Hemispheric asymmetries in faculty and student musicians and nonmusicians during melody recognition tasks

Current research has suggested that musical stimuli are processed in the right hemisphere except in musicians, in whom there is an increased involvement of the left hemisphere. The present study hypothesized that the more musical training persons receive, the more they will rely on an analytic/left-hemispheric processing strategy. The subjects were 10 faculty and 10 student musicians, and 10 faculty and 10 student nonmusicians. All subjects listened to a series of melodies (some recurring and some not) and excerpts (some actual and some not) in one ear and, after a rest, to a different series of melodies in the other ear. The task was to identify recurring vs. nonrecurring melodies and actual vs. nonactual excerpts. For student musicians, there was a right-ear/left-hemispheric advantage for melody recognition, while for student nonmusicians, the situation was the reverse. Neither faculty group showed any ear preference. There were no significant differences for excerpt recognition. Two possible explanations of the faculty performance were discussed in terms of physical maturation and a functionally more integrated hemispheric approach to the task.     

A critical evaluation of some commonly-employed methods for the assessment of type a coronary-prone behaviour

Type A coronary-prone behaviour has been repeatedly associated with an increased incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) amongst middle-aged men and women. This association appears to be independent of other standard CHD risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and elevated serum cholesterol levels. This paper presents normative and correlational data for a number of commonly-employed self-report measures of Type A behaviour and the structured interview. These data replicate U.S. findings that self-report measures tend to correlate only moderately with the Structured-Interview method of assessment of Type A behaviour. The implications of these data for researchers attempting to assess Type A behaviour, especially with limited resources, are discussed.     

Automatic stimulus presentation for the proboscis extension reflex in diptera

An apparatus is described that automates the elicitation of the proboscis extension reflex (PER) in dipterans. The PER has been used as a measure of both classical conditioning and central excitation. Most studies of PER have employed manual stimulation, which adds inter- and intraexperimenter differences in technique as another source of variance. The advantages of this apparatus are (1) elimination of individual differences in manual techniques of experimenters as a possible source of error variance and (2) capability of stimulating several flies individually during a single session. An experiment is reported comparing the manual and automated methods.     

The Effects of Measurement Strategy on Attributions for Marital Problems and Behaviors1

The present study examined the relation of attributions for spouse behaviors, attributions for global conjugal conflict, and marital adjustment. The sample consisted of 74 French-Canadian couples who completed the Marital Attribution Style Questionnaire, the Conflict Rating Scale, and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale. Results showed that the relation between attribution and marital satisfaction is stable across culture. In addition, specific and general attribution measures were low to moderately correlated. However, multiple regression analyses demonstrated that attributions for global conjugal conflict entered the regression equations more often than attributions for hypothetical spouse behaviors. These findings suggest that the comparability of marital attribution measures should not be taken for granted. The need to develop standardized measures is underlined.     

Perceived Control, Drive for Thinness, and Food Consumption: Anorexic Tendencies as Displaced Reactance

Although loss of perceived control has been implicated in the development of eating disorders, previous research has not directly tested the relationship between perceived control and food consumption. This study investigated the hypothesis that individuals with anorexic tendencies react to low perceived control by restricting food intake as a means of regaining a sense of control. Forty female undergraduates who scored either low or high on the Drive for Thinness Scale (Garner & Olmsted, 1984) were led to believe they would be participating in two separate studies. Perceived control was experimentally manipulated such that half of the subjects experienced low control and half experienced high control over a social situation. Under the guise of a second experiment, subjects tasted breakfast cereals and completed measures relevant to eating and body image. Results showed that subjects who were high in drive for thinness (DT) who experienced low control ate less sweetened cereal and planned to eat less at dinner than high DT subjects who experienced high control. Low DT subjects were unaffected by the control manipulation. The results are discussed in terms of displaced reactance.     

A comparative evaluation of parent-training interventions for families of chronic delinquents

Fifty-five families of chronically offending delinquents were randomly assigned to parent-training treatment or to service traditionally provided by the juvenile court and community. The families in the parent-training group received an average of 44.8 hours of professional contact (23.3 hours of which were phone contacts), and each control group family received treatment estimated at more than 50 hours on the average. Comparisons of police contact data at baseline and subsequent years for the two groups showed that subjects in both groups demonstrated reduced rates of offending during the followup years. The finding most relevant was significant treatment-by-time effect for offense rates, with most of this effect accounted for by a greater reduction in serious crimes for the experimental group during the treatment year, and a similar reduction of the community control group occurring in the first of three followup years. These early decrements in offense rates persisted during followup for both groups. Throughout the study, boys in the experimental group spent significantly less time in institutional settings than did boys in the control group. Parent training had a significant impact, but the reduction in offending was produced at very high emotional cost to staff. Although it is clear that this population requires substantial treatment resources, this study underscores the need for more work on prevention.Research for this paper was supported by grant MH 37938 from the Center for Studies of Antisocial and Violent Behavior, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), U.S. Public Health Service (PHS). The writing was supported in part by grants MH 17126 and MH 37940 from the same Center, grant DA 05304 from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, U.S. PHS., and grant MH 38730 from the Child and Adolescent Disorders Research Branch, NIMH, U.S. PHS. The authors gratefully acknowledge the enduring commitment of the treatment staff that made this study possible: Patricia Chamberlain, Marion Forgatch, and Kate Kavanagh.     

Peer support telephone dyads for elderly women: Was this the wrong intervention?

Tested a preventive intervention in which peer telephone dyads were developed for low-income, community-living, elderly women with low perceived social support. After an initial assessment, respondents were randomly assigned to either an assessment-only control or received 10 weeks of friendly staff telephone contact. After a second assessment, participants receiving the staff contact were randomly assigned to continue that contact or were paired in dyads to continue phone contact with one another. Dependent variables were measures of perceived social support, morale, depression, and loneliness. All groups, particularly the staff contact group, showed some improvement in mental health scores over time, but there were no significant differences between intervention groups, or between intervention and assessment-only control groups. The results suggest that participation in the study and in personal assessment interviews at home were probably morale enhancing, and that additional telephone contact did not significantly add to that effect. Evidence also indicates that, in this sample, low perceived family support was significantly related to poor mental health, so it is possible that a program designed to increase friend support may have been the wrong intervention.     

Growth coping,work satisfaction and turnover: A longitudinal study

A longitudinal organizational field study examined work satisfaction and employee growth coping as joint predictors of turnover. Three employee categories were examined: 1) No Turnover, 2) turnover within the same occupational field (Intraoccupational Turnover), and 3) turnover to a new occupational field (Interoccupational Turnover). Work satisfaction was moderate in the first two groups and low in the third group. As predicted, a specific strategy of employee coping, growth, was lowest in the first group, moderate in the second group, and highest in the third group. Through the use of linear discriminant analysis, 66.4% of the employees were correctly classified into No Turnover, Intraoccupational Turnover, and Interoccupational Turnover groups based only on information regarding work satisfaction and growth coping. The first squared canonical correlation was found to equal .30, far surpassing the modest work satisfaction/turnover correlations found in all previous studies.The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.     

The fear potentiated startle effect

A differential conditioning study examined whether an acoustic startle probe, presented during extinction of an aversively conditioned visual stimulus, potentiated the reflex eyeblink response in humans and whether this potentiation varied with the change in affective valence of the conditioned stimulus. Sixty college students were randomly assigned to view a series of two slides, depicting either unpleasant/highly arousing, unpleasant/moderate arousing, neutral/calm, pleasant/moderate arousing or pleasant/highly arousing scenes and objects (duration: 8 sec). During preconditioning (8 trials) and extinction (24 trials) acoustic startle probes (white noise bursts [50 ms; 95 dBA] were administered during and between slide presentation). During acquisition (16 trials) CS+ was reinforced by an electric shock. Startle response magnitudes significantly increased from preconditioning to extinction and were substantially larger to CS+. Conditioned startle reflex augmentation linearly increased with the pleasantness of the slides. Furthermore, subjects showed a greater post-conditioning increase of judged aversiveness to slides that they had previously reported to be more pleasant, exactly paralleling the startle reflex results.