THE BEHAVIOR OBSERVATION INSTRUMENT: A METHOD OF DIRECT OBSERVATION FOR PROGRAM EVALUATION1

The background and development of a multicategory direct observation system, the Behavior Observation Instrument (BOI), is described. This time-sampling procedure for recording the behavior of persons is demonstrated in several treatment settings and the results applied to issues of program evaluation. Elements that have prevented direct observation from being widely adopted, such as costs, manpower, and training requirements, are systematically analyzed. A basic psychometric analysis of the instrument is used to determine optimum frequency and duration of observation intervals as well as observer agreement. The results imply that direct observation methods, once assumed by some to belong to the special province of the single-subject design, can be used to assess the effects of programs on groups of psychiatric clients in an efficient and economic manner.     

Soliciting Charity Contributions: The Parlance of Asking for Money1

The major purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of three verbally-mediated variables on financial contributions in a door-todoor charity campaign. The relationship of race to contributions was also observed by using both black and white subjects. One hundred and twenty black and 120 white subjects were randomly assigned to one of 8 verbal appeals in a 2 (High vs. Low Dependency) × 2 (Internal vs. External Causal Locus of Need) × 2 (“it is your social responsibility” vs. “it will make you feel good” Expressed Reason for Giving) factorial design. The solicitor controlled for order effects by varying the sequence of these three variables within each experimental group. Main effects were found for Rae, Causal Locus of Need, and Expressed Reason for Giving: Whites contributed more than blacks, the external locus of need condition produced more giving than the internal condition, and persons who heard the “feel good” reason donated more than those in the “social responsibility” condition. Additionally, a significant Causal Locus of Need × Expressed Reason for Giving interaction was found. The combination of external locus of need and “feel good” was considerably more productive of contributions than the other three combinations. Implications of these results for the helping behavior literature are discussed.     

Microprocessors: Their impact on real-time computing in psychology

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of microprocessors and other products using large-scale integrated circuit technologies with a set of examples of past, current, and proposed computer applications in psychological research. I first discuss a number of developments in real-time computing that have taken place during the last 10 years. The major part of this paper describes future developments in the Computer Laboratory for Instruction in Psychological Research. We are developing an intelligent high-speed communication network that will enable computers and terminals to communicate with each other. In addition, we are developing a microprocessor-based real-time computer system. The network, the real-time system, and the general assumption underlying the development of the next generation of CLIPR facilities are described.     

Mental rotation and the frame of reference in blind and sighted individuals

Mental rotation in the congenitally blind was investigated with a haptic letter-judgment task. Blind subjects and blindfolded, sighted subjects were presented a letter in some orientation between 0° to 300° from upright and timed while they judged whether it was a normal or mirror-image letter. Both groups showed an increasing response time with the stimulus’s departure from upright; this result was interpreted as reflecting the process of mental rotation. The results for the blind subjects suggest that mental rotation can operate on a spatial representation that does not have any specifically visual components. Further research showed that for the sighted subjects in the haptic task, the orientation of a letter is coded with respect to the position of the hand. Sighted subjects may code the orientation of the letter and then translate this code into a visual representation, or they may use a spatial representation that is not specifically visual.     

Is there a ‘psychosomatogenic’ family?*

Review of the literature revealed two family theories of psychosomatic illness: the ‘enmeshed’ family of Minuchin and the family with affect disturbances. We interviewed twelve families, each containing a child with eczema. Most, but not all, of the families do fit in with one or other or both of the proposed interactional patterns, but the theory of a single family type, the ‘psychosomatogenic family’, is not supported. This complements the studies of individuals where specificity hypotheses have proved oversimplified.     

Vowel-contingent feature detection

Do vowel-contingent selective adaptation effects for place of articulation depend on vowel identity, or on the particular formant frequencies used? An experiment is reported here which tested the adaptation effects of consonants with exactly the same formant transitions before different diphthongs. In this experiment, the phonetic identity of the vowel and the formant frequencies of the consonant are not confounded as they have been in previous studies. In the contingent adaptation condition, no phoneme boundary shifts were observed, and this is interpreted along with previous evidencefor such phoneme boundary shifts when phonetic identity of the vowel and formant frequencies are confounded as indicating that adaptation operates on the spectral representation of the stimulus. Other evidence consistent with this conclusion is that adaptation with alternating adaptors from each end of the test series produced negligible shifts, and that a single adaptor from a diphthong series different from that of the test series produced phoneme boundary shifts as large as those with a single adaptor from the same test series.     

Lexicographic additive differences

Several authors have identified sets of axioms for a preference relation ? on a two-factor set A × X which imply that ? can be represented by specific types of numerical structures. Perhaps the two best-known of these are the additive representation, for which there are real valued functions f_A on A and f_X on X such that (a, x) ? (b, y) if and only if f_A(a) + f_X(x) > f_A(b) + f_X(y), and the lexicographic representation which, with A as the dominant factor, has (a, x) ? (b, y) if and only if f_A(a) > f_A(b) or {f_A(a) = f_A(b) and f_X(x) > f_X(y)}. Recently, Duncan Luce has combined the additive and lexicographic notions in a model for which A is the dominant factor if the difference between a and b is sufficiently large but which adheres to the additive representation when the difference between a and b lies within what might be referred to as a lexicographic threshold. The present paper specifies axioms for ? which lead to a numerical model which also has a lexicographic component but whose local tradeoff structure is governed by the additive-difference model instead of the additive model. Although the additive-difference model includes the additive model as a special case, the new lexicographic additive-difference model is not more general than Luce's model since the former has a “constant” lexicographic threshold whereas Luce's model has a “variable” lexicographic threshold. Realizations of the new model range from the completely lexicographic representation to the regular additive-difference model with no genuine lexicographic component. Axioms for the latter model are obtained from the general axioms with one slight modification.