What Produces Television Attention and Attention Style?

Individual looks at television vary enormously in length, and this has previously indicated differences in ongoing cognitive processes. Furthermore, the relative frequency of looks of different lengths may indicate styles of attention to television. This article compares visual attention of 152 subjects across a variety of genres and examines differences located by situation, person, and media perception variables. Attention style was not consistent for individuals but varied for different types of programming and between‐program breaks. Situational, person, and media belief variables did not predict the proportions of four types of looks. They did, however, predict differences in the proportion of moderately short (orienting) looks across types of content, but not the previously more important very short (monitoring) or moderately long (engaged) looks. The overall importance of type of content in these results suggests that further research should examine within‐program differences in message construction and assess attentional style as patterns or sequences of looks.     

The effect of semantic priming on the detection of letters within words

Memory & Cognition - Smith (1979) reported an experiment in which subjects were to detect whether or not a displayed word contained a particular target letter. Her data indicated that if the...     

PAQ Types and Power Strategies Used in Intimate Relationships

A study was conducted to examine the kinds of power strategies used by Masculine, Feminine, Androgynous, and Undifferentiated people in their intimate relationships. Heterosexual college students (50 men and 50 women) described the power strategies they used in a current or past romantic/sexual relationship, described other aspects of their relationship and themselves, and completed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). The data were analyzed and the results interpreted in terms of a two dimensional model of power strategies in intimate relationships Androgynous people reported using primarily bilateral strategies, such as persuasion, to influence their intimate partners. In contrast, Undifferentiated people reported using primarily unilateral strategies, such as doing what they wanted, regardless of their partner's compliance. In addition, Feminine people and women were more likely to report using indirect and unilateral strategies such as growing silent or leaving the room, while Masculine people and men were more likely to report using direct and bilateral strategies, such as bargaining.     

Benevolent ageism: Attitudes of overaccommodative behavior toward older women

ABSTRACT

Stereotypes of older adults fit a paternalistic pattern, including elevated warmth and lowered competence, yet little effort has been made to elucidate this in an everyday context. This phenomenon was examined with an experimental vignette, in which a woman was offered unnecessary help; specifically, the age (young vs. old) and the independence (accepting vs. declining assistance) of the woman were manipulated. Attributions from a college-age sample toward the woman were examined. In the older conditions, hypotheses were confirmed that participants approved overaccommodative behaviors, endorsed higher warmth and lower competence, and attitudes were modified when the older women contradicted the paternalistic stereotype by declining assistance. That is, competence was modifiable for older women, whereas warmth was not. Implications of these findings as possible evidence of benevolent ageism and the malleability of the Stereotype Content Model are discussed.     

Gender Differences in Moral Influences on Adolescents’ Eyewitness Identification

Abstract

In this study, 232 (89 11- to 12-year-olds, 71 13- to 14-year-olds; 72 15- to 16-year-olds) students recruited from grades 6th–11th in an urban public high school participated in a study of eyewitness identification. The focus of this study was on the effects of age, gender and moral orientation on decisional bias and, as a secondary outcome, on accuracy (using signal detection analysis).The primary purpose of this and previous studies in this series is to uncover implicit moral decision-making in decisional bias. In this study the perpetrator, the bystanders and the foil were all females. Prior to completing the eyewitness identification task, participants were given instructions that emphasized either (a) fairness and crime prevention, or (b) neither. These instructions had no discernible effect on accuracy but, as in past studies, younger participants (below the age of 13) had lower decisional criteria, resulting in a higher rate of false alarms/positives. Further, those who judged the transgression as worse had a lower decisional criterion, indicating more false alarms. Females were more accurate than the males in identifying the female perpetrator and scored significantly higher on how bad they would feel if they were the victim than did the males.     

Distinguishing representation deficits and processing deficits in a case of acquired dysgraphia

The same acquired disorder of spelling may be due to deficits affecting lexical representations of word spelling or deficits affecting the mechanisms that process those representations. This study sought to distinguish these possibilities in a dysgraphic patient. The integrity of the patient's lexical orthographic representations was assessed by having him decide whether or not pairs of words presented auditorily rhymed. Although the patient was impaired on a variety of spelling tasks and with all types of stimulus material, he showed a normal effect of spelling on the rhyme task. Like normal subjects, he was faster at deciding that words rhymed when they were spelled similarly (e.g. tool-cool) than when they were spelled dissimilarly (e.g. rule-cool) and slower at deciding that words did not rhyme when they were spelled similarly (e.g. toad-broad) than when they were spelled dissimilarly (e.g. code-broad). Therefore, as the patient's lexical representations of word spelling seemed to be generally intact, his spelling problems were probably due to difficulty in processing those representations.