REMEDIATION OF NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OF AN ON-GOING RESPONSE-COST SYSTEM WITH CHRONIC MENTAL PATIENTS1

Response-cost procedures within a token economy with extremely regressed residents excluded many residents from access to positive reinforcement. Procedures allowing residents to “purchase eligibility” to obtain backup reinforcers through contingent payment on standing fines, combined with proportional fine payoff schedules contingent upon time without new fines, increased payment on fines, reduced incidence of new fines, and increased utilization of backup reinforcers. These modifications removed adverse side effects while retaining the benefits associated with response costs. Failures or adverse effects of elements of token systems should not occasion abandonment of token economies, but rather encourage their continual evaluation and modification.     

Aging: Downward,upward, or forward?

Life views are dominated by an iconic illusion that forces the span of life into a low-high-low sequence of stages. Aging is seen as loss, decline, a downhill course. But while there are losses in aging, there are also gains, and empirical observations show that many persons enjoy getting older. From a psychodynamic viewpoint the losses in aging, though painful, are made bearable by considerable gains that afford new pleasures. Aging's gains and losses are described, leading to the conclusion that the life course is neither upward nor downward, but a forward movement full of new discoveries.     

Resolving contradictory findings on sex and social class differences in children's responses to reinforcement

Contradictory results have been reported on the effectiveness of various reinforcers with children of different ages and socioeconomic classes. The present study considered the relative effectiveness of two types of verbal and one type of tangible reinforcement on a two-choice discrimination task (marble-in-the-hole) for preschool children. IQ and operant level were treated as covariates and accounted for the observed differences in performance between the 24 middle-class and 24 lower-class children and between the 24 males and 24 females. Disparate findings of previous studies regarding sex and social class differences might have been reconciled if baseline and IQ had been considered.     

Semantic memory for metaphor: The conceptual base hypothesis

The idea that people can encode and use an extremely abstract and general form of a complex linguistic (proverb) input-a conceptual base-was examined in two experiments. In Experiment I, each proverb was accompanied by either a conceptually related (good, mediocre, or poor) or an unrelated interpretation. The related interpretations were more effective recall prompts than were the unrelated interpretations, but only for high-imagery proverbs. In Experiment II, subjects wrote interpretations of the proverbs and then received either the proverb subject-noun or a brief story as a prompt. As was the case for the interpretations in Experiment I, the stories did not share any major vocabulary or propositional structure with their proverb source. Nonetheless, the stories were as effective as the nouns. Also, quality of proverb interpretation and of recall performance were positively related, with the correlations involving low-imagery proverbs, and stories, tending to be higher. Both experiments provided support for the conceptual-base notion, and underlined the importance of interpretive context, but more definitive evidence is needed.     

Interpersonal attraction as a joint function of primacy and recency effects

Memory & Cognition - Empirical primacy-recency inconsistencies between Byrne’s reinforcement affect model of attraction and Anderson’s information integration model of personality...     

Age-of-acquisition,imagery, familiarity and meaningfulness norms for 543 words

The age at which words are first learned appears to be more influential in determining the ease of retrieving words from semantic memory than objective frequency, familiarity, imagery, and meaningfulness. To facilitate research on a wider variety of tasks, we present norms for 543 words for age-of-acquisition, imagery, familiarity, and meaningfulness. Most of the words form single-solution anagrams. There are 471 six-letter nouns and 72 five-letter words. Also reported are the means, SDs, and ranges for each dimension and the intercorrelations between dimensions. Intergroup reliabilities ranged from .847 to .982.     

Brightness contrast effects in a pupillometric experiment

The effect of depth displacement of test bars from the induction wedge of the Ponzo illusion was investigated in two experiments. Either two wedges of opposite orientation were presented simultaneously, one at a near and the other at a far distance, or only one wedge was presented at either the near or the far distance. The test bars were stereoscopically either in the plane of the wedge or displaced from the wedge in distance. When the two wedges were presented simultaneously, the direction of the Ponzo illusion was determined by the wedge at the same perceived distance as the test bars. When only one wedge was present, stereoscopic displacement of the bars in front of, but not behind, the wedge decreased the magnitude of the illusion. The results are interpreted in terms of the adjacency principle.