The maleness of violence in dating relationships: an appraisal of stereotypes

This study clarifies and adds to our understanding of how gender and gender orientation affect physical aggression in dating relationships. The stereotype of male violence assumes that men exclusively or nearly exclusively use abusive and violent behavior to manage conflict situations with an intimate partner, and that the more violent men will be more masculine. Data from a sample of 336 undergraduates indicate that the expected sex differences were not observed; among college students, physical aggression in dating relationships is not gender-specific. However, gender orientation was significantly related to courtship aggression. A more masculine and/or less feminine gender orientation and variations in relationship seriousness proved to be the two strongest predictors of both men's and women's involvement in courtship violence. Findings are discussed in terms of the masculine mystique and the male role norms in our culture's superstructure.This project was funded in part by a faculty research grant from Holy Cross College.     

Word-to-word variation in ERP component latencies: spoken words

Data were collected shedding light on the brain electrical activity underlying word recognition. Subjects listened to a list of 48 spoken words in six random orders under two instructional sets: first to "think about the meanings of the words," and second, to learn the list. The scalp EEG associated with hearing and identifying the words was recorded at F3, F4, Cz, P3, P4, Pz, and Oz. Standard within-subjects time-locked averaging across words showed a late negative-positive complex with N2-P3 topography, the negative component peaking around 480 msec, the positive component peaking around 830 msec. Averaging within words across subjects uncovered considerable latency variability in both components. Within-word N2 and P3 component latencies covaried with word durations and with the "recognition points" predicted for the words by the "cohort theory" of word recognition. N2 latencies corresponded closely to the "N400" effect elicited with semantically incongruous sentence-final spoken words. Implications for ERP investigations of language processing are discussed.     

Reconstructing the dates of personal events: Gender differences in accuracy

One commonly held stereotype is that females are more concerned with, and attentive to, dates than are males. One possible implication of this idea is that females have a more welldeveloped temporal reference schema than males, which should allow females to reconstruct the dates on which past events have occurred with more accuracy than males. This accuracy hypothesis was assessed by re-analysing the data from four studies collected in previous work on the accuracy of event dating. Analyses of two of the studies yielded evidence for more accurate female dating; analysis of a third study produced a substantial, but non-significant, trend in the predicted direction; and analysis of the fourth study yielded a small, but nonsignificant, reversal. A meta-analysis combining the results of these four studies indicated that the dating accuracy of females was superior to the dating accuracy of males. Additional analyses indicated that these differences were probably not due to differences in self-disclosure patterns.     

THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MEMORY: William James in Retrospect

William James did much to set the stage for psychobiology. Beyond insisting that brain structures and processes must be the basis of explanations of mental phenomena, he expressed ideas about brain localization and plasticity in neural networks that foreshadowed many aspects of current neurobiology of learning and even connectionist theory.     

Selective antagonism of the error-increasing effect of morphine by naloxone in a repeated-acquisition task.

Pigeons acquired a different four-response chain each session by responding sequentially on three keys in the presence of four colors. The response chain was maintained by food presentation under a fixed-ratio schedule. Errors produced a brief timeout but did not reset the chain. When either morphine or naloxone was administered alone, the overall response rate decreased with increasing doses. The rate-decreasing effect was accompanied by an increase in percent errors with morphine but not with naloxone. Both effects of morphine were antagonized by doses of naloxone that were ineffective when given alone. The antagonism was selective in that naloxone (3 mg/kg) completely blocked the error-increasing effect but not the rate-decreasing effect of the higher doses of morphine. The view that naloxone is a specific narcotic antagonist was supported by the finding that naloxone failed to antagonize the rate-decreasing and error-increasing effects of d-amphetamine, pentobarbital, and phencyclidine.     

Effects of d-amphetamine and cocaine on strained ratio behavior in a repeated-acquisition task.

Pigeons acquired a different four-response chain each session by responding sequentially on three keys in the presence of four colors. When the fixed-ratio requirement for food presentation was five completions of the chain, d-amphetamine and cocaine disrupted the behavior. As the dose of each drug was increased, the overall response rate decreased, the overall accuracy was impaired (i,e., percent errors increased), and there was less within-session error reduction (acquisition). In contrast, when the fixed-ratio requirement was either 20 or 50 completions of the chain, certain doses of both drugs produced large increases in the overall response rate by eliminating the extended pausing (ratio strain) that was characteristic of the control sessions. These rate-increasing effects were accompanied by error-decreasing effects, both during acquisition and after the response chain had been acquired. Taken together, the results show that the effects of d-amphetamine and cocaine on behavior in a repeated-acquisition task can be modulated by manipulating the value of the fixed-ratio schedule maintaining the behavior.     

Conditional discrimination learning: A critique and amplification

Carter and Werner recently reviewed the literature on conditional discrimination learning by pigeons, which consists of studies of matching-to-sample and oddity-from-sample. They also discussed three models of such learning: the “multiple-rule” model (learning of stimulus-specific relations), the “configuration” model, and the “single-rule” model (concept learning). Although their treatment of the multiple-rule model, which seems most applicable to the pigeon data, is generally excellent, their discussion of the other two models is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Potential problems of terminology are discussed in the present paper, as are additional lines of research that deserve consideration by those interested in further work in this area. The issue of response versus stimulus selection (configuration versus compound-cue learning) is discussed in connection with the configuration model. Particular attention is given to Carter and Werner's criticism of the application, in studies with other species, of the learning set procedure in testing for single-rule learning. Some of the important related issues are: the bias for improvement on new problems in a series, the adequacy of a multiple-rule model to explain learning set formation, and evidence in favor of the single-rule model, at least in primates. Consideration of these additional contributions to the study of conditional discrimination learning emphasizes the usefulness of this task in the comparative study of cognitive processes.