BEYOND LITERAL MEANINGS: The Psychology of Allusion

When people understand expressions that are intended nonliterally, two kinds of meaning are simultaneously apprehended: the literal meanings of the words themselves and the speaker's intended figurative meaning. Standard models of language comprehension assume that the literal meanings of figurative expressions are rejected in favor of a nonliteral meaning. I propose an alternative approach in which literal meanings are systematically used to convey figurative meanings through the process of allusion: The use of an expression to refer to entities or situations that are prototypical exemplars of culturally shared concepts and symbols. This approach provides an account of how people use and understand figurative language in general, and metaphor and idioms in particular.     

Drugs employed in the treatment of alcoholism: rat data suggest they are unnecessarily severe

A tacit assumption, which has often been made by practitioners of both chemical aversion therapy (CAT) and deterrent therapy of alcoholism, is that efficacy of a drug depends mainly on how noxious it is. We conducted two experiments which challenge this assumption. These experiments compared five noxious drugs employed in the treatment of alcoholism, with lithium, in regard to their ability to reduce rats' drinking of a familiar, readily consumed, ethanol (10% v/v) solution. In both experiments, the dose of lithium was equivalent, in terms of body weight, to the largest daily recommended human dose: the dose of each of the five, noxious drugs was twice this equivalent. In the first experiment, the CAT drugs emetine, ipecac and succinylcholine were compared with lithium: in the second, the deterrent therapy drugs citrated calcium carbimide and disulfiram were compared. Despite the use of comparatively smaller doses of lithium, none of the noxious drugs administered in either experiment produced stronger ethanol aversions than lithium. This supports the use of lithium in CAT, and suggests that unnecessarily noxious drugs are being used in the treatment of alcoholism.     

Choice of definite versus indefinite article as a function of sentence voice and reversibility

Subjects were given reversible and nonreversible active and passive sentences, and selected either definite or indefinite articles for the nominals in each sentence. Experiment I used sentences with the first nominal marked for definiteness, and subjects selected the article for the second nominal. Experiment II had subjects select articles for both nominals. It was found in both experiments that sentence voice affected the marking of the second nominal in reversible sentences, but that sentence voice had no effect in nonreversible sentences. Instead, the marking of the second nominal in nonreversible sentences was affected by the article assigned to the first nominal, but there was no similar effect within reversible sentences. These results are related to suggestions of differential depth of processing for reversible and nonreversible sentences, to the stronger topic-comment distinction within passives than within actives, and to the function of articles in explicating case relations.     

Voluntary forgetting before and after learning has been accomplished

Two experiments, in which voluntary forgetting was measured, are reported. In both experiments, lists of randomly mixed syllables and numbers were projected on a screen, and Ss were instructed before projection which part of the lists to remember or to forget. In the first experiment, the syllables were cued as items to be forgotten in one group, and to be remembered in the other one. At the end of the projection, Ss were instructed to recall freely only the syllables. For the former group, this was an unexpected test. The same list was projected for different groups: one, three, five, seven, and fourteen times, with new randomly mixed items each time. Syllable recall increased with an increase of times of projection of the list in the second group, but not in the first one. Recall of syllables in the first group was, however, above the chance level. These results were best interpreted by assuming a voluntary forgetting mechanism, which operates after the verbal items leave the short term store. The second experiment, a variation of the first, was designed to find the locus of voluntary forgetting mechanisms. The question is whether Ss can voluntarily forget syllables only before they are learned, or also after learning has already taken place. Voluntary forgetting after learning has been achieved was found to be ineffective. These results tend to support the hypothesis that voluntary forgetting processes do not operate in the long-term store and that Ss can block the transmission of to be forgotten items from the short-term store to the long-term store.     

Flavor aversions produced by contingent drug injection: Relative effectiveness of apomorphine, emetine, and lithium

Shortly after rats began drinking saccharin solution, different groups of them were injected with different doses of apomorphine, emetine, or lithium. A control group was not injected at all. Six days later, the rats were given free access to saccharin solution and to water. Aversions to saccharin solution were obtained in all injected groups and tended to become more pronounced as the dose level increased. At similar dose levels, lithium produced the most pronounced aversions, apomorphine produced the weakest aversions, and emetine was intermediate. A follow-up study with squirrel monkeys confirmed that lithium produces more pronounced aversions than either emetine or apomorphine. From these results, it seems worthwhile to try lithium in the chemical aversion treatment of alcoholism.     

Linguistic structures and mental operations

The internal representations and mental operations used in verifying a sentence against a pictorial referent are examined in an experiment where the location of the false constituent (subject, verb, or object) varied. The latencies for false sentences were ordered: verb, grammatical subject, grammatical object, with verb mismatches being detected the fastest. An information-processing analysis indicated that both comparison and search operations are employed, and that sentences are represented, in general, as a list of propositions with case-relational information. Context and task demands impose order on the list and lead to different operations on these structures. The depth of processing sentences varies from simple lexical comparisons up to full encoding and usage of syntactic and semantic features and case relations.     

Radical Behaviorism and the Clarification of Causality,Constructs, and Confusions: A Reply to Hayes,Adams, and Dixon

The Psychological Record - In a recent paper by Hayes, Adams, and Dixon (1997), Skinner’s radical behaviorism was criticized on conceptual and philosophical grounds. The criticisms centered...