False Consensus and False Uniqueness in Estimating the Prevalence of Health-Protective Behaviors

The degree to which people perceive that their health-relevant behaviors are also performed by their peers may influence whether they continue these practices or are susceptible to change. The present paper examined estimates of social consensus for health-relevant behaviors. It was hypothesized that respondents would perceive their own behaviors to be relatively more common than do people not performing them, the so-called False Consensus Effect. However, in terms of the accuracy of consensus estimates, people who behave in undesirable ways will tend to overestimate the actual number of others who behave similarly. In contrast, people who behave in desirable ways will underestimate the actual number of people who behave like themselves (false uniqueness). A group of college-aged males were asked to report about their performance of a series of health-relevant behaviors and to estimate the frequency of each behavior among their peers. The findings strongly supported the first two hypotheses and provided some support for the third. One practical implication of the results is that persons with unhealthy practices may resist public health campaigns and other interventions by overestimating consensus for their own behaviors. Also, individuals who think their undesirable health behaviors are relatively common may believe that they involve few health risks for them. The research suggests the need for further research on social cognitions about health, illness, and health-protective behaviors.     

Eyewitness Errors in the Free Recall of Actions

Although eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, its quality is not uniformly poor. Previous research indicates that the most accurate type of testimony involves the unstructured recall of actions. The present study replicates the finding that confabulation, particularly the complete fabrication of nonexistent actions, is rare. Our results also extend earlier work by revealing that the few errors that did occur were spread evenly across subjects—with most subjects making 0 or 1 error and with no subjects making more than 3 errors. Furthermore, action memory errors form a heterogeneous set—there were few commonly recurring or predictable errors. Our attempts to increase error frequency by the use of suggestive implications and rapid action sequences were unsuccessful. Practical aspects of evaluating action memory testimony are discussed, with special reference to cases involving multiple eyewitnesses.     

AN EVALUATION OF LABELING-THEN-DOING WITH MODERATELY HANDICAPPED PERSONS: ACQUISITION AND GENERALIZATION WITH COMPLEX TASKS

We conducted two experiments in which moderately mentally retarded persons were trained first to label and then to enter characters into a computer, calculator, or checkbook (label-then-do) within a multiple baseline design. In Experiment 1, 5 young adults were trained to enter statistical programs into computers in an office setting. Following training, all subjects' use of verbal labels and key-entry skills generalized across tasks (programs) and settings (offices and computer terminals). In Experiment 2, 3 junior high school students were trained with self-labeling procedures to complete a key-entry task and to balance a checkbook. The performance of all students generalized across tasks and settings, and the use of labels generalized for 2 of the students. Results are discussed relative to mediated generalization and to establishing verbal control over behavior.     

Facial action patterns, electromyography, and moods in response to an insoluble task as a function of sex and sex-role differences

College students of either androgynous or sex-typed orientation were randomly assigned to either an insoluble concept-formation task or a solvable one. Posttreatment scores were compared for measures of dysphoric mood (Multiple Affect Adjective List), electromyographic responses (corrugator and zygomatic), and discrete facial responses (Facial Action Coding System). In Study 1, 18 androgynous women were compared to 16 feminine women; in Study 2, 16 androgynous men were compared to 16 masculine men. The insoluble task was associated with more corrugator activity (frowning) than the solvable task in both studies. Feminine women displayed more corrugator responses across both tasks than androgynous women. However, masculine men did not differ from androgynous men in over-all corrugator response activity. Androgynous women smiled more than feminine women on the facial action coding measure. Men subjected to the insoluble task reported significantly more anxiety, depression, and hostility. Masculine men scored higher on anxiety during the insoluble task than androgynous men, while the latter scored somewhat higher on anxiety in the other condition.     

Teaching apes to ape language: explaining the imitative and nonimitative signing of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

Fifteen videotaped conversations of a chimpanzee signing with his trainers were examined in order to determine (a) whether the ape was using imitation to learn about new language forms as some human children do and (b) whether the ape's nonimitative utterances implied knowledge of linguistic structures. The answers to both questions were negative. The evidence suggests that the utterances lacked the semantic and syntactic organization found in the utterances of most children. Instead of learning to use signs as symbols for communicating propositional messages, the ape learned to use gestures as nonsymbolic instrumental responses under the stimulus control of objects in the signing context and verbal and nonverbal cues from the trainers. Other research now underway with chimpanzees may eventually reveal whether this performance is characteristic of chimpanzees in general or is the result of particular training strategies used to teach language to chimpanzees.     

RISK FACTORS FOR SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION IN DATING A Longitudinal Study of College Women

In this longitudinal study of college women, nine risk characteristics assessed prior to the start of college were examined in the effort to identify predictors of sexual victimization in college dating. A total of 100 women were followed for 32 months, with information about personal history, behaviors, and attitudes collected at Time 1 and information about subsequent sexual victimization collected at Time 2. Although four risk factors were significantly associated with victimization, a logistic regression analysis revealed that the best prediction model contained only two variables: Precollege sexual victimization in dating was positively correlated with college victimization, and sexual conservatism was negatively correlated with college victimization. Discussion focused on the needs for improved sex education for teenagers, prevention programs aimed at the precollege level, and increased research and clinical attention to the phenomenon of revictimization.     

Overlapping stage models and reaction time additivity: Effects of the activation equation

Many experimental factors have been found to affect mean reaction time (RT) additively in factorial experiments. What sorts of RT models are compatible with this fact? Sternberg (1969) showed that serial, discrete-stage models are consistent with additivity, and as a result additivity has sometimes been regarded as evidence in favor of such models. However, McClelland (1979) showed that an alternative “cascade” model, which violates crucial assumptions of discrete-stage models, also predicts RT additivity in many cases. This article examines various modified versions of the cascade model, and shows that mean RT additivity arises from many overlapping stage models, including some with thresholds, information quantization, and nonlinear activation transformations. This suggests that other aspects of the data besides mean RT additivity should be examined to distinguish between serial and overlapping stage models.     

Number Versus Contour Length in Infants' Discrimination of Small Visual Sets

This study examined infants' use of contour length in number discrimination tasks. We systematically varied number and contour length in a visual habituation experiment in order to separate these two variables. Sixteen 6- to 8-month-old infants were habituated to displays of either two or three black squares on a page. They were then tested with alternating displays of either a familiar number of squares with a novel contour length or a novel number of squares with a familiar contour length. Infants dishabituated to the display that changed in contour length, but not to the display that changed in number. We conclude that infants base their discriminations on contour length or some other continuous variable that correlates with it, rather than on number.     

Parent Care in the Context of Women's Multiple Roles

This article addresses the multiple roles held by women involved in parent care and the ways in which these roles affect the women's well-being. Research on women's roles (including that of caregiver) has been guided by two opposing perspectives, the scarcity hypothesis and the expansion hypothesis. Findings from our studies of role quality, role combinations, and role spillover have provided abundant evidence that the lives of these women cannot be easilycaptured by either the scarcity or the expansion hypothesis alone.