The effects of attentional focus and partner arousal on sexual responding in functional and dysfunctional men

The effects of attentional-focus instructions (self vs partner focus) and level of partner arousal (high, low and ambiguous) on sexual responding, both objectively and subjectively measured, were examined with sexually-functional (N = 8) and sexually-dysfunctional (N = 8) men. These instructional sets were delivered just before the subjects viewed an erotic film depicting a heterosexual couple in which they identified with the male. When both groups were focusing on themselves rather than their partner, higher tumescence was observed when their partner was displaying low arousal. When the partner's level of arousal was ambiguous, highest tumescence was achieved during partner attentional focus. When the partner was displaying high sexual arousal, functional subjects reached highest levels of tumescence during partner focus, while dysfunctional subjects reached highest levels of tumescence during self focus. In fact, high partner arousal seemed to inhibit dysfunctional subjects' tumescence under partner focus. Examination of self-report of arousal data as measured by a subjective lever revealed interesting group differences. Results are discussed in light of possible maintaining factors in sexual dysfunction and their treatment implications.     

Children's strategies for controlling affective responses to aversive social experience

It was hypothesized that one mechanism of self-control that children develop is the strategic capacity to select the experiences they encounter. This hypothesis led to the prediction that children would deal with certain aversive social experiences by seeking out or taking advantage of opportunities for nurturant experiences. Young children were exposed to an aversive social experience in which they received less nurturance than a peer, a positive experience in which they received more nurturance, or a neutral experience in which nurturance was equal. Subsequently, an opportunity was provided for children to control the length of time they watched a highly nurturant television program. As predicted, boys experiencing an aversive social encounter increased the length of time they exposed themselves to the nurturant television show, and their level of reduced positive affect was related to how long they watched the nurturant content, further supporting the interpretation that they did so in response to their own affective state. Girls did not adopt the strategy of self-exposure to nurturant television but did appear to engage in self-distraction during the aversive social experience. Despite the apparent use of control strategies, there was no indication that these strategies were effective for the amelioration of reduced positive affect resulting from the aversive social experience. Discussion focuses on the sex differences observed in the adoption of strategic behavior and factors contributing to the ineffectiveness of the control strategies. A general model is proposed for personal and environmental factors requisite for the selection, employment, and effectiveness of strategies to control experiences and their affective consequences.     

The complexity continuum in the radex and hierarchical models of intelligence

The hierarchical and radex models of ability organization are shown to be parallel. Both models suggest a complexity continuum along which cognitive performance tasks can be arrayed. In our revised radex model, the complexity continuum from the center to the periphery is shown to correspond to the general-to-specific dimension in factor analyses, or to test correlations with the general factor; complexity is redefined as apparent processing complexity. Examination of the theoretical and empirical bases for this continuum indicates its central importance for theories of intelligence.     

Flavor-illness aversions: potentiation of odor by taste is disrupted by application of novocaine into amygdala

Taste and odor have different properties in toxiphobic conditioning. When each is used alone, taste becomes aversive when followed by immediate or delayed poison, while odor becomes aversive only if followed by immediate poison. However, if odor and taste are presented as a compound and followed by delayed poison, then odor does become aversive when tested alone. It is as if taste has potentiated the odor signal. Several experiments assessed the role of the amygdala in this potentiation effect by anesthetizing the amygdala with 10% novocaine. Novocaine applied 30 min before presentation (Pre-CS) of an odor-taste compound disrupted the potentiated odor aversion but not the taste aversion. In contrast, novocaine applied 1 min after the compound odor-taste or 1 min prior to LiCl poison did not dissociate odor and taste aversions; both odor and taste aversions were facilitated. Novocaine applied 30 min before an odor alone also disrupted an odor aversion induced by immediate LiCl. But identical treatment did not disrupt odor avoidance conditioned by immediate foot-shock, suggesting that amygdala anesthesia does not simply produce anosmia. Pre-CS novocaine treatment also disrupted flavor neophobia prior to conditioning. The results suggest that novocaine applied to the amygdala disrupts the integration of odor with taste and illness during toxiphobic conditioning.     

Sexual activity and contraceptive use among low-income urban black adolescent females.

A modified form of Nathanson and Becker's (1983) Health Belief Model Questionnaire and other measures designed to assess cognitive processing were administered to low-income black adolescent female clients of an inner-city comprehensive health care clinic. The purpose of the study was to explore determinants of sexual activity and contraceptive use. Subjects were classified as not sexually active (n = 50), sexually active/noncontracepting (n = 20), or sexually active/contracepting (n = 72). Not sexually active subjects tended to be younger, more career motivated, to have a father at home, to be more influenced by family values, and to have more conservative attitudes regarding adolescent sexuality than did sexually active subjects. Sexually active/noncontracepting subjects tended to report fewer benefits and more barriers to the use of contraception. Level of cognitive processing did not differ among the three groups, but was at a lower-than-expected level for age. Finally, inconsistent contraceptive use was common to both sexually active groups.     

Similarity ratings and confusability of lipread consonants compared with similarity ratings of auditory and orthographic stimuli.

Similarity ratings of pairs of lipread consonants were obtained using a 5-point scale. Matrices were constructed showing mean similarity ratings and confusions among stimuli. Both the similarity and the confusion data provide normative data useful for researchers in many areas. Lipread data collected here are compared with similarity ratings of orthographically and auditorily presented consonants collected by Manning (1977). These comparisons provide information about how stimulus similarity both within and between presentation formats may affect information processing of the three types of stimuli. These data are of special interest to researchers studying the visual processing of speech and the effect of format of presentation on recall.     

U-shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: implications for child language acquisition

A three-layer back-propagation network is used to implement a pattern association task in which four types of mapping are learned. These mappings, which are considered analogous to those which characterize the relationship between the stem and past tense forms of English verbs, include arbitrary mappings, identity mappings, vowel changes, and additions of a suffix. The degree of correspondence between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models which learn mappings of this sort (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987) and children's acquisition of inflectional morphology has recently been at issue in discussions of the applicability of PDP models to the study of human cognition and language (Pinker & Mehler, 1989; Bever, in press). In this paper, we explore the capacity of a network to learn these types of mappings, focusing on three major issues. First, we compare the performance of a single-layered perceptron similar to the one used by Rumelhart and McClelland with a multi-layered perceptron. The results suggest that it is unlikely that a single-layered perceptron is capable of finding an adequate solution to the problem of mapping stems and past tense forms in input configurations that are sufficiently analogous to English. Second, we explore the input conditions which determine learning in these networks. Several factors that characterize linguistic input are investigated: (a) the nature of the mapping performed by the network (arbitrary, suffixation, identity, and vowel change); (b) the competition effects that arise when the task demands simultaneous learning of distinct mapping types; (c) the role of the type and token frequency of verb stems; and (d) the influence of phonological subregularities in the irregular verbs. Each of these factors is shown to have selective consequences on both successful and erroneous performance in the network. Third, we outline several types of systems which could result in U-shaped acquisition, and discuss the ways in which learning in multi-layered networks can be seen to capture several characteristics of U-shaped learning in children. In general, these models provide information about the role of input in determining the kinds of errors that a network will produce, including the conditions under which rule-like behavior and U-shaped learning will and will not emerge. The results from all simulations are discussed in light of behavioral data on children's acquisition of the past tense and the validity of drawing conclusions about the acquisition of language from models of this sort.