Conditioned suppression in the gerbil

The present report describes apparatus and procedures for investigating conditioned suppression of a running response in the gerbil. Data are presented which demonstrate that the conditioned suppression observed in this situation is not an artifact of alpha responses, pseudoconditioning, or sensitization. An analysis of differential conditioning indicated that cue similarity and US intensity are negatively related to cue-specific differential responding.     

A note on responses to ethyl alcohol before and after smoking1

Differential sensitivity was measured before and after smoking a cigarette by 10 smokers, using 10 nonsmokers as controls. Stimuli consisted of reagent grade ethanol in eight concentrations ranging from 4% to 12%. No significant differences were observed between smokers and nonsmokers or before vs after smoking, although slightly higher overall correct responses and correspondingly smaller jnds were obtained for the nonsmokers. No practice affects were noted among the control group between the first and second set of samples. The findings confirm previous results which had been recently questioned.     

Social Support, Counselling, and Cancer

Maintenance of self-esteem and of social relationships are major tasks for cancer patients, and are facilitated by supportive interactions with a variety of others. Different sources potentially provide different forms of support. Patients value informational support from doctors, with concurrent emotional support; family members and confidants specialise in the provision of empathy, reassurance of personal worth, and encouragement; and other cancer patients may act as supplementary sources of both information and empathy. Counsellors may provide direct social support in the forms of empathy and access to material help and information, and may also facilitate socially supportive interactions between the patient and other natural providers of support such as doctors, family, and peers.     

Accepting personality test feedback: A review of the Barnum effect

This article attempts a comprehensive and critical review of the by-now fairly extensive literature on the Barnum effect—the approval/acceptance by subjects of bogus personality interpretations supposedly derived from standard tests. Since the last major review eight years ago various methodological extensions have occurred and various rival hypotheses for established findings have been proposed. The present review is divided into three major sections: client and clinician characteristics; feedback statements and test format; and implications for personality assessment and measurement. Nearly 50 studies on the acceptance of personality interpretations are systematically reviewed and criticized.     

Discourse in aphasia: Integration deficits in processing reference

The present study investigated moderately impaired aphasic subjects' ability to integrate information across sentences by having them identify antecedents for ambiguous pronouns in brief narratives. In order to disambiguate the pronouns, the subjects had to consult either textual cues and/or extratextual cues. In addition, the subjects' ability to retrieve factual information was measured by having them identify explicitly stated noun referents. The results show that the aphasic subjects had significant difficulty using textual cues to resolve referents when the referents were not readily accessible through world knowledge. The patients had little difficulty interpreting referents which were recoverable from world knowledge or were stated explicitly. The explanatory power of world knowledge effects, grammatical class effects, memory effects, and linguistic integration effects in accounting for the deficit pattern observed is considered.     

The masking of octave-band noise by broad-spectrum noise: A comparison of infant and adult thresholds

Localization responses to a 4,000-Hz octave-band noise in a background of broad-spectrum noise were obtained from infants, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months of age, and adults. A two-alternative, forced-choice procedure was used to determine thresholds at each of two levels of masking noise, 42 and 60 dBC. Adults were also tested for their localization of pure tones in noise and their detection of octave-band noises with the more traditional two-interval, forced-choice task. Increasing the masking noise from 42 to 60 dBC resulted in comparable threshold shifts for all age groups. However, infant thresholds were 16–25 dB higher than those obtained for adults. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

AN ANALYSIS OF SOME VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REPRIMANDS

Although several studies have shown that social reprimands can function as punishers, no study reported to date has isolated any of the factors influencing reprimand efficacy. Three experiments were conducted to investigate several factors. Experiment 1 used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on two elementary school boys, one of whom was in a special education class. Results showed that verbal reprimands delivered with eye contact and firm grasp of the student's shoulders reduced disruptive behavior to a greater extent than did verbal reprimands delivered without eye contact and grasp. Both types of reprimand were more effective than a baseline condition during which disruptive behavior was ignored. Experiment 2 also used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on one elementary school boy. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered from one meter away were considerably more effective than reprimands delivered from seven meters away. Experiment 3 used a reversal design and was conducted on two pairs of elementary school children, one a pair of boys and the other a pair of girls. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered to just one member of the pair reduced the disruptive behavior of both members of the pair. Thus, the effects of reprimands “spilled” over to nonreprimanded students.     

The effects of confederate prompt delivery style in a standardized social simulation test

Role plays or social simulations are presently one of the most common methods for assessing social skills. Although social simulation techniques have become quite popular, little is known about the psychometric adequacy of many of the role-play instruments which have been developed. This investigation was an attempt to determine certain properties of one particular social skills assessment instrument: the Simulated Social Interaction Test. The effects of various confederate prompt delivery styles on the judged social competency level of subjects in the Simulated Social Interaction Test were examined. Two confederates, one male and one female, were trained to portray three confederate prompt delivery styles: (a) unreceptive, (b) neutral, and (c) receptive. In order to determine if judges would compensate for the different confederate prompt delivery styles, two sets of trained judges rated the levels of skill and anxiety generated by the 30 subjects tested. One set of judges was screened from the confererate delivery while observing the simulation; the other set of judges followed the more common rating procedure (i.e., they were not screened from the confederates' deliveries). Data analysis examined variation in subject performance under each condition and according to each set of judges for both overall social skills and anxiety ratings. Confederate prompt delivery style was found to affect subjects' rated performance. There was also suggestive evidence that judges were sometimes able to compensate for different confederate delivery styles. The practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.This study was funded in part by a research grant from the Veterans Administration.     

Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study

English and Italian provide some interesting contrasts that are relevant to a controversial problem in psycholinguistics: the boundary between grammatical and extra-grammatical knowledge in sentence processing. Although both are SVO word order languages without case inflections to indicate basic grammatical relations, Italian permits far more variation in word order for pragmatic purposes. Hence Italians must rely more than English listeners on factors other than word order. In this experiment, Italian and English adults were asked to interpret 81 simple sentences varying word order, animacy contrasts between the two nouns, topicalization and contrastive stress. Italians relied primarily on semantic strategies while the English listeners relied on word order—including a tendency to interpret the second noun as subject in non-canonical word orders (corresponding to word order variations in informal English production). Italians also made greater use of topic and stress information. Finally, Italians were much slower and less consistent in the application of word order strategies even for reversible NVN sentences where there was no conflict between order and semantics. This suggests that Italian is ‘less’ of an SVO language than English. Semantic strategies apparently stand at the ‘core’ of Italian to the same extent that word order stands at the ‘core’ of English. It is suggested that these results pose problems for claims about a ‘universal’ separation between semantics and syntax, and for theories that postulate a ‘universal’ priority of one type of information over another. Results are discussed in the light of the competition model, a functionalist approach to grammar that accounts in a principled way for probabilistic outcomes and differential ‘weights’ among competing and converging sources of information in sentence processing.     

Relationships of achievement motivation and sex-role identity to college women's career orientation

Two career orientation factors, Career Centeredness and Career Commitment, were predicted to relate differentially to women's achievement motivation and sex-role identity. Career Centeredness is an orientation which places a career above other life activities (e.g., recreation, family life, etc.) as a source of satisfaction whereas Career Commitment concerns the intention of steadily pursuing a career throughout life. The expectation that Career Centeredness would be more characteristic of masculine women and correlate higher with achievement motivation than would Career Commitment was generally supported. Results are discussed in terms of societal support for these two career orientations and of role conflict experienced by women with different sex-role identities.