Interactions among levels of processing

This article examines associations among representations of physical, name, and category information by determining effects of category repetition on and following physical, name, and category match trials. Subjects decided whether two letters were from the same half of the alphabet. Category repetition effects were evidenced by faster ~nd more accurate responses when letters from the same half of the alphabet were used on successive trials. Although physical matches showed no effect of category repetition, name and category matches did. Trials following physical matches were less affected by category repetition than were trials following name or category matches. The results suggested that these category repetition effects were mediated by interletter associations: Reaction time increased with the alphabetic distance between preceding and current letters. However, these distance effects held only for forward (A → B) and not backward (B → A) alphabetic sequences, suggesting that the alphabetic representation is ordinal and unidirectional.     

Self-rated adjustment and sex-typing on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory: Is masculinity the primary predictor of adjustment?

Questions concerning the relationship between self-rated adjustment and the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) were examined in two studies. In Study I, whether sex-typing was defined by Bem's original t-test criterion or the newer median-split criterion, superior adjustment was associated with androgynous vs. traditional typing only among women, not men. Also in conflict with the androgyny position, adjustment differences among sex-types were accounted for by differences in masculinity, not in femininity or androgyny per se. The greater contribution of masculinity vs. femininity to self-rated adjustment may be exaggerated because BSRI femininity includes items which do not load on a unidimensional femininity factor. In Study II, inspection of these unrelated items suggested that they reduce the desirability of BSRI femininity, thereby reducing its relationship to adjustment. Comparisons between standard BSRI scoring and an alternative based on unidimensional subscales revealed that the alternative femininity subscale was judged to be more desirable, and it reduced the degree of difference between masculinity and femininity in their relationships to adjustment. Superior adjustment, however, was again associated with androgynous vs. traditional sex-typing only among women, and adjustment differences among sex-types were again accounted for by differences in masculinity.The authors acknowledge the assistance of the following persons who helped in the administration, scoring, or preparation of questionnaire materials: Jill Jamison, Eric Isberg, Kay Peter, Steve Zalinger, Walter Davis, James Ball, Mark Jensen, and Heidi Sanft. Correspondence should addressed to Dr. Louise Silvern, Psychology Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309.     

Two adolescents at risk for schizophrenia: A family case study

This is a study of the complex factors that contributed to the development of adolescent psychoses in two stepbrothers, ages 12 and 15. The identified patient, the younger boy, was in what appeared to be a reversible stage of early adolescent psychosis and his 15 year old newly acquired stepbrother in a nonreversible stage. Each boy was a mentally gifted, neurologically handicapped adolescent who was inextricably vulnerable on the basis of his neurodevelopmental sensitivity to specific immobilizing parental fears and conflicts. Their inherent problems set them apart from their intact teenage sisters and affected the nature and quality of their total life experience. Those working with psychotic children and their families must bear these relationships in mind for optimal strategic intervention and change. In the management of psychotic adolescents and their families, the individual and family therapist could work to everyone's disadvantage if these important neurodevelopmental difficulties are not considered.This study was supported in part by the Maternal and Child Health Services Training and Study Project No. 144, Department of Health, Education and Welfare.     

Career indecision in adult women: A comparative and descriptive study

This study compared 66 high-school women, 66 first-year college women, and 66 adult women on four measures of career indecision, the Satisfaction with Career Scale, the Occupational Alternatives Question, the Vocational Decision Making Difficulty Scale, and the Career Decision Scale. The results consistently suggested that the adult women were experiencing more career indecision than the high-school and college women. Intercorrelations among the scales were generally moderate to somewhat low and raised some questions about the use of the Career Decision Scale with adult women. Additional data were gathered on the adult women in an attempt to delineate the sample. Variables included were: marital status, present work experience, the career-related goals and the reasons for pursuing these goals, and possible impediments to reaching the goals. These results are presented and the implications for future research and counseling with adult women are examined.     

Case specificity of the stimulus probability effect

Four memory scanning experiments investigated the effect of the probability of occurrence of one case of a letter (e.g., “A”) on response time to the other case of that same letter (“a”). There was no effect: Responses to one case of a letter did not depend on the probability of occurrence of the other case of the letter. This finding indicates that facilitation of visual encoding by high probability of occurrence is not caused by increased activation at the level of the name code. Previous results rule out the possibility that facilitation occurs at the level of feature detectors responding to the individual visual features of the high-probability stimuli, and these results were replicated in the present experiments. It appears that facilitation is caused by activation along specific routes by which visual features activate letter names. This conclusion has implications for the locus of effect of stimulus probability in models of letter coding     

Hyperlexia as a variant of developmental language disorder

Memory and associative reasoning skills of 10 hyperlexic children are examined. The results suggest superior visual and isolated auditory memory skills along with impaired associative language ability. The results are discussed in relation to various theories of hyperlexia.     

Evaluations of the Work of Men and Women as a Function of the Sex of the Judge and Type of Work

Forty-two male and 42 female subjects selected from a large city, a small town, or a university campus were asked to evaluate four pen and ink sketches and four quotations. Two sketches and two quotations were associated with fictitious women's names while the remainder were associated with fictitious men's names. A three-way interaction indicated that women tended to discriminate against the productions attributed to men, and men significantly discriminated against the productions of women. But all discriminations were limited to intellectual productions (quotations).     

Supplementary report: Braids,side segments,and impossible figures

Impossible figures and their braid analyses are reconsidered from the point of view of their side segments rather than their corners.     

Distribution of DSM-II diagnoses in a child psychiatric setting

While DSM-II contains more diagnostic categories related specifically to children than did the earlier DSM-I, clinical utilization studies of the various categories have not been extensive. The present study reports data on the distribution of diagnoses of childhood disorders and analyzes relationships among several diagnostic categories and subject variables. Results indicate that clinicians are using a wide range of DSM-II diagnoses for childhood disorders, including some which were intended for use with adults as well as those which were designed specifically for children. Transient Situational Disorders and Behavior Disorders are assigned almost equally to two-thirds of the sample. Chi-square analyses revealed a relationship between diagnostic categories and subject variables of age and sex. These data suggest that boys, particularly between the ages of 6 and 13, are more frequently than girls categorized as Behavior Disorder, and that the Transient Situational Disorder category is overutilized for adolescents, both male and female.The authors are indebted to James H. Johnson for his valuable contributions in all phases of this study and to Peggy Louro for her assistance in data collection.     

Current Concerns and Electrodermal Reactivity: Responses to Words and Thoughts

ABSTRACT Previous research has found that subjects rate words that are closely related to their current concerns as affectively more arousing than other words. This investigation inquires whether a similar relationship occurs when arousal is measured electrodermally, and whether nonspecific (spontaneous) electrodermal activity is associated with self-generated thoughts about current concerns. In the first experiment, subjects listened to audiotaped sequences of three-word clusters associated with previously measured own current concerns or with concerns of others. Mean skin conductance responses were significantly larger for clusters related to subjects' own concerns than for those related to others' concerns, although many subjects contributing to this effect showed some awareness of the hypothesis. In the second experiment, thoughts that accompanied nonspecific skin conductance responses received significantly higher self-ratings for concern-relatedness and arousal than thoughts that occurred during electrodermal inactivity. In Experiment 3, they were rated higher for current-concern content and anxiety and lower for mental imagery and dormant-concern content than thoughts during electrodermal inactivity.