The effects of contextual information and gender on the prediction of hypnotic susceptibility

Council, Kirsch, and Hafner (1986) obtained empirical support for the hypothesis that significant correlations between questionnaire measures of absorption and hypnotic susceptibility are an artifact of subjects' beliefs about their own hypnotizability. We tested this hypothesis in a two-session experiment. During Session 1, subjects completed questionnaire measures of absorption, mystical experience, daydreaming frequency, and paranormal beliefs. During Session 2, subjects were tested for hypnotic susceptibility. Subjects were also exposed to one of three information manipulations: They were told about hypnotic testing either before or after filling out the questionnaires or were not told about hypnotic testing. The information manipulation moderated the prediction of susceptibility by the questionnaire measures for women, but not for men. For women, scores on the absorption questionnaire predicted susceptibility only when subjects were informed about hypnotic testing. In the told-after condition, this effect generalized to all of the remaining questionnaire measures. For men, none of the questionnaires was a reliable predictor of susceptibility.     

Role of visual information in ball catching

The present study is concerned with the perceptual information about the body and space underlying the act of catching a ball. In a series of four experiments, subjects were asked to catch a luminous ball under various visual conditions. In general, catching in a normally illuminated room was contrasted with catching the luminous ball in an otherwise completely dark room. In the third and fourth experiments, intermediate conditions of visual information were included. The results suggest that it is possible to catch a ball with one hand when only the ball is visible, but performance is better when the subject has the benefit of a rich visual environment and two hands. The second experiment indicated that subject performance does improve with practice in the dark, but time spent in the darkened room itself doesn't result in a significant decrement in performance. Results of the third study suggest that vision of one's hand does not aid in the performance of this task whereas the presence of a minimal visual frame appears to aid performance. The final study examined the relation between catching performance and body sway under similar visual conditions. Results of this experiment imply that persons who exhibit relatively little postural sway in full-room lighting performed better at this catching task.     

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.     

Social contagion of binge eating

A social psychological account of the acquisition of binge eating, analogous to the classic social psychological work, "Social Pressures in Informal Groups" (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950), is suggested and tested in two college sororities. In these sororities, clear evidence of group norms about appropriate binge-eating behavior was found; in one sorority, the more one binged, the more popular one was. In the other, popularity was associated with binging the right amount: Those who binged too much or too little were less popular than those who binged at the mean. Evidence of social pressures to binge eat were found as well. By the end of the academic year, a sorority member's binge eating could be predicted from the binge-eating level of her friends (average r = .31). As friendship groups grew more cohesive, a sorority member's binge eating grew more and more like that of her friends (average r = .35). The parsimony of a social psychological account of the acquisition of binge eating behavior is shown. I argue that there is no great mystery to how bulimia has become such a serious problem for today's women. Binge eating seems to be an acquired pattern of behavior, perhaps through modeling, and appears to be learned much like any other set of behaviors. Like other behaviors, it is under substantial social control.     

Shared knowledge about infants among fathers and mothers

Evidence for the exchange of parenting information between low-income White mothers and fathers of infants was found. Mothers had more accurate expectations for normative development than fathers, but more accurate fathers had spouses who were also more accurate--even when education was controlled. Though few significant differences were evident in help-seeking behavior when infant problems were encountered, fathers turned to fewer helpers than mothers and were somewhat more likely to rely solely on their spouse. These data indicate that researchers must consider the exchange of information between spouses, particularly when studying the socialization of parenting among fathers at this stage in the life cycle of the family.     

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.     

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.     

Prosodic aspects of motherese: effects on gaze and responsiveness in developmentally disabled children

This study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of using voice tones (prosody) typical of "motherese" (O. K. Garnica, 1977, in C. E. Snow & C. A. Ferguson (Eds.), Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, pp. 63-88, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press) on responsiveness and eye gaze in children with severe handicaps. Specifically, two conditions, "motherese" and "conversational" voice tones, were compared. The current study presents data from naturalistic observations of six children, and controlled experimental manipulations with four children. The results of the naturalistic observations in Study 1 suggested a positive relationship between the use of voice tones typical of "motherese" and responsiveness and eye gaze. Further analysis using an alternating treatments design in Study 2 revealed similar results. Specifically, the use of prosody associated with "motherese" showed increased levels of eye gaze when compared to the use of "conversational tones." The results suggest the importance of considering normal development in analyzing social and teaching interactions between teachers and severely handicapped children.     

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.