Attributional Modesty in Women

Three experiments were conducted to test a two-factor model of the determinants of attributional modesty in women. Women tended to make modest attributions for success when they were concerned about how others would evaluate them and when they were concerned about their own self-image. Specifically, the knowledge that one's attributions would be public and the anticipation of future performance on similar tasks led to modesty. Self-derogatory attributions for failure occurred when the subjects thought their attributions would be public.     

Variability of normal grapho-elements and the assessment of abnormal grapho-elements in the EEG of clinically healthy test persons

The percentage pattern and topical distribution of alpha, beta, theta and delta waves, the occipital voltage level asymmetry of the alpha waves and the frequency of temporal functional disorders were studied in 100 17-year-olds, 273 male test persons of various age and 6,000 healthy persons. The results indicated that 1/4--1/8 of the test section is precentrally taken up by theta waves in the E.E.G. of healthy 17-year-olds. Random sampling on a larger scale shows that left occipital alpha wave domination is just as frequent as on the right; voltage level symmetry occurs only in 13--23 per cent of all cases. Three per cent of the clinically healthy persons showed local temporal E.E.G. anomalies which were on the left in 96 per cent of the cases. Attention is drawn to possible consequences with regard to nomenclature, evaluation and diagnostic assessment.     

Defendant characteristics and juridic decisions

Research has demonstrated that attractive defendants receive more preferential treatment than do less attractive defendants. The present study examined two explanations for this finding (liking-leniency and causal inference models). It varied both the attractiveness of the defendant's traits and their relevance to the likelihood of committing a traffic felony. Results indicated that the attractive defendant was found less guilty than the unattractive defendant only when the traits were associated with the likelihood of acting criminally. This suggests that a causal inference model was appropriate when subjects decided guilt. However, a liking-leniency model was supported for decisions on severity of punishment as the attractive defendant was treated more leniently than the unattractive defendant, regardless of the relevancy of the traits to the crime.     

Parental divorce: long-term effects on mental health, family relations and adult sexual behavior

Specific long term effects of parental divorce were examined in a sample of 179 Icelanders, 20 to 30 years of age. The participants answered the Borromean Family Index, the Affect Balance Scale and a number of questions on sexual behavior and attitudes towards marriage and divorce. Results showed that compared to adults whose parents remained married, those of divorced parents reported more negative emotional experiences at the time of the study and had looser family ties. They also had greater number of short love affairs, had their first love affair at a younger age, had a greater number of sexual partners, and were younger at the time of their first sexual intercourse than adults whose parents remained married.     

Chinese and Americans see opposite apparent motions in a Chinese character

The perceived direction of apparent motion can be influenced by both "top-down" factors, such as expectation, and by "bottom-up" or stimulus-driven factors, such as grouping (Tse, P., Cavanagh, P. & Nakayama, K. (1998). The role of parsing in high-level motion processing. In T. Watanabe, High-level motion processing - computational, neurobiological and psychophysical perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Here we report the results of a single experiment that pitted top-down cues against bottom-up cues in an apparent motion sequence over the successive strokes of a Chinese character. Although each stroke was in fact presented all at once, subjects raised in China tended to see apparent motion over a single stroke in the direction it would have taken when drawn by hand, even though bottom-up cues drive a percept of apparent motion in the opposite direction for observers unfamiliar with the Chinese language. There is therefore a learned component to motion perception arising from top-down expectations capable of overriding bottom-up cues to motion.     

Index of Names

Authors Index

Index of Names