Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

PROMPTING ONE LOW-FAT,HIGH-FIBER SELECTION IN A FAST-FOOD RESTAURANT

Evidence increasingly links a high-fat, low-fiber diet to coronary heart disease and certain site cancers, indicating a need for large-scale dietary change. Studies showing the effectiveness of particular procedures in specific settings are important at this point. The present study, using an A-B-A-B design and sales data from computerized cash registers, replicated and extended previous work by showing that inexpensive prompts (i.e., signs and fliers) in a national fast-food restaurant could increase the sales of salads, a low-fat, high-fiber menu selection. Suggestions also are made pertinent to more widespread use of the procedures.     

A Well-Kept Secret: What Counseling Psychology Can Offer Social Psychology1

Although social psychology has increasingly influenced counseling psychology, the impact that counseling psychology has had or could have on social psychology is less well developed. This paper considers factors that have limited counseling's influence on social psychology. In addition, contributions that counseling can make to social psychology are presented. It is argued that both disciplines have evolved to investigate the behavior of “normal” individuals in social contexts. It is concluded that there is much to be gained by both specialties in a fuller and more comprehensive integration and understanding of the findings and methods of the other.     

Television Food Commericals' Effect on Children's Resistance to Temptation1

This study investigated the effect of television food commercials on children's self-control within a resistance to temptation paradigm. Commercial type, food stimulus type, and the child's sex provided the three independent variables in a 4 × 4 × 2 factorial design. Behavioral and self-report indices of temptation and control were measured. Children were significantly more tempted to transgress for the low-nutrition food, regardless of the commercial shown. Sex differences in reported degree of temptation were found. However, the television commercials did not affect the children's latency to transgress.     

A survey of celiac-sprue patients: effect of dietary restrictions on religious practices

Celiac-Sprue Disease, also referred to as Non-Tropical Sprue, is a dietary disease. Celiac-Sprue patients were asked to complete a questionnaire regarding the effect of dietary restrictions on participation in the Passover meal and reception of Communion. A pilot study suggested that subjects made changes in their religious practices because of dietary restrictions. A second, more detailed survey, was performed in which 58 subjects participated and 14 religions were represented. The results indicated that many subjects made changes in their religious practices (p less than .01), made changes on their own initiative (p less than .01), or violated diet prescribed for the disease under the religious setting versus other settings (p less than .05).     

Encoding and retrieval processes in learning-disabled, head-injured, and nondisabled young adults

Using a multi-trial, free-recall paradigm (Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test; Lezak, 1983), the acquisition and retention by learning disabled (LD) young adults with a Halstead Impairment Index less than or equal to 0.3 (low LD) or greater than or equal to 0.4 (high LD) was compared with that of nondisabled and head-injured (HI) young adults. Significant group differences, particularly during the last three acquisition trials, confirmed the effectiveness of this method in revealing subtle learning and retention deficits. Analyses of Trial 1 recall showed group differences in the prerecency but not the recency portion of the serial position curve, thus implicating long-term but not short-term memory differences between the groups. Analyses of pair frequency (Sternberg & Tulving, 1977) data showed that the three clinical groups had difficulty organizing the to-be-learned material for effective retrieval. Following an interpolated task, retention was poorer for the clinical groups than for the nondisabled and varied inversely with the degree of neuropsychological impairment. Finally, during retention, the nondisabled and low LD groups retained and used the list organization established during acquisition whereas the high LD and HI groups did not.     

The relationship of undershooting (anticipation) error in space localization to spatial dimension and spatial category width

In this study I explored whether the degree of anticipation/habituation (undershooting/overshooting) varies with the dimension to be localized, when the method of adjustment is used in space localization. In this study, undershooting occurred for both the vertical (Group 1) and the horizontal (Group 2) dimensions, but was significant only for verticality. The magnitude of undershooting observed for verticality was significantly greater than that for horizontality. A secondary issue regarding the possible relationship between spatial category width and undershooting/overshooting was examined. It was hypothesized that greater degree of spatial category width would be associated with greater undershooting. The opposite was found: Spatial category width was negatively related to undershooting. Finally, within each group, very high consistency of magnitude of spatial category width was observed (rs greater than .90), despite the fact that spatial category width showed shrinkage over the course of the study.     

Attempts to train novices for beer flavor discrimination: a matter of taste

Inexperienced beer-drinkers who could not pass a beer-flavor discrimination test were divided into a taste group, which received additional perceptual experience with beer flavors; a verbal group, which received instruction in beer flavor terminology; a taste/verbal group, which received both additional experience and instruction; and a control group. Before and after training, all subjects participated in a similarity rating task involving beer flavors and flavor-related adjectives. Additional taste experience--but not increased experience with beer-flavor terminology--improved novices' ability to detect identical beer flavors. Results are discussed in terms of the trainability of flavor discrimination and the role of cognitive factors (both flavor-related and flavor-independent) in marketing beverages.     

Effects of relation similarity on part-whole decisions

Subjects were presented with word pairs (e.g., bed-mattress) and timed as they decided whether one word named part of the item named by the other word. Yes responses were facilitated, and no responses were impeded, by relation similarity (i.e., the similarity of the relation between the two stimulus items to the part-whole relation). Item similarity, the similarity of the two stimulus items to each other, had no effect. The results support the view that similarity effects in semantic decision tasks are due to the comparison of elements of the relation between the two stimulus words against relation elements that serve as criteria for the target relation that the subject has been asked to identify.     

Children's understanding of death according to parents and pediatricians

Thirty pediatricians and 30 parents were interviewed on (a) how and when children develop concepts about death, (b) children's emotional responses to the thought of death, (c) the possibility of dialogue between adults and children about death, and (d) differences in healthy and seriously ill children's conceptualization of death. Pediatricians were no different than parents in their opinions. Moreover, in some cases, less educated parents and older doctors tended to hold opinions that were even farther from reality. Overall, the results suggest that children, healthy or sick, are left alone with the problem of death and are not helped either by their parents or by their doctors.