Investing in karma: when wanting promotes helping

People often face outcomes of important events that are beyond their personal control, such as when they wait for an acceptance letter, job offer, or medical test results. We suggest that when wanting and uncertainty are high and personal control is lacking, people may be more likely to help others, as if they can encourage fate's favor by doing good deeds proactively. Four experiments support this karmic-investment hypothesis. When people want an outcome over which they have little control, their donations of time and money increase (Experiments 1 and 2), but their participation in other rewarding activities does not (Experiment 1b). In addition, at a job fair, job seekers who feel the process is outside (vs. within) their control make more generous pledges to charities (Experiment 3). Finally, karmic investments increase optimism about a desired outcome (Experiment 4). We conclude by discussing the role of personal control and magical beliefs in this phenomenon.     

Processing of form: further evidence for the necessity of attention

Using the materials and general procedure described by Rock and Gutman (1981), 160 subjects were required to attend selectively to a series of 10 red or green outlines of two overlapping contours. Immediately afterwards, six groups of 20 subjects were administered various kinds of recognition tests involving attended, unattended, or new figures, and two groups of 20 were asked to provide affect ratings of the test stimuli. Consistent with the findings of Rock and Gutman in 1981, attended outlines were selected as old more often than unattended or new ones. Although some data in a single-stimulus condition suggested that the unattended forms were "discriminated negatively," this effect was not replicated with forced-choice testing. Over-all, there was little evidence that, on unattended forms, subjects were significantly more accurate, differentially confident or displayed more liking than on new ones. These results are interpreted as supporting the view that attention is required for the cognitive representation of form.     

Gender and sex-role attributes as predictors of utilization of natural support systems during personal stress events

This study was an empirical investigation of gender and sex-role attributes as they relate to the utilization of natural support systems during personal stress events. Compared to male subjects, female subjects reported significantly higher levels of requested assistance and perceived more help as being available from their natural support systems during the most stressful event encountered during the previous year. Subjects' scores on the femininity dimension of the Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire were significantly correlated with amount of support asked for during stress events. Along with the variable of perceived level of stress, gender and femininity score accounted for 36% of the variance of natural support system utilization during a personal crisis. The results of the study are discussed in the context of current research on (a) the utilization of natural support systems and (b) the relationship between person variables and psychophysiological disease.     

Expectancies of reinforcer location and quality as cues for a conditional discrimination in pigeons

Experiment 1 demonstrated that reliably correlating different reinforcer locations (top vs. bottom) with sample stimuli markedly enhanced the performance of White Carneaux pigeons in a spatial conditional discrimination. This differential outcome effect was more evident at longer retention intervals. In Experiment 2, pigeons were given the opportunity to learn about two redundant reinforcer features--location (top vs. bottom) and quality (grain vs. chow). Which reinforcer feature exerted control over choosing depended on task structure. In the congruent task, where pecks to the top key operated the top feeder and pecks to the bottom key operated the bottom feeder, reinforcer location exerted predominant control. In the incongruent task, where pecks to the top key operated the bottom feeder and vice versa, reinforcer quality exerted exclusive control. These results have implications for the nature of reinforcer representations in instrumental learning.     

Writing programs on the Apple for the student psychology laboratory: Routines,subroutines, and sources of information

Writing programs for the student psychology laboratory on the Apple II series of microcomputers presents the programmer with a number of problems. Among these are increasing program execution speed, obtaining precise response and interval timing, reducing program memory requirements, obtaining efficient disk I/O, providing good error trapping, and presenting clear screen displays. Since Applesoft BASIC is not equipped with many of the desirable features of a more advanced language, ways to solve these problems are not obvious. This paper suggests a number of potential solutions and provides additional sources of information.     

A comparison of inexpensive statistical packages for apple II microcomputers

The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare some inexpensive software packages that calculate a variety of statistics on the Apple II microcomputer. For each package, hardware requirements, program capacity, limitations, constraints, accuracy, editing, error handling, and other features were studied.     

Writing high-quality statistical software for Apple II microcomputers

The purpose of this paper is to describe some principles and techniques that programmers should consider when trying to improve or create a statistical package. Four computational issues are discussed: accuracy, speed, computing probabilities, and error trapping. A single-array data structure is proposed for use within the program. Several other input-output issues are covered, including menus, command languages, questions, data input and editing, CRT and printer formatting, and graphics.