Denial and Confirmatory Search: Paradoxical Consequences of Medical Diagnosis1

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of medical diagnostic-test results on illness appraisal and the recall of symptoms and behavior. Subjects were tested for a fictitious enzyme deficiency and were told either that the test result was positive (deficiency present) or that it was negative (deficiency absent). In addition, some of the subjects were told the test was accurate 95% of the time and others were told it was accurate 75% of the time. As predicted, subjects judged the enzyme deficiency as less serious and more prevalent when presented with positive test results. Subjects with positive test results also recalled more behaviors that had been labeled as risk factors. Although positive test subjects tended to report more deficiency-related symptoms, diagnosis did not affect the free recall of general symptoms. In addition, information concerning the reliability of the diagnostic test had no effect on judgments or recall but did affect information seeking. Subjects with positive test results were less likely to request a definitive follow-up test when their results were unreliable. The results are interpreted as evidence for independent confirmatory search and denial processes following medical diagnosis.     

Socializing Attribution: Generalization to “Real” Social Environments1

Social status variables have been shown to influence attributional judgments, but their effects have been demonstrated almost entirely in experimental settings. The influence of such statuses in experimental settings may differ from their influence in natural settings. We examined the influence on attributional judgments of the status characteristics of both subjects and actors in conjunction with variations in the degree of “real world” characteristics of both subjects and social context. These comparisons were drawn through a partial replication of earlier research investigating the effects of a social status variable, victim sex, and a situational variable—type of assault—on attributions about an assault victim. The social status characteristic, victim sex, had less influence on attributions in an adult juror sample than in a student sample and testimony-related characteristics were more influential in the adult juror sample than in the student sample. Thus, the categories of variables that influence attributions appear to depend on the context of judgment and on the breadth of subjects' life experience. These findings are discussed and we conclude with the caution that careful identification of the differences produced by context and subject characteristics is necessary to support generalization of laboratory-based research.     

Neuroticism, extraversion, and related traits in adult twins reared apart and reared together

The relative importance of genetic and environmental factors for neuroticism, extraversion, impulsivity, and monotony avoidance were estimated in a sample of 99 monozygotic and 229 dizygotic pairs of twins reared apart (TRA) and a matched sample of 160 monozygotic and 212 dizygotic pairs of twins reared together (TRT). The average age was 58.6 (SD = 13.6); 72% of the twins were 50 or older. Model-fitting analyses verified the importance of genetic factors for all four measures; from 23% to 45% of the total variation was attributable to genetic sources. There was considerable evidence that these factors were operating in a nonadditive manner for extraversion and impulsivity. Shared environment accounted for less than 10% of the variance; some evidence for selective placement was found for neuroticism.     

The effects of contextual information and gender on the prediction of hypnotic susceptibility

Council, Kirsch, and Hafner (1986) obtained empirical support for the hypothesis that significant correlations between questionnaire measures of absorption and hypnotic susceptibility are an artifact of subjects' beliefs about their own hypnotizability. We tested this hypothesis in a two-session experiment. During Session 1, subjects completed questionnaire measures of absorption, mystical experience, daydreaming frequency, and paranormal beliefs. During Session 2, subjects were tested for hypnotic susceptibility. Subjects were also exposed to one of three information manipulations: They were told about hypnotic testing either before or after filling out the questionnaires or were not told about hypnotic testing. The information manipulation moderated the prediction of susceptibility by the questionnaire measures for women, but not for men. For women, scores on the absorption questionnaire predicted susceptibility only when subjects were informed about hypnotic testing. In the told-after condition, this effect generalized to all of the remaining questionnaire measures. For men, none of the questionnaires was a reliable predictor of susceptibility.     

Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

Developmental changes in attentional skills: the effect of irrelevant variations on encoding and response selection

The present experiments examine how irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfere with performance in a selective attention task. Second graders, fifth graders, and adults were administered a discrete trial version of a selective attention task in which they were required to search for an object that matched the prime on the targeted dimension. The stimuli in the first experiment were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions whereas the second experiment used spatially separated dimensions. The results indicated that while the spatially separated dimensions were perceived independently by all age groups, developmental differences in perceived structure were evident with the spatially integrated dimensions. Problems associated with response selection were a major source of interference with both types of stimuli, but the severity of the interference varied with the age of the perceiver and the nature of the stimuli. The developmental implications of these findings were considered.     

Behavioral and sociocognitive correlates of ratings of prosocial behavior and sociometric status

Although peers' and teachers' evaluations of children's prosocial behavior and peers' sociometric ratings frequently have been used in studies of social development, the validity of young children's ratings of others has been questioned, as has that for teachers' ratings of prosocial behavior. In this study, preschoolers' ratings of peers' sociometric status and prosocial behavior, as well as teachers' ratings of children's prosocial dispositions, were obtained. These were correlated with children's naturally occurring prosocial or social behavior; ratings of prosocial behavior also were correlated with children's prosocial moral reasoning and prosocial self-attributions. Peers' sociometric ratings were positively related to children's sociability whereas prosocial ratings were related to helping (but not sharing) behavior. Teachers' ratings of prosocial behavior were not related to frequency of prosocial behaviors, but were positively related to developmentally mature moral judgments and self-reported motives.