The Relation of Distressful Childhood Experiences and Empathy in College Undergraduates

We assessed the relation between the empathic responsiveness of young adults and the relative frequency and intensity of distressful events they experienced as children. Undergraduate subjects (N = 111; 56 men and 55 women) were led to believe that they were participating in two separate studies. In the first study, students completed the Distress Experiences in Childhood questionnaire, a filler task, and a slightly abbreviated version of the Mehrabian and Epstein (1972) empathy measure. In the second study, students watched an emotion-laden videotape of a patient (actually an actress) in a therapy session and subsequently completed an emotional-response questionnaire adapted from Batson, O'Quin, Fultz, Vanderplas, and Isen (1983). Students who rated their distressful childhood experiences as highly distressing scored higher on both measures of empathy than did students who rated their experiences as relatively less distressing. In contrast, the number of distressful childhood experiences reported was generally unrelated to empathy scores.     

Children's Anticipated Responses to Hypothetical Peers With Undesirable Characteristics: Role of Peers' Desire to Change,Effort to Change,and Outcome

The authors explored the extent to which 5th- and 6th-grade students’ anticipated responses to hypothetical peers with undesirable characteristics (e.g., being overweight) are influenced by information that each peer (a) desired (or did not desire) to change the characteristic, (b) exerted effort (or did not exert effort) to change the characteristic, and (c) was successful (or unsuccessful) in changing the characteristic. In general, the children anticipated responding more favorably to peers who were successful in overcoming an undesirable characteristic than those who were unsuccessful. However, across both outcome conditions, peers who wanted to change and exerted effort to change were rated more favorably than were peers who reported no effort to change an undesirable characteristic, regardless of whether or not they had expressed a desire to change that characteristic. For peers whose failure to change an undesirable characteristic was associated with no effort to change, those who expressed a desire to change were rated more favorably than those who expressed no desire to change.     

Force Control Is Greater in the Upper Compared With the Lower Extremity

The authors investigated whether force control is similar between the upper and lower limbs and between contractions that involve 1 or 2 joints. Six volunteers (27.5 ± 11.2 years of age) attempted to produce consistent discrete rapid force responses of 30, 60, and 90 N by using 6 different body postures, 3 with the upper and 3 with the lower limb. One of the postures for each limb involved 2 joints. The standard deviation of peak force and impulse (aggregate of the force-time curve) was significantly greater (?25%) for the lower limb than for the upper limb (p < .01). Contractions that involved 1 or 2 joints within a limb had similar variability. Therefore, the upper limb might have better control of force than the lower limb because of its extensive use in fine motor tasks in daily activities.     

After-Contraction Phenomenon: Influences on Performance and Learning

Three experiments investigated the influence of an after-contraction phenomenon on the performance and learning of a dynamic force-production task. The after-contraction effect refers to an involuntary potentiation (induced by a sustained pre-contraction) that is thought to summate with voluntary motor commands to bias subsequent responding. The precontraction involved a brief (20 s) static contraction. The subsequent influence of the precontraction on a dynamic force-production task was assessed. Experiments 1 and 2 were aimed at demonstrating the direct impact of the precontraction intensity on the magnitude and decay of the after-contraction effect. The results indicated that as the intensity of the precontraction increased, the magnitude of the induced bias increased. In Experiment 3, the indirect influence on subsequent retention of varying the precontraction intensity during acquisition was investigated. The results indicated that the performance of subjects experiencing varying precontraction intensities during acquisition was inferior to that of subjects experiencing a constant precontraction intensity, but the performance of the varied precontraction intensities group was superior on the test of retention. It is noted that the paradoxical reversal from acquisition to retention is similar to that found in contextual interference experiments and may arise from similar mechanisms.     

Immediate Movement History Influences Reach-to-Grasp Action Selection in Children and Adults

The authors review studies of mentally simulated movements. In automatic or cyclical movements, actual and motor imagery (MI) durations are similar. When athletes simulate only dynamic phases of movement or perform MI just before competing, however, environmental and time constraints lead to an underestimation of actual duration. Conversely, complex attention-demanding movements take longer to image. Finally, participants can modify the speed of MI voluntarily when they receive specific instructions. To complete the available data, the authors compared imagined and actual durations in tennis and gymnastics. Results showed systematic and disproportionate overestimation of actual duration. The authors found a relationship between complex motor skills and MI duration. They discuss the factors leading to over- and underestimation and the hypotheses that could be tested.     

Directional Variability of the Isometric Force Vector Produced by the Human Hand in Multijoint Planar Tasks

Numerous studies have examined control of force magnitude, but relatively little research has considered force direction control. The subjects applied isometric forces to a handle and the authors compared within-trial variability when force is produced in different directions. The standard deviation of the force parallel to the prescribed direction of force production increased linearly with the targeted force level, as did the standard deviation of the force perpendicular to the instructed direction. In contrast, the standard deviation of the angle of force production decreased with increased force level. In the 4 (of 8) instructed force directions where the endpoint force was generated due to a joint torque in only 1 joint (either the shoulder or elbow) the principal component axes in force space were well aligned with the prescribed direction of force production. In the other directions, the variance was approximately equal along the 2 force axes. The variance explained by the first principal component was significantly larger in torque space compared to the force space, and mostly corresponded to positive correlation between the joint torques. Such coordinated changes suggest that the torque variability was mainly due to the variability of the common drive to the muscles serving 2 joints, although this statement needs to be supported by direct studies of muscle activation in the future.     

Skill Level,Vision, and Proprioception in Simple One-Hand Catching

Two experiments examined the interaction of vision and articular proprioception in simple one-hand catching. In Experiment 1 (N = 18) skilled baseball and Softball players used the left and right hands to catch slowly moving tennis balls, while Experiment 2(N = 16) used novice catchers as subjects. In half the trials, sight of the catching hand was prevented by placing a screen alongside the subjects’ face. Results of Experiment 1 revealed that the screen caused minimal disruption of the positioning phase of the catch, with moderate disruption of the grasping phase. However, for the unskilled subjects of Experiment 2, the screen caused considerable disruption of positioning. The data provide only minimal support for Smyth and Marriott’s (1982) contention that limb position is inadequately specified by articular proprioception. It is argued that skill level serves as a mediator in the ability to use proprioception for limb positioning, but vision appears necessary to control the precise temporal organization of the grasp phase of one-hand catching.     

Reexamination of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory: The Interpersonal BSRI

The 40 masculine and feminine items of 746 Bern Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI; Bern, 1974) were subjected to a principal axis factor analysis with varimax rotation. Results revealed a four-factor solution, indicating that the original BSRI items do not provide two unidimensional ratings of femininity and masculinity. However, some support is given to Bern's initial two-factor thesis in that two principal factors emerged: one consisting of items that were originally identified as feminine, the other consisting of items that were originally identified as masculine. Content examination of the two principal factors resulted in an interpretation of the factors as Interpersonal Sensitivity and Interpersonal Potency. Internal consistency and validity of these two scales were examined and found to be adequate.     

A Semantic Differential Investigation of Color on the Holtzman

This study was an attempt to find evidence of subjective color disturbance on the Holtzman Inkblot Test. Two tests of anxiety and one of neuroticism were administered to 129 male undergraduates. Those Ss scoring in the extreme ranges on each instrument were classified as high and low groups.

Eight entirely chromatic cards from the Holtzman and their achromatic photographic reproductions served as experimental stimuli while 15 cards (15 mixed chromatic-achromatic cards) served as buffers. The degree of subjective disturbance elicited by each card was determined by means of a semantic differential composed of 16 pairs of bi-polar adjectives.

It was found by means of X² analyses that no significant differences appeared between the two groups of Ss when either the chromatic or achromatic stimuli were rated separately. When a difference measure between the two types of stimuli was employed, both groups rated the chromatic cards in more favorable terms. In the discussion, it was suggested that “novelty shock” might be a more appropriate term than color shock and that traditional color shock indices may be artifacts inherent in Rorschach stimuli and administration. Some suggestions for clarifying the possible interrelationship between neurotic symptomatology and emotional reactions to chromatic stimuli through empirical approaches were advanced.     

A Simple Test of the Concurrent Validity of the Social Interest Index

To assess the concurrent validity of the Social Interest Index (SII), we examined the relationships between subjects' social interest scores and their number and frequency of social contacts. As hypothesized, subjects' SII scores were related in a positive, significant manner to their reported number of close friends, number of relatives they felt close to, and number of monthly friend/relative contacts (all ps < .01). The results, which showed a positive relationship between social interest and social contacts, support the concurrent validity of the SII.