunologic Perspective on AIDS Research: Questions,Preliminary Findings,and Suggestions1

Starting with the premise that research questions emanating from the fields of psychoneuroimmunology and behavioral medicine may provide critical information for understanding and treating acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), we provide brief backgrounds on psychoneuroimmunology and on AIDS. Previously, Solomon had generated 25 hypotheses based on the thesis that the immune and central nervous systems are intimately linked. Eight hypotheses from his list are presented as particularly relevant to AIDS. From these hypotheses, we derived a set of 12 new questions to be addressed in research on AIDS. Evidence and illustrations from studies in the literature, from our own research on psychoimmunologic relationships and psychosocial factors related to outcome, and from clinical examples is discussed for each question. Finally, suggestions are offered to address some of the problems in conducting psychoneurologic research.