In support of extreme groups design for studying masculinity-femininity and intelligence

Humphreys (this issue) reanalyzed the data of Welsh and Baucom (1977) and stated that their conclusions were unsupportable. Humphreys's criticisms are inappropriate since his findings are based upon a measure of masculinity-femininity (M-F) which is different from the previous approach and based upon a sample which is somewhat different. Thus he addresses issues which are inconsistent with Welsh and Baucom's focus. Finally, Humphreys's insistence on correlational analysis to the exclusion of extreme groups design is viewed as inappropriately limiting.     

ACQUISITION,DISCRIMINATIVE STIMULUS CONTROL,AND RETENTION OF INCREASES/DECREASES IN BLOOD PRESSURE OF NORMOTENSIVE HUMAN SUBJECTS1

The aims of this study of 24 normotensive subjects were: to compare a free-operant with a discrete-trials training format; to determine the most effective training procedure by comparing instrumental conditioning with instructional set and a control; to see if both increases and decreases in blood pressure could be brought under discriminative control, and to examine the maintenance of acquired self-control of blood pressure. A 2 × 3 design was employed in which two trial formats (free operant and discrete trials) were factorially compared with three training conditions (instrumental conditioning, instructional set, and control). Instrumental conditioning was found superior to both the instructional set and control conditions in producing increases and decreases in mean diastolic blood pressure. The free-operant format led to a greater degree of learned BP control in that subjects were able to increase and decrease their blood pressure by 10% to 15% of basal value and to maintain the blood-pressure operant after contingent auditory feedback/reinforcement was removed. Training was discontinued when subjects in the other five groups failed to reach criterion after 10 consecutive acquisition sessions.     

EFFICACY AND MAINTENANCE OF AN EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR A CONSUMER COOPERATIVE

We examined the effects of contingency management on participation in and maintenance of an education program by new members of a student housing cooperative. With credit and fine contingencies in place, the percentage of participants completing study guides was five times higher than without the contingencies. Members continued to implement the program for 9 years without researcher involvement.     

Sexual harassment,male dominated organizations and the role of counselling psychology: The case of medical school

This paper presents evidence of sexual harassment in medical school based on a survey of students (n = 186) and lecturers (n = 100); but while 85.5% of students believe that medical educators should combat this behaviour, only 67.7% of the lecturers do so. it is argued here, that ambivalence towards sexual harassment is a psychological symptom of a male dominated culture, with long term implications for victims, perpetrators and witnesses. It is an issue which needs to be addressed both interpersonally and at an organizational level.     

Child’s Play: Anatomically Correct Dolls and Embodiment

Anatomically detailed dolls have been used to elicit testimony from children in sex abuse cases. However, studies have shown they often provide false accounts in young, preschool-age children. Typically this problem is seen as a cognitive one: with age, children can correctly map their bodies onto a doll due to greater intellectual ability to represent themselves. I argue, along with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that although cognitive developments aid in the ability to represent one’s own body, a discussion of embodiment is required in order to understand the use and abuse of anatomical dolls in forensic interviews. This paper examines these issues and maintains that a better understanding of embodied perception in both adults and children helps show how phenomenology can provide a more nuanced understanding to a troubling ethical and legal problem.

Knowledge of response location alone is not sufficient to generate social inhibition of return

Previous research has revealed that the inhibition of return (IOR) effect emerges when individuals respond to a target at the same location as their own previous response or the previous response of a co-actor. The latter social IOR effect is thought to occur because the observation of co-actor's response evokes a representation of that action in the observer and that the observation-evoked response code subsequently activates the inhibitory mechanisms underlying IOR. The present study was conducted to determine if knowledge of the co-actor's response alone is sufficient to evoke social IOR. Pairs of participants completed responses to targets that appeared at different button locations. Button contact generated location-contingent auditory stimuli (high and low tones in Experiment 1 and colour words in Experiment 2). In the Full condition, the observer saw the response and heard the auditory stimuli. In the Auditory Only condition, the observer did not see the co-actor's response, but heard the auditory stimuli generated via button contact to indicate response endpoint. It was found that, although significant individual and social IOR effects emerged in the Full conditions, there were no social IOR effects in the Auditory Only conditions. These findings suggest that knowledge of the co-actor's response alone via auditory information is not sufficient to activate the inhibitory processes leading to IOR. The activation of the mechanisms that lead to social IOR seems to be dependent on processing channels that code the spatial characteristics of action.     

The processes of facilitation and inhibition in a cue-target paradigm: insight from movement trajectory deviations

Several researchers have examined the trajectories of aiming movements in cue-target paradigms to investigate the motoric and attentional underpinnings of the inhibition of return (IOR) effect. The results of separate studies have revealed inconsistent patterns of trajectory deviations. These discrepancies may have arisen because the studies used narrow ranges of cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs) which may have prevented the time courses of facilitation and inhibition effects to be fully assessed. The present study was designed to conduct an examination of temporal and spatial characteristics of aiming movements over a broader range of CTOAs to provide a more comprehensive assessment of the potential expression of attentional and motoric contributions to cuing effects. Participants aimed to targets which were preceded by a non-predictive cue at CTOAs of 100, 350, 850, and 1100 ms. Analysis of spatial and temporal characteristics of the movements revealed facilitatory and inhibitory cuing effects in the trajectories, but only inhibitory cuing effects in RT. Further, the inhibitory effects in RT appeared at a shorter CTOA than the inhibitory effects in trajectories. This pattern of results suggests that the inhibitory mechanisms underlying IOR affect both attention and motor systems, but that these effects are displaced in time.     

Seeing is believing: Priors,trust, and base rate neglect

Kahneman and Tversky (1973) described an effect they called ‘insensitivity to prior probability of outcomes’, later dubbed base rate neglect, which describes people’s tendency to underweight prior information in favor of new data. As probability theory requires that prior probabilities be taken into account, via Bayes’ theorem, the fact that most people fail to do so has been taken as evidence of human irrationality and, by others, of a mismatch between our cognitive processes and the questions being asked (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996). In contrast to both views, we suggest that simplistic Bayesian updating using base rates is not necessarily rational. To that end, we present experiments in which base rate neglect is often the right strategy, and show that people’s base rate usage varies systematically as a function of the extent to which the data that make up a base rate are perceived as trustworthy.     

Assessment of executive functioning in childhood epilepsy: The Tower of London and BRIEF

Children and adolescents with epilepsy are known to demonstrate executive function dysfunction, including working memory deficits and planning deficits. Accordingly, assessing specific executive function skills is important when evaluating these individuals. The present investigation examined the utility of two measures of executive functions—the Tower of London and the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning (BRIEF)—in a pediatric epilepsy sample. Ninety clinically referred children and adolescents with seizures were included. Both the Tower of London and BRIEF identified executive dysfunction in these individuals, but only the Tower of London variables showed significant relations with epilepsy severity variables such as age of epilepsy onset, seizure frequency, number of antiepileptic medications, etc. Further, the Tower of London and BRIEF variables were uncorrelated. Results indicate that objective measures of executive function deficits are more closely related to epilepsy severity but may not predict observable deficits, as reported by parents. Comprehensive evaluation of such deficits, therefore, should include both objective measures as well as subjective ratings from caregivers.