Testing alternative explanations for mortality salience effects: Terror management,value accessibility,or worrisome thoughts?

Previous research has shown that reminding subjects of their mortality encourages negative reactions to others whose behaviour or attitudes deviate from the cultural worldview (e.g. Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Rosenblatt, Veeder, Kirkland and Lyon 1990; Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon and Chatel 1992; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski and Lyon 1989). According to terror management theory, these findings result from a heightened need for faith in the cultural worldview that is activated by reminders of one's mortality. Study I assessed the plausibility of an alternative explanation which posits that mortality salience simply primes individuals' values. Whereas mortality salience led to harsher bond recommendations for a prostitute, a procedure that directly focused subjects on their values did not. Studies 2 and 3 assessed the possibility that reminding subjects of any worrisome future concern would produce the same effect as a reminder of mortality. In both studies, mortality salience led to negative reactions to a deviant and had no effect on self-reported affect, whereas other worrisome thoughts had no effect on reactions to a deviant but did create negative affect. Thus, consistent with terror management theory, mortality salience effects seem to result exclusively from thoughts of death.     

The perception of ingroup and outgroup homogeneity: On the confounding of group size,level of abstractness and frame of reference. A reply to Bartsch and Judd

In this reply, I criticize Bartsch and Judd's (1993) article on several grounds. First, they under-utilize the efforts undertaken in prior work to rule out the possibility of an inverse relation between group size and perceived group homogeneity as an alternative explanation of the observed ingroup homogeneity effect. Secondly, Bartsch and Judd's design doubles and thus aggravates the confounding problem. By trying to avoid the target group size confound, they end up with two other confounds involving level of abstractness and frame of reference. Finally, I criticize Bartsch and Judd's methodological advice to avoid within-subjects comparisons of ingroup and outgroup homogeneity in minority–majority contexts. Quite on the contrary, I highlight the socialpsychological significance of these comparisons.     

Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental representation of language

We argue that psycholinguistics should be concerned with both the representation and the processing of language. Recent experimental work on syntax in language comprehension has largely concentrated on the way in which language is processed, and has assumed that theoretical linguistics serves to determine the representation of language. In contrast, we advocate experimental work on the mental representation of grammatical knowledge, and argue that sybtactic priming is a promising way to do this. Syntactic priming is the phenomenon whereby exposure to a sentence with a particular syntactic construction can affect the subsequent processing of an otherwise unrelated sentence with the same (or, perhaps, related) structure, for reasons of that structure. We assess evidence for syntactic priming in corpora, and then consider experimental evidence for priming in production and comprehension, and for bidirectional priming between comprehension and production. This in particular strongly suggests that priming is tapping into linguistic knowledge itself, and is not just facilitating particular processes. The final section discusses the importance of priming evidence for any account of language construed as the mental representation of human linguistic capacities.The order of the first two authors is arbitrary. H.B. is supported by an EPSRC Postgraduate Studentship. M.P. is supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Felowship. S.L. is supported by a University of Nottingham Postdoctoral Fellowship. A.S. was supported by British Academy Research Grant awarded to M.P. T.U. is in part supported by a Mellon Science Development Grant. We would like to thank Dave Elmes, Tyler Lorig, Matt Traxler, an anonymous reviewer, and members of the Sentence Processing Group, Human Communication Research Centre, Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.     

The effect of child negative affect on maternal discipline behavior

The effect of children's negative affect on maternal discipline behavior was evaluated in a sample of 39 children (19 to 41 months old) and their mothers. Mothers were randomly assigned to view a videotape that contained either a high level of child negative affect (NA) or no negative affect (NNA). After viewing the videotape, mothers were observed interacting with their own children in three tasks designed to elicit child misbehavior. Mothers in the NA condition displayed significantly greater overreactivity to child misbehavior; no significant difference in laxness was observed between the two groups of mothers. Children of mothers in the NA condition tended to display more misbehavior during the last two tasks of the interaction. Maternal negative affect received mixed support as one possible mediator of this effect.These data were presented at the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy in Atlanta, Georgia in November 1993.     

Experiences of lecturers helping distressed students in higher education

Lecturers in higher education frequently attempt to support distressed students, yet most lecturers have no training in counselling. In order to gauge the extent to which lecturers are called upon to help distressed students, a survey was conducted of the experiences and opinions of lecturers in a British higher education institution. The incidence of helping students in distress appeared to be very high, almost all respondents (97%) having advised one or more distressed students during the twelve-month period preceding the survey. Further findings and implications of the survey are discussed.     

I: Effect of delayed auditory feedback on speech and keytapping

The effects of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) on the performance of simple speech and keytapping tasks were compared. In the first experiment, each of the fourteen young adult subjects was asked to repeat the speech sound “b” in groups of three sounds. The subject heard his undelayed speech sounds through earphones. Under the delay condition, the speech sounds were delayed 244 millisec. before being returned to the subject's earphones. In the second experiment, each of the same subjects was asked to tap on a key in groups of three taps. The subjects heard an undelayed click through earphones each time they tapped on the key. Under the delay condition, the clicks were delayed 244 millisec. before being returned to the earphones. Graphic recordings were made of the time and intensity characteristics of tapping under both conditions.

The changes which occurred in speech and keytapping under DAF were qualitatively the same and consisted of increases in intensity and unit-to-unit time of both taps and speech sounds. When performing under DAF, the subjects also exhibited a tendency to repeat more sounds or to tap more times than had been requested. The percentage of change in intensity and time characteristics for speech and keytapping performances which occurred under DAF were not significantly different for the two motor systems. The amount of change in speech performance under DAF did not correlate significantly with the amount of change in keytapping performance.