Sex bias in the newspaper treatment of male-centered and female-centered news stories

Differences in the newspaper treatment of men and women were examined in two sets of news stories collected a year apart, in the fall of 1976 and 1977. In both samples, coverage of women was more likely to include mention of personal appearance, marital status, and spouse than was coverage of men. These differences could not be attributed to the greater number of men in the news, nor to differences in the sections of the newspaper where stories about men and stories about women were usually found. They were equally true of locally written and national wire-service stories.     

Measurement of state and trait anxiety in elderly mental health clients

Anxiety in elderly persons is frequently discussed but rarely measured. Difficulties in measuring state and trait anxiety with mental health clients aged 55 and older using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) led the authors to validate the use of the simpler, children's form of their scale. Four types of validity data were found: (1) the childrens' form was highly correlated with the adult form, (2) both scales were significantly correlated with objective ratings of anxiety made by staff, (3) the STAI measures were not correlated with behavioral ratings other than anxiety (discriminant validity), (4) the residential clients were significantly higher in A-trait than the day clients. The nonresidential clients were not more anxious than college students. Discussion emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing between and measuring both state and trait anxiety in order to understand anxiety in the elderly.     

The gestures of a gorilla: language acquisition in another pongid

A female lowland gorilla, Koko, has been engaged in an ongoing language program since July 1972 when she was 1 year old. During the first 30 months of training she acquired a vocabulary of 100 words in American Sign Language which she spontaneously combined into meaningful and often novel statements of up to 11 signs in length. The gorilla is using a rapidly expanding vocabulary of signs to express semantic and possibly grammatical relations similar to those expressed by human children in the early stages of language acquisition. Patterns of generalization, gradual increase in mean length of utterance, and innovative use of gestural language are discussed in relation to data available on children and chimpanzees.     

Depth separation and lateral interference

In four experiments, the perceptual interaction between an annulus and a Landolt C enclosed within it was investigated as a function of their perceived relative depth positions and of the perceived lateral distance between the inner edge of the annulus and the outer edge of the C. To permit facile and unconfounded manipulation of perceived depth, the stimuli were stereoscopic contours formed from dynamic random-lement stereograms. Either one or both stimuli were visible continuously. The effect of the annulus on the Landolt C was assessed by forced-choice recognition thresholds of the C and by judgments of its apparent clarity. The main results were: (1) For both threshold recognition and apparent clarity, perceived depth separation has a strong effect on the strength of perceptual interaction; (2) the effect is asymmetrical in that the stimulus perceived as in front of its partner and closer to the observer has greater perceptual potency; and (3) as spacing between the elements increases, perceptual interaction declines independently of depth position. The implications of these data for general theories of stimulus interaction in three-dimensional space are discussed.     

Naturalistic observation in clinical assessment

Summary The development of the Behavioral Coding System (BCS) used by the Social Learning Project has encompassed approximately 8 years of clinical and research experience with naturalistic observation as a clinical assessment tool. The BCS, while originally designed to accomplish certain broad purposes, illustrates a solution to an assessment task that should be applicable to other research and clinical settings in which naturalistic observation of family interactions are needed.A variety of reliability analyses, ranging from traditional interobserver agreement among coders to generalizability analyses, have supported the measurement precision of the BCS scores, for their intended purposes. In conducting this series of investigations, certain problems in psychometric analysis of observation data have arisen and been documented. Most notably, the tradition of estimating reliability via interobserver agreement has been questioned, mainly on the grounds that behavioral complexity intrudes into such analyses in ways that suggest that current observer reliability estimates may be substantially biased. The usefulness of generalizability theory is argued, particularly for observational data collected under varying assessment conditions which may influence behavioral scores.Three types of validity have been reported for BCS scores: content, concurrent, and construct validity. The BCS has favorably withstood these psychometric investigations, showing that the behavioral measures are justified on content grounds, that outside reports of behavior coincide satisfactorily with the BCS scores, and that expected behavioral changes following treatment are readily indexed by the BCS scores.Excerpts and abstracts from chapters by Jones, Reid, and Patterson (1975, pp. 42–95), and from Reid (1977).The assessment procedures were developed as part of an extended series of grants from the Section on Crime and Delinquency, National Institute of Mental Health.J. B. Reid (1977) has recently edited a manual which presents a much fuller report of the topics covered in this report, including: a more extensive literature review, operational definitions of code categories, normative data, video training tapes, and procedures for training observers.     

Accelerating stimuli for two classes of coercive behaviors

The analyses focused on a means by which classes of events may be derived from sequential data. A prior analyses of family interaction has derived two classes labeled Hostile and Social Aggression. Events in a class were initiated by a common network of antecedent behaviors. The current analyses showed that class members also shared a common set of maintaining consequences. These events correlated with altered probabilities for the immediate recurrence of a target event.     

Aphasia, dyslexia and the phonological coding of written words

A possible account of the reading difficulty of certain aphasic-dyslexic patients includes the notion that they are impaired in translating the written word into a phonological code via grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. This notion was tested in two experiments, both utilizing orthographically regular non-words (like dake) as stimuli. The first experiment provides an analysis of two patients' (largely successful) attempts to repeat non-words, and their (almost totally unsuccessful) attempts to read them. Second, in a lexical decision task (is this written letter-string a word or not?), the finding that normals are slowed by non-words homophonic with real words (like flore) was replicated using a modified technique. This effect, attributable to phonological coding, was not shown by the patients. At the same time, their ability to discriminate between words and non-words was essentially intact. Consideration was given to mechanisms which might underlie such patients' correct and erroneous readings of words and non-words.     

Serial,parallel, or holistic identification of single words in the two visual fields?

Subjects made timed manual responses in judging whether laterally presented four-letter words were identical to targets. In Experiment 1, nontargets differed by a single letter from targets. A right-field superiority occurred only for targets (which were detected fastest of all) and for nontargets where a letter changed at Position 2 or Position 3. Changes at initial and final positions were detected faster than the two middle positions, and there were no significant field differences. In Experiment 2, ascenders and descenders were controlled and changes were made in nontargets at all four letter positions, at Positions 1 and 4, at Positions 2 and 3, or at 2 alone. Response times for nontargets varied inversely with the number of differing letters, regardless of position. Significant field differences again only appeared for changes in the two middle positions. Letters at the beginning and end of a word seem to be processed faster than and differently from those within, where field differences are strongest. Vowel-consonant differences probably do not account for these effects, which are more compatible with some form of parallel, rather than either serial or holistic, processing.     

Sensorimotor skills and language comprehension in autistic children

The objectives of this study were to examine the level of sensorimotor concepts of young autistic children and to relate these concepts to language comprehension. A sample of 16 autistic children with a mean mental age of 24.8 months was administered a standardized scale of sensorimotor intelligence and of receptive language. The autistic children demonstrated surprisingly sophisticated sensorimotor skills, particularly object permanence. While their initial performance was inferior to that of normal controls matched on mental age, particularly in their use of objects in combination, the difference between groups diminished on the second test administration. On the receptive language measure, the autistic children were less able to identify words correctly. The sensorimotor behavior of autistic children who demonstrated language comprehension did not differ from those who showed no language comprehension, except that the former group tended to use an object as an instrument somewhat more frequently. The fact that the autistic children were so impaired in language even with fairly good sensorimotor skills suggests that these skills, particularly object permanence, play a minor role in their language acquisition.Support for this research was provided by Biobehavioral Research Support Grant 516, Grant 12–41 from the March of Dimes, NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship No. 1 F32 MH07550-01 (Ungerer), and NIMH Grant MH 33815-01. Subjects were recruited from the UCLA Research Center for the Study of Childhood Psychosis, funded by NIMH Grant MH 30897. We would like to thank members of the CRC, particularly Dr. Peter Tanguay, Dr. Barbara Fish, and Dr. B. J. Freeman, for their support of our research efforts.