Reaction-time measures of stutterers and nonstutterers

Ten adult male stutterers and ten adult male nonstutterers participated in six reaction-time tasks designed to measure manual, acoustic, and laryngeal-region response latencies. The analysis revealed statistically significant differences between the groups for the acoustic data only. The results indicated that acoustic reaction-time differences are not accounted for by the speed of the general laryngeal response.     

Differential effects of personality on access to various long-term memory codes

Arousal, as indexed by personality measures, has been related to memory encoding, organization, and retrieval. In an attempt to investigate one of the component information-processing mechanisms underlying both encoding and retrieval, the effects of introversion-extraversion on performance in a simultaneous matching task was investigated. As predicted from earlier research, personality did not influence performance on a physical identity matching task but extraverts were faster than introverts in making taxonomic category matches (a semantic task). Somewhat unexpectedly, extraverts were also faster at making “homophone” identity matches. Arousal, then, appears to influence access to long-term memory codes of any type—a characteristic that may be reflected in tests of both encoding and retrieval.     

Participants' postexperimental reactions and the ethics of bystander research

Researchers and review boards lack an empirical base for evaluating the ethics of proposed research procedures. This paper contributes to such a base by reporting participants' postexperimental affective reactions to bystander experiments employing deception and their evaluations of the ethics of these experiments. Anonymous “ethics” questionnaires were administered to 231 subjects who had participated in one of three laboratory experiments on helping and had been debriefed. Participants reported very little negative affect. Most viewed the research as ethically justified, and found their participation both instructive and enjoyable. There was little variation in reactions as a function of subjects' sex, the particular experiment they had participated in, and their behavior during the experiment. Implications of these findings for assessing the ethics of future deceptive and stressful research are discussed.     

Works, works better

A theory of Goodman and Elgin concerning the individuation of literary works is examined and criticized. An alternative account is offered to meet various of the difficulties in their proposal. In addition, it is suggested that there may not be asingle account of the notion of a literary work that can best do all the jobs we expect of it.     

Effects of aging on priming and skill learning.

This study examined the effects of aging on 2 kinds of implicit memory; repetition priming and skill learning. In Experiment 1, older adults showed less improvement in the skill of reading inverted words than did young adults, but priming performance did not differ for the 2 age groups. Similarly, in Experiment 2, in a partial-word identification task, skill learning was observed only for young adults, whereas there was no age difference in priming. Experiments 1a and 2a, however, showed that when older adults were presented with more perceptual information than were young adults, the age deficit in skill learning was eliminated. These results indicate that skill learning is impaired under data-limited conditions, whereas priming is unaffected under these conditions. It is proposed that the age deficit in skill learning is related to a deficit in perceptual organization and reorganization.     

Do deaf individuals have better visual skills in the periphery? Evidence from processing facial attributes

ABSTRACT

Studies examining visual abilities in individuals with early auditory deprivation have reached mixed conclusions, with some finding congenital auditory deprivation and/or lifelong use of a visuospatial language improves specific visual skills and others failing to find substantial differences. A more consistent finding is enhanced peripheral vision and an increased ability to efficiently distribute attention to the visual periphery following auditory deprivation. However, the extent to which this applies to visual skills in general or to certain conspicuous stimuli, such as faces, in particular is unknown. We examined the perceptual resolution of peripheral vision in the deaf, testing various facial attributes typically associated with high-resolution scrutiny of foveal information processing. We compared performance in face-identification tasks to performance using non-face control stimuli. Although we found no enhanced perceptual representations in face identification, gender categorization, or eye gaze direction recognition tasks, fearful expressions showed greater resilience than happy or neutral ones to increasing eccentricities. In the absence of an alerting sound, the visual system of auditory deprived individuals may develop greater sensitivity to specific conspicuous stimuli as a compensatory mechanism. The results also suggest neural reorganization in the deaf in their opposite advantage of the right visual field in face identification tasks.     

Semantic weight and verb retrieval in aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia may have difficulty with verb production in comparison to nouns. Additionally, they may have greater difficulty producing verbs that have fewer semantic components (i.e., are semantically "light") compared to verbs that have greater semantic weight. A connectionist verb-production model proposed by Gordon and Dell (2003) learns through error correction to "divide the labor" between syntax and semantics. Verbs that are semantically heavier come to depend less on syntax and more on semantics. For lighter verbs, the reverse is true. We performed this study to clarify the role of semantic weight in aphasic verb production and to test the prediction from Gordon and Dell that a brain lesion that impairs the syntactic input to verb retrieval will impair lighter verbs more than heavier ones. Consistent with this prediction, we found that the decrement for lighter verbs was present in a group with agrammatic aphasia but not in a matched group without agrammatism.     

Attachment and family therapy: clinical utility of adolescent-family attachment research

The divide separating research and clinical work is narrowing. New therapies have been informed by research from specialties such as developmental psychology and developmental psychopathology. In this article, we attempt to illustrate the usefulness of research on attachment relations for family-based therapy with adolescents. We examine the clinical utility of adolescent attachment research within the context of multidimensional family therapy, an empirically supported treatment model that has incorporated developmental research, including basic research on attachment, in its assessment and intervention framework.     

Victimization in South Korean children's peer groups

This study reports a cross-sectional investigation of the behavioral, academic, and psychosocial correlates of victimization in South Korean children's peer groups. The participants were 122 children (66 boys, 56 girls; from 10–12-years-old) recruited from a primary school in Seoul, South Korea. Multi-informant assessments (peer nominations, teacher ratings, and self-reports) of peer victimization, social behavior, loneliness/social dissatisfaction, and academic functioning were obtained. Multivariate analyses indicated that peer victimization was associated with poor academic adjustment, loneliness, submissive–withdrawn behavior, aggression, and low levels of assertive–prosocial behavior. These findings suggest that there is considerable similarity in the social processes underlying peer group victimization across South Korean and Western cultural settings.