A "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and memory

We conducted three studies that tested a "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and recall. Each study consisted of two or three sessions held a few days apart. All subjects read about the sentencing decisions of one or two target trial judges and of six nontarget trial judges who consistently gave either higher or lower sentences than the target judge(s). Each study varied both the standard that was available when subjects initially judged the sentencing decisions of a target judge and the standard available when subjects subsequently recalled those decisions. To accomplish this, we varied the context of judgment, the timing of judgment, and the overall category norm for trial judges' sentencing decisions that was available at recall. We found that although subjects had been exposed to the same target information and had initially judged it in the same way, their recall of the information was different depending on whether and how a change-of-standard had occurred between judgment and recall. Unique predictions of the change-of-standard perspective were confirmed that could not be accounted for in terms of other types of context effects on judgment and memory.     

Specific forms of facial EMG response index emotions during an interview: from Darwin to the continuous flow hypothesis affect-laden information processing

Previous research has demonstrated that mild negative emotional imagery and unpleasant sensory stimuli lead to greater electromyographic activity over the brow muscle region than mild positive imagery and stimuli, even in the absence of significant changes in visceral and general facial EMG activity. Previous research has not addressed whether electromyographic responses over the brow region are a sensitive and specific index of emotions, however, since a multiplicity of events lead to changes in brow activity. In this research, facial electromyographic and audiovisual recordings were obtained while individuals were interviewed about themselves. Afterwards, individuals were asked to describe what they had been thinking of during specific segments of the interview marked by distinctive electromyographic responses over the brow region in the context of ongoing but stable levels of activity elsewhere in the face. The results are interpreted in terms of a continuous flow hypothesis of affect-laden information processing.     

Major life events, hassles, and adaptation in adolescence: confounding in the conceptualization and measurement of life stress and adjustment revisited

Prior work has suggested that methodological and conceptual confounding may play a role in the associations obtained between stressful life events, social resources, and adaptive outcome. Of particular concern in our work were (a) the source and method of assessment; (b) conceptual overlap between life stress and resource items and symptoms of disorder; and (c) induced response bias through the instructional sets of the stress measures. A second goal was to extend our understanding of the life stress-adjustment linkage in groups for whom little data of this type exist. By using multi-trait-multimethod procedures we found that both distal major life events and proximal daily stressors had important degrees of unique and shared variance with adaptive functioning, whereas the effects for social support were inconclusive. Further, the importance of considering possible sources of potential confounding in producing quite different levels of association between life stress and adaptation was underscored by the results.     

Effects of a structured behavior modification treatment program on locus of control in behaviorally disturbed children

The effect of a 10-day behavior modification treatment program on locus of control was investigated. The subjects were children (N = 130; 6 to 12 years old) with severe behavioral disorders who were predominantly from low socioeconomic backgrounds, from broken homes, and socially deprived. Pre- and post-testing was done with the Nowicki-Strickland Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale (Nowicki & Duke, 1974) and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale for Children (Nowicki & Strickland, 1973). Children between the ages of 10 and 12 responded to therapy with a significant increase in internality, but younger children did not.     

Marital conflict and adjustment: speech nonfluencies in intimate disclosure

Speech nonfluency in response to questions about the marital relationship was used to assess anxiety. Subjects were 31 husbands and 31 wives, all white, college educated, from middle- to lower-middle-class families, and ranging from 20 to 30 years of age. Three types of nonfluencies were coded: filled pauses, unfilled pauses, and repetitions. Speech-disturbance ratios were computed by dividing the sum of speech nonfluencies by the total words spoken. The results support the notion that some issues within marriage are more sensitive and/or problematic than others, and that, in an interview situation, gender interacts with question content in the production of nonfluencies.     

Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.     

Perceptual sensitivity to dimensional and similarity relations in free and rule-governed classifications

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in the stimulus classifications of younger and older subjects. In Experiment 1, 4- and 10-year-olds were given free classifications in which they could group stimuli according to overall similarity or identities in size, color, or orientation. Both age groups classified stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were given free classifications followed by rule-governed classifications which required them to group stimuli according to specific relations. In the free classifications, a majority of subjects in both age groups classified the stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In the rule-governed classifications, both age groups were more accurate when a single separate relation was required for solution than when overall similarity was required. These results support a differential-sensitivity view of perceptual development, which asserts that individuals at all ages primarily perceive and use separate relations.     

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.     

Developmental changes in attentional skills: the effect of irrelevant variations on encoding and response selection

The present experiments examine how irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfere with performance in a selective attention task. Second graders, fifth graders, and adults were administered a discrete trial version of a selective attention task in which they were required to search for an object that matched the prime on the targeted dimension. The stimuli in the first experiment were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions whereas the second experiment used spatially separated dimensions. The results indicated that while the spatially separated dimensions were perceived independently by all age groups, developmental differences in perceived structure were evident with the spatially integrated dimensions. Problems associated with response selection were a major source of interference with both types of stimuli, but the severity of the interference varied with the age of the perceiver and the nature of the stimuli. The developmental implications of these findings were considered.     

The Systematic Measurement of French and Raven's Bases of Social Power in Workgroups

A typology of five bases of social power developed by French and Raven (1959) has been used to study small-group behavior in field settings by various researchers but interpretation of these data is limited by several methodological shortcomings. This study describes the development and testing of questionnaire measures for the Legitimate, Expert, Referent, Reward, and Coercive bases of social power and attempts to correct some of the scale format confounds that have affected previous empirical efforts. Analyses of Likert-scaled responses from the 23-item questionnaire show for the first time that these five constructs are factorially identifiable and orthogonal. Scale responses are shown to accurately reflect hierarchical status differences in an organization and to correlate significantly with such common leader behaviors as Initiation of Structure and Consideration.