A reflection: Howard Scott Liddell, 1895-1962

Howard S. Liddell, Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, was one of the earliest American students and developers of I.P. Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex and an early researcher on stress. The significance of Liddell's work on stress was fully recognized when he was sent, as a member of a commission, to the battlefront at the height of the Korean War to study stress and self-control in the soldiers. This profound experience convinced Liddell that behavioral research must ultimately be made relevant to the understanding and elevation of human behavior. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in efforts to implement this conviction through research, writing, and lectures before scientific and lay groups.     

Impulsivity and perception: individual differences in the processing of the local and global dimensions of stimuli

There appears to be an association between a "global" mode of perceptual processing and a cluster of personality traits, one of which is impulsivity. The goal of the present study was to clarify this relationship. Subjects differing in impulsivity (as measured by a self-report inventory) performed speeded cardsorting tasks. They sorted stimuli consisting of large letters made up of smaller letters. Highly impulsive subjects had no more difficulty than other subjects in ignoring the large, "global," letters when they tried to attend to the smaller, "local," letters of which they were composed, nor were they more vulnerable than other subjects to Stroop-like response interference produced by the global letters. High impulsives did have particular difficulty when the task required that they integrate the information provided by the local and global letters. This finding can be explained in terms of individual differences in the value placed on speed relative to accuracy in information processing.     

Contributions of elicitation to measures of self-control

Pigeons' not pecking or pecking constituted choice between a delayed, large reinforcer and an immediate, small reinforcer (self-control) and at other times between a delayed reinforcer and no reinforcer (omission). Both a tone and a keylight were tested as choice signals, and the delayed reinforcer was either response independent or response dependent. Pigeons pecked during the choice signals on over 95% of the trials in the self-control procedure, and pecked during the choice signals on over 75% of the trials in the omission procedure. Consistent pecking was observed with either the tone or the keylight as a choice signal, with the exception that a tone paired with a response-independent delayed reinforcer did not maintain pecking in the omission procedure. Pigeons pecked during more choice signals when delayed reinforcers were response dependent than when the delayed reinforcers were response independent. These results indicate that Pavlovian conditioning influences self-control experiments, especially in single-key procedures.     

A survey os school psychologists'' use of behavior modification procedures

A national survey of behavior modification procedures used by school psychologists is reported. Usable questionnaires were received from 148 (49%) of 300 randomly selected members of the 1982 National Association of School Psychologists directory. Each respondent was asked to indicate the type of exposure, use, and inclusion of data collection procedures for each of 18 commonly used behavioral techniques. Conditional probabilities between type of exposure and use found strong relationships between supervision and subsequent use. The implications for the field of school psychology and future directions for training programs are discussed.     

Biomagnetism from the neuropsychiatric viewpoint--principles of recent developments in diagnostic procedure

The following survey is intended to demonstrate and discuss some principle problems of biomagnetism and the application in clinical fields. The development of special technical parameters especially by the SQUID method is initiating new possibilities of research and completing the neurobiologically determinated basis and conditions of neuropsychiatric disorders. The Magnetoencephalography (MEG) will be represent an important role of a new functional diagnostic method.     

Infant hypotonia, obesity, hypogenitalism and oligophrenia--new viewpoints on the etiology and symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome

We present four cases of Prader-Willi syndrome. Two of them have an abnormality of a chromosome 15, the other both show different chromosomal abnormalities. Translocations or deletions were found recently in the bands 15q11/12 in about 60% of the cases of Prader-Willi syndrome. The consequences for diagnosis, symptomatology and genetic counselling of the syndrome are discussed.     

Estimating social and nonsocial utility functions from ordinal data

This paper reports an experiment testing two hypotheses. The first is that the value or utility associated with a payment to one's self and a payment to a co-worker can be represented as an additive function of a utility for own payment (nonsocial utility) and a utility for the difference between own and other's payment (social utility). The second hypothesis is that changes in the amount of work accomplished by one's self and/or the other should influence the social, but not the the nonsocial utilities. Support for both hypotheses is reported.