Self-consciousness, self-awareness, and self-attribution

Self-awareness was either manipulated by a mirror (experimental) or not (control). Subjects were selected for being high or low in private self-consciousness (disposition to attend to one's thoughts, feelings, motives). Private self-consciousness had a stronger effect on self-attributions than did self-awareness. These findings have implications for attribution, self-consciousness, and the relationship between manipulations and dispositions.     

Auditory evoked potentials during selective listening to dichotic speech messages

The sensitivity of the scalp-recorded, auditory evoked potential to selective attention was examined while subjects monitored one of two dichotically presented speech passages for content. Evoked potentials were elicited to irrelevant probe stimuli (vowel sounds) embedded in both the right- and the leftear’s message. The amplitude of the evoked potential was larger to probe stimuli embedded in the attended message than to probe stimuli in the unattended message. Recall performance was unaffected by the presence of the probes. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that this evoked potential sensitivity reflects an initial “input selection” stage of attention.     

Detection errors on the word the: evidence for reading units larger than letters.

In four experiments, subjects read 100-word passages and circled instances of the letter t. Subjects missed a disproportionate number of ts in the word the. Evidence was provided against explanations of this effect involving the location and pronunciation of the t in the and against an explanation in terms of the redundancy of the. Rather the high frequency of the appeared to be critical, and it was suggested that high-frequency words are read in terms of units larger than the letter.     

Language acquisition following hemidecortication: Linguistic superiority of the left over the right hemisphere

The language development of three 9- and 10-year-old children possessing only a right or a left hemisphere was studied. Surgical removal of one brain half antedated the beginning of speech, so each child has acquired speech and language with only one hemisphere. Different configurations of language skill have developed in the two isolated hemispheres: phonemic and semantic abilities are similarly developed but syntactic competence has been asymmetrically acquired. In relation to the left, the right brain half is deficient in understanding auditory language, especially when meaning is conveyed by syntactic diversity; detecting and correcting errors of surface syntactic structure; repeating stylistically permuted sentences; producing tag questions which match the grammatical features of a heard statement; determining sentence implication; integrating semantic and syntactic information to replace missing pronouns; and performing judgments of word interrelationships in sentences. Language development in an isolated right hemisphere, even under seizure-free conditions, results in incomplete language acquisition.     

An examination of how one's attitudes toward women are reflected in one's defensiveness and self-esteem

The Berger Self-Esteem Measure, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, and Spence's (1972) Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) were used to test 96 undergraduates. Subjects were divided according to sex and median split scores on the personality measures. Analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for sex and defensiveness and approached significance for the sex × self-esteem effect (p<.10). Males and females were found to respond significantly differently on the AWS scale. Highly defensive males were more discriminating toward women and self-concept appeared to be an influential variable. However, self-esteem alone did not seem to have any significant effects.