Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music

The acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal stabilities in music is investigated in children of elementary school age. Listeners judge how good short tone sequences sound as melodies. The ratings show a pattern of increasing differentiation of the pitches in an octave range. The youngest listeners distinguish between scale and nonscale tones; older listeners distinguish between the tonic triad tones and other scale components. A group of adult listeners show octave equivalence and temporal asymmetries, with a preference for sequences ending on the more stable tones within the hierarchy. Pitch height effects do not interact with the age of the listener. These results are discussed in terms of the primacy of physical variables, novice-expert differences, and general cognitive principles governing the acquisition and development of internal representations of pitch relationships.     

Individual differences in digit span, susceptibility to proactive interference, and aptitude/achievement test scores

Individual differences in digit span, susceptibility to proactive interference, and various aptitude/achievement test scores were investigated in two experiments with adults. Susceptibility to proactive interference was estimated from performance in a position task in Experiment 1, and from the Brown-Peterson task in Experiment 2. In contrast to previous research, digit span was strongly correlated with many of the aptitude/achievement scores in both experiments, suggesting that the digit span task taps some important components of mental ability. The results of both experiments were also consistent in offering no support for the hypothesis that susceptibility to proactive interference is an important source of span differences. Finally, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that susceptibility to proactive interference is a source of individual differences in reading comprehension and knowledge of word meanings, but not in grammar and word usage skills, reading rate, or quantitative ability.     

Orthogonal procrustes rotation maximizing congruence

Procedures for assessing the invariance of factors found in data sets using different subjects and the same variables are often using the least squares criterion, which appears to be too restrictive for comparing factors.Tucker's coefficient of congruence, on the other hand, is more closely related to the human interpretation of factorial invariance than the least squares criterion. A method maximizing simultaneously the sum of coefficients of congruence between two matrices of factor loadings, using orthogonal rotation of one matrix is presented. As shown in examples, the sum of coefficients of congruence obtained using the presented rotation procedure is slightly higher than the sum of coefficients of congruence using Orthogonal Procrustes Rotation based on the least squares criterion.The author is obliged to Lewis R. Goldberg for critically reviewing the first draft of this paper.     

The importance of home practice for progressive relaxation training

The efficacy of home practice assignments was evaluated as a component of standardized progressive relaxation training. Subjects reporting general anxiety and tension problems were assigned to either a home practice relaxation, no home practice relaxation or wait-list control condition. Treatment was conducted for 10 sessions over a 5-week period. In addition, subjects in both conditions engaged in in-vivo application of their relaxation skills during a final 2-week application period. Group comparisons showed that both progressive relaxation conditions significantly improved on daily self-monitored general anxiety and tension levels relative to the wait-list control condition. Group analyses of percent subject improvements supported the effectiveness of home practice assignments, especially during the application period. No systematic differences between groups, on physiological and self-report variables, were found during several laboratory relaxation evaluation sessions. This study supports the contribution of home practice assignments to progressive relaxation training.     

Reliability of psychophysiological assessment

In order to assess the reliability of psychophysiological recording, 15 subjects were assessed on multiple response measures (forehead EMG and forearm flexor EMG, heart rate, skin resistance level, hand surface temperature and cephalic vasomotor response), under multiple stimulus conditions (baseline, self-control, cognitive and physical Stressors), on multiple occasions (Days 1, 2, 8 and 28). Three forms of reliability coefficients were computed for each response measure: coefficients on absolute scores, coefficients on change scores from baseline to stressful conditions and coefficients on percent change from baseline. Only frontal EMG appeared to have consistently high absolute reliability coefficients, with hand surface temperature having high reliability if sessions are repeated within 1 week. Heart rate was less consistently reliable. Treating the responses as relative measures did not increase their reliability; indeed, hand surface temperature was completely unreliable when examined in this fashion. Implications of this study for behavioral medicine, biofeedback and anxiety-based disorders research, as well as Lang's tripartite response system model of fear and emotion, are discussed.     

Correlations of measures of personality and of intelligence within and across generations

Members of over 100 families were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) as well as various psychometric tests of personality. Individual cognitive and personality measures often were associated. Parent personality scale scores often were associated with offspring WAIS scores and vice versa. Stepwise multiple regressions demonstrated that knowledge of parental personality test scores substantially increased the predictability of offspring WAIS scores.     

Adults' emotional states and recognition of emotion in young children

This study addressed the degree to which adults' emotional states influence their perception of emotional states in children and their motivation to change such states. Happiness, sadness, anger, or a neutral state was induced in adults, who then viewed slides of 4-year-old children who were actually experiencing various emotional states. Adults' own emotional states had little impact on their accurate recognition of children's emotions or on their motives for social action to change such emotions. However, adults' states did influence the intensity they assigned to children's emotions, with happy adults tending to rate some emotions as more intense for black children (sadness) and for girls (anger and neutrality). The base rates with which adults used different emotion labels also influenced judgments, increasing it for the recognition of happiness and reducing it for anger. The results are discussed in terms of the factors that influence whether or not emotional states affect judgment processes and the role of emotion labels in the effective recognition of ongoing emotional states. Also addressed is the consequence of adults' recognition of emotion in children for the effective socialization of emotion.     

“Masculinity,” “femininity,” and adjustment in college men

The regression of adjustment—indexed by measures of anxiety and depression— on “masculinity” (instrumentality) and “femininity” (expressiveness)—as assessed by the BSRI, PRF ANDRO, and the Short BSRI—was studied in 122 college men. The findings revealed that: (a) anxiety and depression marked a single adjustment factor; (b) self-esteem mediated the relationships between instrumentality, expressiveness, and adjustment, such that when the variance due to it was removed, neither instrumentality nor expressiveness accounted for significant variance in Anxiety-Depression; (c) the Short BSRI index of expressiveness behaved differently from the other indices and more like that of the PAQ; (d) instrumentality and expressiveness interacted significantly, such that instrumentality was positively associated with adjustment for those with low or average expressiveness and expressiveness was positively associated with adjustment only for those with low or average instrumentality; and (e) men high in instrumentality and low in expressiveness reported slightly higher adjustment than “androgynous” men.     

The cutaneous saltatory area and its presumed neural basis

The saltatory area, defined as that region of the skin within which two successive and spatinily separated signals will interact to produce apparent mislocalization of the prior signal, is measured by a campimetric technique applied to the palm, finger pad, and volar forearm. As contrasted with earlier measures on larger anatomical units, saltatory areas of the hand region are considerably compressed. Comparisons between cortical receptive fields and saltatory areas lead to speculation concerning the operation of the neural principle of “magnification” in the establishment of saltatory limits. The correspondence of configurational properties of both receptive fields and saltatory areas suggests a commonality of principles underlying both, but demands more information on the temporal dimensions of cortical interaction to confirm the parallelism.