Perceptions of rape victims and assailants: Effects of physical attractiveness,acquaintance, and subject gender

Subjects read different versions of a rape case in which the victim was walking alone at night and the defendant was obviously guilty. Female subjects saw the crime as more debilitating for the victim and were more punitive than male subjects. Female subjects considered the victim less responsible when the defendant was unattractive than when the defendant was attractive. Presence or absence of prior casual acquaintance between the victim and assailant interacted with other factors. With prior acquaintance, male subjects considered the victim more responsible than female subjects, unattractive victims were considered more responsible than attractive victims, and unattractive defendants were considered more likely to engage in future antisocial behavior than attractive defendants. Although biased by other factors, level of victim blame was low overall. Yet subjects seemed reluctant to believe the rapist and his victim were unacquainted and seemed to consider the rape as sexually, rather than aggressively, motivated.The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Andrea R. Halpern and T. Joel Wade. Portions of this paper were presented at the meetings of the Eastern Psychological Association, Buffalo, New York, April 1988.     

Salience of stimulus and response features in choice-reaction tasks

A pattern of differential reaction time (RT) benefits obtained in spatial-precuing tasks has been attributed to translation processes that operate on mental codes formed to represent the-stimulus and response sets. According to the salient-features coding principle, the codes are based on the salient stimulus and response features, with RTs being fastest when the two sets of features correspond. Three experiments are reported in which the stimulus and response sets were manipulated using Gestalt grouping principles. In the first two experiments, stimuli and responses were grouped according to spatial proximity, whereas in the last experiment, they were grouped according to similarity. With both types of manipulations, the grouping of the stimulus set systematically affected the pattern of precuingbenefits. Thus, in these experiments, the organization of the stimulus set was the primary determinant of the features selected for coding the stimulus and response sets in the translation process.     

Temporal characteristics of primary-secondary message interference in a dichotic listening task

Previous experiments have shown that during performance of a shadowing task the unattended message is processed at a semantic level. Four experiments are reported that deal with the question of how processing of the unattended message influences the difficulty of shadowing the attended message. Experiment I demonstrated that pupil dilation measures the difficulty associated with a shadowing task. In Experiment II it was shown that during shadowing of 20-item lists pupil dilation decreases as shadowing continues when either words or white noise are in the unattended channel. These results support the idea that it takes time for the attentional mechanism to focus on the attended message. In Experiments III and IV it was found that this decrease in difficulty of shadowing is much less when the attended and unattended messages come from the same stimulus category (letter-letter, digit-digit). The results indicate that, when the unattended message is from the same stimulus category as the attended message, it can interfere with the ability of the attentional system to focus on the attended message.     

Muscle tension in human operant heart rate conditioning

The physiological mechanism involved in human operant heart rate conditioning is not known. If skeletal muscle tension is a mediator, it should be possible to generate significant heart rate increases by inconspicuous voluntary muscle tension. Eleven subjects were instructed to generate inconspicuous muscle tension for 90-second periods. No gross muscle movements were observed, but average heart rate during the trials was over 13 beats-per-minute greater than pre-trial base lines. Respiratory pattern changes and surface electromyogram changes did not reliably correlate with heart rate increases. Inconspicuous muscle tension could be a mediator in human operant heart rate conditioning, and cannot be ruled out by absence of change in respiratory pattern or electromyogram.     

Evidence that thesame-different disparity in letter matching is not attributable to response bias

When pairs of letters or letter strings are judged assame ordifferent, correctsame responses are usually faster than correctdifferent responses. Recently, Ratcliff and Hacker (1981, 1982) have argued that thissame-different disparity is likely attributable solely to a bias to respondsame. The present article reports an experiment in which the relative bias to respondsame ordifferent was varied for matches of single-letter pairs. Bias was manipulated by having 80, 60, 40, or 20 pairs in a block of 100 besame, with the remainder beingdifferent. For both sequential and simultaneous presentation of the letters,same reaction times had an overall advantage overdifferent reaction times that could not be attributed to response bias. Moreover, consistent with Proctor’s (1981) facilitation principle, this reaction time disparity was greater with sequential presentation than with simultaneous presentation. The larger reaction time advantage forsame pairs with sequential presentation was obtained without an increase in the relative number of false-same responses, supporting the view that the facilitation is attributable to changes in sensitivity and not to changes in encoding criteria.     

Deconstructing Marilyn: Robust effects of face contexts on stimulus—response compatibility

Hommel and Lippa (1995) found a left-right spatial compatibility effect with respect to a background context of Marilyn Monroe's face, rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise from upright, when subjects responded to up or down stimuli by pressing a left or a right key. They interpreted their results as providing evidence for object-based coding of stimulus location. We conducted four experiments in order to evaluate the reliability of this face context effect, to control for possible artifacts and evaluate alternative explanations, and to establish generalizability to other face contexts. This was accomplished by using not only the original photograph, but also a mirror-reversed image, chimeric faces composed from the left or the right sides of the original photograph, an outline drawing face, and a circle with markings for facial features. Our results were much stronger than those of Hommel and Lippa, and the face context effect was found for all of the face variations. Our experiments also provided evidence to suggest that asymmetric coding of the up and down locations contributes to performance in the face context as well.     

Supervision-competence, confidence, accountability

The need for a shared understanding of the tasks and purposes of supervision for the emerging professions of counselling and psychotherapy is presented Progress to date is reviewed, including a brief account of the initiatives taken by the British Association for Counselling. Taking one definition of the supervision task, its implications are explored and contrasted to other possible definitions. It is suggested that working with trainee counsellors calls for some agreed skills which may not be within the accustomed repertoire of all 'schools of counselling', and a plea is made for group supervision which actively engages all participants. The implications of the ideas in the article for supervisor development and counsellor training are examined.