Superstitious Rule Generation is Affected by Probability and Type of Outcome

The Psychological Record - One hundred and fifty participants played a computer task in which pOints were either gained (reinforcement) or lost (punishment) randomly on 75%, 50%, or 25% of trials....     

Visual acuity improvement following fading and feedback training—I. Comparison of myopic and emmetropic volunteers

18 myopes and 18 emmetropes were randomly assigned in pairs to either Fading and Feedback training or a no-treatment control condition. The emmetropes were fitted with plus lenses equivalent to the spherical correction of the paired myope to simulate myopic visual acuity. Extensive visual acuity measures were obtained pre- and post-training. Data analyses indicated significant increases in recognition visual acuity for trained subjects, compared to no-treatment controls. The myopia/emmetropia variable did not interact with training even though there were noticably greater increases in visual acuity for trained myopes compared to the other conditions. Resolution visual acuity did not change as a function of training. These data are discussed in terms of their implications for better understanding the mechanisms responsible for visual acuity increases following behavioural training.     

Hope and Coping with Cancer by College Women

The relations of dispositional hope to various self-reported cancer-related coping activities were examined in 115 college women. Dispositionally high- as compared to low-hope women were more knowledgeable about cancer, and this relationship remained when the shared variances due to previous academic achievement, experience with cancer among family or friends, and positive and negative affectivity were removed. Additionally, high- as compared to low-hope women reported more hope-related coping responses in four separate imagined phases of cancer (prevention/risk, detection, temporal course, and impact), and these relationships remained when shared variances related to previous academic achievement, knowledge about cancer, experience with cancer, and negative affectivity were removed. Hope is discussed as means of maintaining a "fighting spirit" for coping with cancer.     

Establishing a Descriptive Database for Teachers with Aggressive Students

While establishing a database that describes students' aggressive behaviors and the conditions present at the time of occurrence, we discovered a variety of definitions of aggression in the literature. This lack of consistency limits the information provided to teachers working with the frequent problem of violence. We propose an inclusive and verifiable definition of aggression gleaned from experience and the literature. The definition incorporates verbal, paraverbal, nonverbal, and physical aggression. Validation is presented from the literature, and from 39 practicing teachers who used the definition to categorize 659 target behaviors. The teachers' level of agreement with the authors' categorization was 93% (median).     

Lexical insertion,inflection, and derivation: Creative processes in word production

This study examines the distinction between creative and noncreative behavior as applied to the production of words and sentences. Under one hypothesis words such as governor and government are stored as independent units and produced by rote, but under another these nouns are not produced as fully integrated units but are generated by rules for combining stems (govern) and affixes (-ment and -or). Analyses of German and English speech errors supported the generation-by-rule thesis and indicated that word stems, prefixes, and suffixes must be separately stored in the internal lexicon and marked as to syntactic function in combining with other word components. The data also suggested a three-stage model of lexical processes in the production of speech: a lexical insertion stage whereby abstract lexical formatives are called on or introduced into sentences by means of abstract syntactic and semantic features; a rule application stage whereby feature agreement rules are applied to the formative and then inflectional, derivational, and phonological rules are applied to derive the phonetic string; finally a serial output stage whereby the phonetic string is translated into serially ordered motor commands.This research was supported by NIMH Grant RO 19964 to Donald Mackay.     

The Impact of Job Applicants' Facial Maturity, Gender, and Academic Achievement on Hiring Recommendations

Two studies investigated the impact of job applicants' facial maturity, gender, and achievement level on hiring recommendations. The results revealed that discrimination based on gender and facial appearance varies with the type of job for which an applicant is being considered. Applicants who were babyfaced or female were favored for jobs requiring qualities of warmth and submission, whereas those who were maturefaced or male were favored for jobs requiring qualities of shrewdness and leadership. These hiring preferences were most pronounced for high achieving applicants. They were also paralleled by stereotypical perceptions of the job- relevant attributes possessed by the applicants, which suggests that the effects of applicants' gender and facial maturity are mediated by the perceived fit between their assumed attributes and the job requirements. Finally, the jobs for which male and maturefaced applicants were favored were those for which high-achieving applicants were also favored, which suggests that female and babyfaced applicants are most apt to be discriminated against when applying for higher status jobs.     

Interactive versus passive dynamics and the exploratory analysis of multivariate data

In two experiments, we examined subjects’ ability to infer structure from three-dimensional data presented dynamically in interactive versus passive mode and in static scatterplots. Accuracy of estimating the number of clusters in three-dimensional data sets was measured for each of these conditions, as a function of cluster discriminability.     

The Empire of Women: Rousseau on Domination and Sexuality

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works are often a touchstone and inspiration for many when it comes to thinking carefully about domination. We find Rousseau-inspired analyses across a wide range of political theories centering the concept of domination, from republicanism, liberalism, and Marxism to critical theory, feminisms, and beyond. This article aims to raise questions about a powerful, prevailing, and compelling reading of Rousseau's conception of domination. Beyond that, I hope to offer further insight into the components of his view of domination by centering his account of sexuality as a domination/subordination relation. Ultimately, I suggest that Rousseau's considered view is that domination is a matter of being in a dependency relation. In other words, to be dependent upon others (whether a particular other or group of others) is sufficient for being dominated. However, not all domination relations are illegitimate. Both sexuality and the specific case of forming a social compact are sites of domination relations that can be rendered legitimate under certain conditions.     

Comparing the effects of static and dynamic signals during multiple schedules

The extent to which multiple schedules are an effective schedule thinning method following functional communication training (FCT) relies on the control the schedule-correlated stimuli exert over behavior. Thus, the stimuli used to signal the schedule in place (e.g., reinforcement and extinction) in a multiple schedule arrangement require special attention. To date, the majority of the research on multiple schedules has evaluated the use of different arbitrary signals as schedule-correlated stimuli (e.g., poster boards). These signals are considered static as they lack movement. More recently, some studies have successfully used dynamic signals, which include movement or animation, within multiple schedule arrangements. However, the extent to which one type of signal may result in faster stimulus control over behavior has not been evaluated. Thus, the purpose of this study was to compare the use of static and dynamic signals as schedule-correlated stimuli in multiple schedules used within the context of FCT. Four children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder participated in the study. The results suggest that no differences in discriminated manding were observed for three out of four participants. Only dynamic signals resulted in discriminated manding for one participant.     

Treating elopement without extinction in a preschool setting

Elopement is a prevalent and dangerous behavior that is common with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Due to safety, logistics, and effort on the part of stakeholders, recent research has emphasized the need for treatments that do not include extinction or response blocking. Using a multiple-baseline-across-functions design, we successfully decreased elopement with functional communication training, without additional treatment components, for one function but needed to add an additional treatment component (response blocking) for the second function for a 4 year-old boy with ASD who engaged in elopement in a preschool setting. We highlight contributions to the literature on elopement as well as directions for future research.