A comparison of two measures of egocentrism

This study examined the relationship between two prominent measures of egocentrism, Enright's Adolescent Egocentrism Scale (AES) and Elkind's Imaginary Audience Scale (IAS), in a sample of 458 adolescents, between 10 and 15 years old. Both correlational and factor analyses indicated that the two measures assess distinctly different phenomena. As predicted, IAS scores were correlated with self-reported levels of shyness, nervousness, and social skills. These results provide partial evidence for the validity of the IAS as a measure of self-consciousness, though not necessarily egocentrism per se. The validity of the AES was not examined.     

Disarmament Decisions as Social Dilemmas1

The individual deciding on a nuclear weapons production policy is faced with a dilemma in which a choice must be made to support one of several conflicting defense policies. In order to investigate the social-psychological variables that are related to armament policy decision making, a telephone survey was conducted in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Adult subjects (N= 110) responded to questions concerned with cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional responses to nuclear arms. Participants were also asked to choose a weapons production policy for the United States under conditions of continued and decreased Soviet nuclear arms production. Results indicated that respondents decisions about nuclear weapons production were related to their support for deterrence, the availability of their nuclear-related images, their emotional response to nuclear war, their attributions of responsibility for the prevention of nuclear war, and their political party affiliation. Distinctions between antinuclear decision-makers and pronuclear decision-makers are discussed.     

Personality in adulthood: a six-year longitudinal study of self-reports and spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory

Previous longitudinal studies of personality in adulthood have been limited in the range of traits examined, have chiefly made use of self-reports, and have frequently included only men. In this study, self-reports (N = 983) and spouse ratings (N = 167) were gathered on the NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985b), which measures all five of the major dimensions of normal personality. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses on data from men and women aged 21 to 96 years showed evidence of small declines in Activity, Positive Emotions, and openness to Actions that might be attributed to maturation, but none of these effects was replicated in sequential analyses. The 20 other scales examined showed no consistent pattern of maturational effects. In contrast, retest stability was quite high for all five dimensions in self-reports and for the three dimensions measured at both times in spouse ratings. Comparable levels of stability were seen for men and women and for younger and older subjects. The data support the position that personality is stable after age 30.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Some observations on control by spoken words in children's conditional discrimination and matching by exclusion

This study examined matching-to-sample procedures that might result in the emergence of conditional behavior never explicitly taught. Subjects were preschool children. Two pictures were displayed as comparisons on every trial, and samples were spoken words. In baseline training preceding each of three experiments, children learned to select pictures of a dog, a table, and a banana in response to their spoken English names. Thereafter, probe trials displayed novel comparisons with baseline comparisons: one novel comparison was displayed with the dog and another with the table. The three experiments differed primarily in the nature of the samples presented on probe trials. In Experiment 1, probe samples were novel words, "JAIJAI" and "BREEL." On the probes, each of seven subjects reliably selected the novel comparisons, apparently "excluding" the familiar ones. In Experiment 2, probe samples were from the subjects' baseline. On one probe, for example, the sample was "TABLE," and the subject had to choose either the dog or the novel picture. Exclusion was logically possible because the dog had always before been incorrect in the presence of "TABLE." Under these conditions, however, only two of nine children excluded reliably. In Experiment 3, probe samples were words that had never been samples on any matching-to-sample trial, but that had controlled the children's behavior in other settings. On one probe, for example, the sample was "PENCIL," and the subject had to choose either the dog or a novel picture. Subjects virtually always excluded the former and selected the latter. Unreliable exclusion in Experiment 2, therefore, apparently resulted because the probe samples had previously served also as samples on baseline trials. Spontaneous verbalizations recorded during probing provided further data consistent with this interpretation. The study helps to define variables controlling exclusion performances by showing that such performances are more likely to occur if the sample has no prior experimental history.     

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.