Arousal and paired-associate learning

Walker and Tarte (1963) postulate that at short retention intervals high arousal paired-associates are reproduced more poorly than low arousal items. Walker and colleagues believe that this hypothesis is confirmed by their paired-associate learning studies. However, results of these paired-associate learning studies are position confounded artifacts. Better recall of low arousal items at short-term retention is caused by the coincidence of the recency effect and low arousal at the end of the trial. When these position effects are controlled there is no action decrement for the high arousal paired-associates. To test this assumption, the Kleinsmith and Kaplan study (1963) was replicated and two other variations were conducted. In these three studies with 76 subjects, which were tested at two minutes or 1 week, the action decrement occurs only when the two position effects coincide.     

Ignorance is not a victimless crime: The case of the caring teacher,part 2

Confusion about the mandated reporting of child abuse was discovered in a case study to be widespread, including at the state level. Such extensive confusion serves to keep citizens from both seeing the depth of suffering to which children are subjected and responding appropriately to their suffering; and it serves to keep society dissociated from the impact violence has on us.     

Sexual equality,male superiority,and Korean women in politics: Changing gender relations in a “patriarchal democracy”

As a newly industrialized country Korean society may be characterized as a patriarchal democracy, where the Western democratic principle of sexual equality and the traditional Confucian ideology of male superiority contradict each other and complicate the behavioral rules for gender relations. This paper explores the processes of social change in gender relations by examining organizational patterns of social actions of individuals in male-female interactions in South Korea, with a focus on the experiences of women in politics. The analysis suggests the emerging pattern of gender relations in Korean society is a compartmentalized gender schema that is fluid and situationally defined by the individual's nunch'i (tact or savoir-faire).The research on which this paper is based was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the East-West Center. I am grateful to the two institutions. Special thanks are also due to Jerry Boucher, Jon McGee, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on early versions of this paper.     

A kinematic analysis of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of anterior aphasic subjects using electromagnetic articulography

An investigation was made into the extent and time course of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of two normal and two anterior aphasic, German-speaking subjects. Both labial and velar coarticulation gestures were investigated. Subjects produced sentences containing target words contrasting in postconsonantal vowel rounding (e.g., [geli:ge]/[gely:gel]) and in nasality (e.g., [ti:de]/[ti:ne]). Speech kinematics were monitored by means of electromagnetic articulography. The data revealed that for correct productions, aphasic speakers' coarticulatory patterns were more highly variable than those of control subjects. These differences, however, were found chiefly for spatial displacement characteristics, while the temporal aspects of articulator movement necessary for anticipatory coarticulation appeared largely intact. Articulator mistiming did not appear to explain a small corpus of stop/nasal substitution errors produced by one of the aphasic speakers.     

Toward a Process Analysis of Emotions: The Case of Surprise

Based on an earlier model of the processes elicited by surprising events, the present studies provide evidence for one of these processes, the evaluation of the surprising event's relevance for ongoing activities (action-relevance check). The central prediction tested was that, if unexpected events elicit among other processes an action-relevance check, then response delay on a concurrent task will be more pronounced in a condition where this process is more elaborate and hence takes more time. In accord with this prediction, Experiment 1 found that an unexpected appearance change of the imperative stimulus in a choice reaction time (RT) task caused greater response delay than an equivalent appearance change of a distractor stimulus. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and tested several additional predictions that concerned the effects on response delay of a second appearance change of either the imperative or the distractor stimuli. These predictions, which were also mostly confirmed, were derived by combining the logic underlying the first study with the assumption that once made, appraisals of unexpected events are stored as part of the situational schema and are reused when the same or similar events reoccur leading to an abbreviation of appraisal processes. Experiment 3 once more replicated the basic finding of the previous studies and ruled out a possible alternative explanation. It is suggested that the proposed RT method of process verification may be of broader interest as a tool to study appraisal processes in emotion.     

Gender and Self-Reported Sexual Arousal in Response to Sexual Stimuli: A Meta-Analytic Review

Social constructionist theories and sociobiological perspectives have led to increased interest in gender differences in sexual behavior. This study involved a meta-analysis of gender differences in sexual arousal in response to sexual stimuli. Forty-six studies in which participants were presented with a sexual stimulus depicting males and females and in which participants responded using a self-report measure of arousal were compiled, and 62 independent effect sizes were aggregated. An overall effect size of d = .31 showed a small to moderate-sized gender difference in sexual arousal with men reporting more arousal than women across all studies. There was significant variation in the effect sizes, though, which was only partially explained by variables coded from the studies. It was found that the gender difference was slightly larger for studies using pornographic vs. erotic stimuli, was larger for studies where participants were tested in a private setting or small group compared to a large group, and was much larger for college age participants compared to those who were older than college age. Generally, the pattern of results provided more support for predictions from social influence theories compared to sociobiological theory.     

Input- and output-monitoring in implicit and explicit memory

Previous experiments have shown that the procedure of questioning subjects retrospectively about the input and output status of information (input and output monitoring) is a useful method for assessing the awareness states of subjects during implicit and explicit memory tasks. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the previous findings could be extended to other implicit and explicit memory tasks. We were especially interested in whether differences in input- and output-monitoring performance can be observed when both the implicit and explicit memory tasks are conceptual ones. In a final test phase, the target items from the study phase and new distractor items were presented. In a recognition-like situation, subjects had to decide whether an item had been presented in the study phase (input status), as well as whether they had produced the item in the memory-test phase (output status). In all three experiments judgments about the input status - but only for those items that had been produced in the implicit or in the explicit memory test - were more precise after explicit than after implicit memory testings. This finding was not influenced by the distinction between perceptual and conceptual-memory tasks (Exp. 1), and was obtained under conditions in which the implicit and the explicit memory tasks were both conceptual and differed only in test instructions (Exps. 2 and 3). These results suggest that not only subjects performing a perceptual test of implicit memory, but also subjects in a conceptual implicit test were less aware of using information from a previous study episode than subjects who received memory instructions. It is concluded that requiring judgments about the input status of information is a good method for assessing subjects test awareness and is preferable to the use of a questionnaire (Exp. 3). In contrast, in all three experiments no differences were found with the output-monitoring measure between implicit and explicit test conditions.     

Ability to generate mental images in students of art

To evaluate the ability to generate mental images and its relations to artistic training, 44 undergraduates were presented with a list of selected fragments from 40 characters in the Roman alphabet. Subjects provided those letters suggested by the fragments for as many items as possible within a 90-second interval. It was hypothesized that students who had received college training in studio art would be able to produce a greater number of candidate images than students not trained in art, resulting in more correct answers and higher scores. Results confirmed the hypothesis. Trained subjects completed significantly more of the letters on the image-generation task than did those not trained in art (p=.0001). This suggests that superior ability to generate images is associated with artistic training. Further, these results imply that, to the degree to which artistic training reflects ability, image generation may also be related to artistic ability.