Impressions of people created by age-related qualities of their gaits

Drawing on the ecological theory of social perception, we investigated the impact of age-related gait qualities on trait impressions. In Study 1, subjects observed 5- to 70-year-old walkers depicted in point-light displays, and rated the walkers' traits, gaits, and ages. Younger walkers were perceived as more powerful and happier than older walkers. A composite of youthful gait qualities predicted trait impressions regardless of the walkers' masculine gait qualities, sex, and perceived age. In Study 2, subjects observed young adult walkers depicted in point-light displays and rated their traits, gaits, and ages. Consistent with the effects of real age found in Study 1, young adults with youthful gaits were perceived as more powerful and happier than peers with older gaits, irrespective of their masculine gait qualities, sex, and perceived age. Study 3 replicated Study 2 using displays showing walkers' full bodies and faces. A youthful gait predicted trait impressions even when subjects could discern the walkers' age and sex.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Effects of Social Demand on Reports of Self-Monitored Blood Glucose in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that social demand could substantially affect reports of self-monitored blood glucose (BG) in adolescents with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Of 34 patients initially enrolled in the study, 10 were excluded because they did not bring any BG records with them to an outpatient clinic appointment. The remaining 24 patients were randomly assigned to either a low or high social demand condition that provided instructions for monitoring of BG for the week following the appointment. The subjects' BG records were quantified to provide frequency of measurement and mean reported BG for the week prior to and after the clinic visit. Five subjects did not return their BG records for the week following the intervention. The analyses were therefore based on the 19 subjects from whom complete records were obtained. The 12 subjects in the low social demand group and 7 subjects in the high social demand group were equivalent with regard to age, duration of diabetes, socioeconomic status, and glycosylated hemoglobin. Frequency of BG measurement was similar in both groups during both weeks. The mean BG value reported in the week prior to intervention was similar for the groups. However, analyses of the post-intervention BGs revealed that subjects in the low-demand group reported significantly higher BGs compared to pre-intervention and to subjects in the high-demand group. These findings suggest that self-monitoring and reporting of BG is a social behavior that is affected by the demand characteristics of the interpersonal patient-health provider relationship. Because optimal treatment planning for individuals with diabetes requires accurate BG records, care must be taken to interpret them in light of the social demand characteristics associated with clinical assessment.     

BEHAVIORAL MOMENTUM IN THE TREATMENT OF NONCOMPLIANCE

Behavioral momentum refers to the tendency for behavior to persist following a change in environmental conditions. The greater the rate of reinforcement, the greater the behavioral momentum. The intervention for noncompliance consisted of issuing a sequence of commands with which the subject was very likely to comply (i.e., high-probability commands) immediately prior to issuing a low-probability command. In each of five experiments, the high-probability command sequence resulted in a “momentum” of compliant responding that persisted when a low-probability request was issued. Results showed the antecedent high-probability command sequence increased compliance and decreased compliance latency and task duration. “Momentum-like” effects were shown to be distinct from experimenter attention and to depend on the contiguity between the high-probability command sequence and the low-probability command.     

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.     

The effect of mood and pleasant versus unpleasant information feedback on performing a motor skill

The effect of negative, positive, or neutral feedback on a rotary pursuit task as a function of the subject's depressed or elated mood was ascertained. Specifically, the self-schema hypothesis was examined. Ninety female volunteers, ranging in age from 18 to 25 years, participated. They were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions based on depressed or elated mood states, elicited by Velten's (1968) mood induction procedure, and feedback. A control group received no feedback and was not subjected to a mood inducing treatment. Baseline measures and changes in mood were determined by the Multiple Adjective Affective Checklist (MAACL). Bogus feedback was offered after all but one of the trials. The subjects' mood changed significantly during the mood-inducing treatment. For motor performance, partial support was lent to self-schema. Elated and depressed subjects performed best under positive and negative feedback, respectively. The effects, however, were temporary.