Watching people talk about their emotions: Inferences in response to full-face vs. profile expressions

Young adults talked to an experimenter about their emotional reactions to video episodes intended to evoke either negative or positive affect. Facial behavior was simultaneously videotaped from three perspectives (full-face, a 90° right profile, and a 90° left profile) without their awareness. Judges viewed a subset of dynamic expressions in one of the three facial perspectives in either normal or mirror-reversed orientation. While subjects talked about a negative affect elicitor, the left hemiface and the full-face were perceived as more expressive than the right hemiface. The left hemiface, in reversed orientation, was perceived to display more emotion than the same expression in original orientation for positive or negative affect. These results are discussed in the context of the literature exploring hemifacial differences in emotional expression and mouth asymmetry during propositional speech.     

Effects of background music on the remembering of filmed events

The use of background music within films provides a naturalistic setting in which to investigate certain issues of schematic processing. Here, the relative placement of music was manipulated such that music either accompanied a scene's outcome, and thereby accentuated its affective meaning, or foreshadowed the same scene, and thereby created expectancies about the future course of events. In addition, background music was either congruent or incongruent with the affect of an episode's outcome. When subjects were later asked to recall the series of filmed episodes, results showed that expectancy violations arising from mood-incongruent relations led to better memory in the foreshadowing condition, while mood-congruent relations led to better performance in the accompanying condition. Results from a recognition task further revealed that scenes unavailable for recall could be recognized when cued by background music. These overall findings are discussed in terms of selective-attending processes that are differentially directed as a function of background music.     

THE ACQUISITION OF SIMPLE AND COMPOUND SENTENCE STRUCTURE IN AN AUTISTIC CHILD1

Contingent reinforcement and imitative prompts were used to teach an autistic child to use simple and compound sentences to describe a set of standard pictures. When imitative prompts and reinforcement were discontinued, correct use of simple sentences declined, but increased again when imitative prompts and reinforcement were re-instated. When imitative prompts and reinforcements were used to teach compound sentence structure, correct use of simple sentences declined and correct use of compound structure increased. At the end of training, the child also used novel compound sentences to describe a set of pictures on which he had received no direct training.     

Treatment, subtype, and word type effects in dyslexic children''s response to remediation

Children diagnosed as accuracy-disabled or rate-disabled readers (Lovett, 1984a, 1986, 1987) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions providing training in word recognition and decoding skills (DS), oral and written language (OWLS), or classroom survival skills (an alternative treatment control). The experimental treatment programs exerted a positive treatment effect on the word recognition performances of both groups, but treatment-specific changes in contextual reading and oral language skill were not observed. Pre- and post-treatment comparisons on an experimental word recognition task revealed a post-test advantage for DS-trained children of both subgroups. Accuracy-disabled readers demonstrated treatment-specific gains for both orthographically regular words (e.g., wade) and for exception words (e.g., broad), with their gains greater on exception words. Rate-disabled children demonstrated treatment-specific gains only for exception words, but exhibited these gains following both the DS and the OWLS treatments. Although both experimental treatment programs were associated with a positive outcome for the rate disabled subgroup, DS training was associated with relatively greater treatment gain. These data suggest that the critical variables underlying the effectiveness of the DS treatment include the specific lexical knowledge these disabled readers acquired, their greater reliance on an orthographic pattern procedure in word recognition, and/or the fact that newly acquired items were practiced to a point approximating automatization.     

Sex roles and yielded/expressed self-control

Previous research has indicated that stereotypically masculine behaviors characterize leadership and that stereotypically feminine traits are devalued. However, this research may be questioned on the basis that the sex stereotype measures employed were not appropriate for the managerial role and that the rating task was not clearly defined. The present study attempts to deal with these concerns by asking groups to rate two different managers: the one they would wish to work for or the one they would wish to have working for them. As hypothesized, those who described the supervisors who they wished to have working for them valued masculine traits significantly more than those who described the supervisor they would like to work for. In all cases, however, stereotypically sexneutral traits were most highly valued.Reprint requests may be sent to either author at the Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina 28223. Preliminary data from this investigation were presented at the Southeastern Psychological Association Convention, March 1985. The authors wish to thank David Gilmore for his comments on an earlier version of the paper, and Debra Schwartz for her efforts in the data collection and analysis stages of the project.     

Concurrent treatment of mother and child in resolution of multigenerational separation and individuation difficulties

This case serves as a paradigm of concurrent treatment of a mother and child, where the central problem was one of separation-individuation. The nature of the child's presenting symptom of night terrors, the overinvolvement of the mother and the child, and the tendency of the child to withdraw from the outside world, all pointed to a child at risk for the more symptomatic development of school refusal and greater psychopathology. Since the treatment took place within a full service community mental health clinic, it was possible to provide psychiatric evaluation and consultation of both mother and child and the use of two therapists working collaboratively. With this method of treatment, the unfolding of both mother's and child's separation-individuation processes could be identified and utilized. Since she was an electively mute child who refused to come into the treatment room, another therapeutic tool became the use of the younger brother as a facilitator.     

Long-term memory for a common object

A series of experiments was done to determine how completely and accurately people remember the visual details of a common object, a United States penny. People were asked to: draw a penny from unaided recall; draw a penny given a list of its visual features; choose from among a list of possible features those which do appear on a penny; indicate what was wrong with an erroneous drawing of a penny; and select the correct representation of a penny from among a set of incorrect drawings. Performance was surprisingly poor on all tasks. On balance, the results were consistent with the idea that the visual details of an object, even a very familiar object, are typically available from memory only to the extent that they are useful in everyday life. It was also suggested that recognition tasks may make much smaller demands on memory than is commonly assumed.     

Changes in attitudes and beliefs in two-person interaction situations

A number of studies have supported a model of attitudes and belie ft in which the attitude toward a given issue is viewed as a function of both the belie ft about that issue and their evaluative components (Fishbein, 1965a). The present study tested the predicative ability of this model against alternative models and its applicability to changes in attitudes and beliefs resulting from the interaction of disagreeing peers. Two attitudinal issues and two types of beliefs for each, instrumental and attributive, were used. Pairs of subjects who disagreed on an issue according to their pretest responses were asked to reach a consensus and then to complete a post-test questionnaire. Pretest responses indicated that the predictions of the Fishbein model were supported for each type of belief considered separately and for both combined for both issues. The predictions of most of the alternative models were also significantly related to actual attitudes. Although some of these predictions closely approximated those of the Fishbein model, this model was, overall, the best predictor. When changes in pretest-post-test responses for experimental subjects were considered, the predictions of the model were supported for both issues when both types of belie ft were considered together and when attributive beliefs were considered alone, but only for one issue when instrumental beliefs were considered alone.