Private self-consciousness, canned laughter, and responses to humorous stimuli

Sefl-focused attention is hypothesized to (a) intensify emotional responses; (b) diminish susceptibility to suggestion; and (c) increase the consistency of self-report and behavior. These hypotheses were tested by having 82 undergraduates varying in private self-consciousness (PrSC) listen to humorous stimuli presented either with (laugh track group) or without (no laugh track group) canned laughter. Subjects' funniness ratings and overt laughter served as dependent measures. Regression analyses revealed that PrSC and funniness ratings were negatively correlated in the laugh track group, but uncorrelated in the no laugh track group. In contrast, PrSC and overt laughter were positively correlated in both groups. The association between funniness and laughter appeared stronger in high than in low PrSC subjects. Interpreted in light of research indicating that funniness ratings represent affect-free evaluations of humor stimuli, whereas laughter represents amusement, these results suggest that self-focus (a) intensified subjects' amusement; (b) decreased the extent to which their evaluations of the stimuli were biased by canned laughter; and (c) increased the consistency between their (self-reported) cognitive and (overt behavioral) affective responses (although this finding was equivocal).     

Designing work environments to influence productivity

Features of the work environment can be designed to contain cues for performance standards, thereby influencing productivity on the job. This paper explores the importance of normative information for motivation and how it can be designed into the workplace in order to promote more efficient job behaviors.The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments of Terence R. Mitchell and J.H. Kerr Inkson on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Assessing compliance to home relaxation: A simple technology for a critical problem

A simple, low-cost, and reliable technology for assessing compliance with relaxation practice in the natural environment is presented. Brief, audible cue tones are overdubbed onto selected client relaxation tapes, which are ordered by the therapist and then played in sequence by the client. The presence/absence or number of cue tones on each tape in the sequence is self-monitored, thereby providing the therapist with a record for objectively assessing whether or not the tapes were used as instructed. A clinical case example is presented to illustrate use of the procedure. Finally, advantages and limitations of the procedure are discussed.A portion of this paper (clinical case study) was presented at the meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, November 1980, New York. This research was partly supported by the Medical Research Service of the Veterans Administration. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Leonard H. Epstein for his support and stimulation in the early development of this and related projects.     

Relationship between parental discipline and children's ability to cope with stress

A questionnaire was developed to assess the use of disciplinary methods by parents regarding their children's approach to fearful situations. The predictive validity of this tool was evaluated by correlational analyses with the assessment of fear (behavioral, subjective, and physiological) in their children during hospitalizations for surgery. The results confirmed the usefulness of the questionnaire. Parents who reported use of positive reinforcement, modeling, and persuasion as ways of encouraging the child to deal with fearful situations had children who were low in anxiety during the actual stressful life experience. The reported use of punishment, force, or reinforcement of dependency was correlated with higher anxiety. Differences in the use of these methods by mothers and fathers are reported. The reliability of the questionnaire and its relationship to social desirability and the sex of the child are discussed.     

Spacing effects in picture memory

Three experiments were conducted to capitalize on the conclusion of Shaffer and Shiffrin (1972) that complex visual scenes are not rehearsed in testing the hypothesis that the effect of spacing on memory is due to rehearsal. In Experiment I, a list of vacation slides was presented in which both the number of repetitions and the spacing of repetitions were varied. Subsequent frequency judgments showed an effect of spacing much like that found using verbal materials. In Experiments II and III, effects of filled and unfilled spacing intervals were compared, and it was concluded that the spacing effect is primarily a function of the duration of the spacing interval. No evidence was found to support the notion that pictures are rehearsed. Rehearsal apparently cannot play the key role in an adequate, completely general explanation of the spacing effect.     

Justice,Injustice, and Critical Potential Beyond Borders: A Multi‐Dimensional Affair

Until fairly recently, positions within the global justice debate have been quite polarised along the statism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy. Recently, the dichotomy has been challenged (although somewhat unsystematically), but the idea that the proximity of a view to cosmopolitanism also tracks its critical potential in political terms has not. This article rejects this premise. In order to do so, it also provides a novel, more systematic challenge to the statism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy. The main suggestion is that we should consider two aspects simultaneously, and identify positions within the debate on the basis of how they relate to both of these. First of all, participants in the debate can make three different kinds of claims, which I shall call moral, political, and institutional. Secondly, views position themselves within a spectrum in each of the three dimensions, rather than deciding between cosmopolitanism and statism – and at different at different points of the spectrum with regard to their moral, political, and institutional commitments respectively. This account gives us a better grasp of what taking a stand in the global justice entails. Crucially, it enables us to understand that the transformative and critical potential of a specific view depends on a variety of factors, and not only on its stand at the moral level. One can be fairly critical of the status quo without endorsing a cosmopolitan, or even nearly cosmopolitan, moral outlook. In short, the moral story is not the whole story.