The role of cue additivity in salience in taste aversion conditioning

In toxiphobia conditioning certain cues are more easily associated with malaise (i.e., more salient) than others. The present experiments show that cue additivity can account for previously found differences in salience of certain fluids. The relative salience of saccharin, saline and casein hydrolysate was tested in normal rats and in animals rendered anosmic by treatment of their nasal passages with zinc sulphate. The normally more salient casein was reduced in salience to the same level as saccharin and saline in the anosmic animals, while anosmia did not affect the relative salience of saccharin and saline. A second study tested the cue properties of vanilla, a fluid of very low salience. Anosmic animals could not show a conditioned aversion to vanilla. Normal animals readily learned the aversion but could not show it following a later anosmia treatment. Anosmia did not disrupt a saccharin aversion previously conditioned in normal animals. The data show that some of the “tastes” used in toxiphobia conditioning have olfactory components, and some are purely olfactory. Further, olfactory cues can summate with taste cues to form a more salient stimulus.     

Questions concerning fear of success and its conceptual relatives

Several measures of fear of success have been constructed, yet little attempt has been made to study the relations between them. Moreover, it is not clear that most of the measures can be differentiated from measures of fear of failure. Few fear of success researchers have worried about the relationship between their work and the large body of literature dealing with achievement motivation and fear of failure. Arguments about behavioral correlates of achievement-related anxieties should acknowledge the possibility that some people are both successful and anxious, and that they suffer on dimensions other than performance (e.g., psychosomatic illness). Two general forms of success anxiety — cultural and neurotic — have been discussed; both seem to require more intensive study than has been devoted to either one so far.     

Two-voice music programming system: The PDP-9 as an automatic electronic organ

A small computer was programmed to translate two-part musical scores into tables of numbers which were then used in the execution of the music through an amplifier and loudspeaker. The objective was to create sets of tape recordings to be used in psychophysical testing of the discriminabilities and preferabilities of music played on different pitch scales. The close tolerances in the timing of events in such stimulus materials demand special programming techniques and hardware components. The working system is described, and recommendations are made concerning the main features of an improved system.     

Effects of viewing real versus fantasy violence upon interpersonal aggression

Of 96 male undergraduates, one-third saw a violent film which they were told represented a real event, one-third saw the same film presented as a fictional event, and the remaining subjects saw no film. One-half of the subjects in each group had been attacked previously by a confederate while the others had not. Each subject was then given an opportunity to aggress against the confederate by administering shocks to him as punishment in a learning task. Results indicate that subjects who observed real violence delivered stronger shocks to the confederate than subjects who viewed fantasy violence or saw no film. Subjects who were angered and saw the real film were the most punitive toward the confederate.     

The educational psychologist in England and Wales

This article reviews the background to the development of the profession in England and Wales. It traces the recent pressures for expanding the size of the profession which led to the establishement of a working party by the British Government's Department of Education and Science, under the chairmanship of Professor Summerfield. The recent report of this working party (Department of Education and Science, 1968) is discussed and its analysis of the functions of the educational psychologist is summarized. The article selects a few of the report's main recommendations for the future. Those recommendations relating to training, numbers of educational psychologists required, the nature of the work, and the structure of the profession are outlined. Finally the article discusses initial reactions to the recommendations of the report.