The effect of varied physician affect on recall, anxiety, and perceptions in women at risk for breast cancer: an analogue study.

Evaluated the effect of varied physician affect on subject recall, anxiety, and perceptions in a simulated tense and ambiguous medical situation. Forty women at risk for breast cancer viewed videotapes of an oncologist presenting--with either worried or nonworried affect--mammogram results. Although the mammogram results and the oncologist were the same in both presentation, analyses indicated that, compared to the women receiving the results from a nonworried physician, the women receiving the results from a worried physician recalled significantly less information, perceived the clinical situation as significantly more severe, reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety, and had significantly higher pulse rates. These results suggest that physician affect plays a critical role in patient reaction to medical information. Implications for compliance research, patient satisfaction, and physician training are discussed.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

A comparison of the effects of partial reinforcement schedules using a within-subject serial autoshaping procedure

Three experiments, each using a single group of pigeons, are reported. In Experiment 1 subjects were initially trained with two stimuli, one of which was always followed by food, the other being reinforced according to a 50% partial reinforcement schedule. Subsequently a serial procedure was adopted in which an additional stimulus, C, was consistently followed by the partially reinforced CS. A second additional stimulus, A, was followed on half of its occurrences by the continuously reinforced CS, its remaining presentations being followed by nothing. The rate of autoshaped keypecking was substantially greater during A than during C. In the remaining experiments subjects received first-order conditioning with a single stimulus that was either partially (Experiment 2) or continuously (Experiment 3) reinforced. The stimuli A and C were then again introduced for serial autoshaping. Stimulus A was occasionally paired with the CS and occasionally followed by nothing, whereas stimulus C was always followed by the CS. As in Experiment 1, the rate of responding during A was greater than during C. It is proposed that one influence on the rate of autoshaped keypecking during a CS is the accuracy with which the immediate consequences of that CS are predicted.     

The recovery of structure from motion: no evidence for a special link with the convergent disparity mechanism

Convergent and divergent stereo mechanisms were compared in their ability to recover structure from motion. Contrary to a recent result reported by Richards and Lieberman, no difference in their performance was found; both mechanisms appeared equally capable of supporting the perception of good structure from motion. Possible reasons for the disparate results are discussed.     

Vicario's illusion of sloping steps reexamined

If a few parallel horizontal rows of dots are set diagonally, like steps, across the visual field, the inner rows appear not to be horizontal but sloping up to one side; the effect holds as long as the vertical distances between the rows do not exceed a given visual angle. This illusion, described by Vicario in 1978, was never explained. An experiment is reported in which the illusion was still visible at row separations well in excess of the spatial limits originally considered, provided the stimulus elements were enlarged. The maximum illusion was obtained for length ratios (interrow distance to size of dots) identical to those which have been shown to produce the largest effects in a number of illusions of area and length. This suggests that Vicario's illusion is similar to other illusions of extent, and that it can be explained by a neural extent-coding model.