Interpersonal determinants of attitude change following counterattitudinal behavior

In a test of predictions derived from an identity-analytic model of self-presentational behavior, individuals who privately endorsed positive or negative attitudes about sexual behavior were asked to deliver a prosexuality speech while alone, while watched by observers, or while being watched by observers who questioned the morality of the subject’s actions. Subsequent attitude measures indicated that the subjects who initially adopted negative attitudes justified their behavior by expressing more favorable attitudes about sexuality, but only when no audience witnessed their speech. When an audience was present, these individuals emphasized their lack of choice. In contrast, subjects who privately endorsed positive attitudes publicly expressed less favorable attitudes when their morality was challenged by the observers. These findings suggest that attitude change following counterattitudinal behavior (a) stems from private image-maintenance needs as well as public self-presentational concerns, and (b) is sometimes designed to secure an image of morality as well as an image of consistency.     

Appraisal of behavioral measurement techniques for assessing dental anxiety and fear in children: A review

The aim of this article is to review and evaluate behavioral and physiological measurement techniques frequently used to assess dental anxiety and fear in children. Attention is given to the data collected, the empirical findings obtained, and the availability of normative data. The main focus, however, is on the reliability and validity. Results show that all questionnaires are open to criticism. Of the behavioral measures, Melamed's Behavior Profile Rating Scale is to be preferred to Frankl's Rating Scale, Venham Rating Scales, and Visual Analogue Scales. The main reasons are that Melamed's BPRS measures the behavior of the child more precisely and that it has superior psychometric properties. Furthermore, because of their practical, conceptual, and psychometric problems, physiological measures at this stage are found to be less appropriate for assessing dental fear in children. It is concluded that a behavioral measure is not always the ideal, but often the only available technique for assessing dental fear in children.     

Reasoning about update logic

Logical frameworks for analysing the dynamics of information processing abound [4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 20, 22]. Some of these frameworks focus on the dynamics of the interpretation process, some on the dynamics of the process of drawing inferences, and some do both of these. Formalisms galore, so it is felt that some conceptual streamlining would pay off.This paper is part of a larger scale enterprise to pursue the obvious parallel between information processing and imperative programming. We demonstrate that logical tools from theoretical computer science are relevant for the logic of information flow. More specifically, we show that the perspective of Hoare logic [13, 18] can fruitfully be applied to the conceptual simplification of information flow logics.     

Social categorization as a function of priming

The present study investigates the effect of priming on the use of social categorizations. Using sex and race as stimulus categorizations, previous studies failed to confirm the hypothesis that priming one of the two available categorizations would enhance the use of the primed categorization relation to the not-primed categorization. As suggested by Stangor, Lynch, Duan and Glass (1992). a momentary increase in accessibility may be insufficient to further enhance the use of highly accessible categorizations like race and sex, but it may be expected that priming will increase the use of categorizations which are less habitually used in daily life. The results of the present experiment support the hypothesis that, when the stimulus categorizations are weakly accessible (university major, university town), the relative use of the previously primed categorizations does indeed increase, compared to the alternative, not-primed, categorization.