Presidential threats and the secret service in a free society

In September 1981, a symposium of distinguished mental health practitioners from various clinical, administrative, research, and legal disciplines was conducted on the topic of “Behavioral Science and the Secret Service,” under the sponsorship of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine. The article combines a study of the symposium's written conference summary, the author's experience as legal counsel to a state security hospital, and research into federal cases that have interpreted the so-called “Presidential Threat Statute” (18 USC 871) in order to discuss the role of the Secret Service in protecting elected federal officials from physical harm. The potential for increasing practical cooperation between the Service and state mental health systems is also discussed.     

Implicit and explicit COVID-19-vaccine harmfulness/helpfulness associations predict vaccine beliefs,intentions, and behaviors

We investigated the role of implicit and explicit associations between harm and COVID-19 vaccines using a large sample (N = 4668) of online volunteers. The participants completed a brief implicit association test and explicit measures to evaluate the extent to which they associated COVID-19 vaccines with concepts of harmfulness or helpfulness. We examined the relationship between these harmfulness/helpfulness COVID-19 vaccine associations and vaccination status, intentions, beliefs, and behavior. We found that stronger implicit and explicit associations that COVID-19 vaccines are helpful relate to vaccination status and beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine. That is, stronger pro-helpful COVID-19 vaccine associations, both implicitly and explicitly, related to greater intentions to be vaccinated, more positive beliefs about the vaccine, and greater vaccine uptake.     

Adaptation to uniocular image magnification: Is the underlying shift proprioceptive?

Ss wore a 4% overall size lens (OSL) before one eye while they engaged in 20 min of binocular exploration of a typical indoor environment. Tests before and after the exposure period were conducted to determine whether or not OSL exposure leads to shifts in depth judgments based on binocular disparity. No significant shifts were observed. These results were applied to an evaluation of two contrasting hypotheses that have been proposed to explain adaptation to meridional size lens (MSL).     

Magnitude production and magnitude estimation of taste intensity

Magnitude productions of sodium chloride (salty), quinine hydrochloride (bitter), and sucrose (sweet) yielded steeper psychophysical functions than those obtained with magnitude estimation. Hydrochloric acid (sour) produced the opposite effect. The results are discussed with respect to previous findings in taste intensity scaling and to general psychophysical considerations.     

Frequency response characteristics for sinusoidal movement in the fovea and periphery

Threshold sensitivity was measured for sinusoidal movement of bright 1-deg lines against a dark background as a function of oscillation frequency and retinal location. Sensitivity was greatest in the fovea and at a frequency of 1–2 Hz. Peripheral sensitivity was more narrowly tuned than foveal sensitivity. The presence of a stationary reference line affected mainly the foveal sensitivity. The results are interpreted as evidence for both position- and velocity-sensitive mechanisms in the movement detection system.     

The detection of visual intensity differences by pigeons

Pigeons were trained in a conditional discrimination procedure to discriminate between visual stimuli that varied in intensity. The magnitude of the intensity difference ranged from 0.80 to 0.05 logarithmic units. Psychometric functions were calculated from the data and the mean difference threshold for the 11 subjects was approximately 0.12 logarithmic units. A signal-detection analysis of the data suggested that stimuli that were below the calculated threshold were detectible to the subjects.     

Misuse,abuse, overuse,and unuse of on-line computer facilities by psychologists

This, then, is a very personal and informal view of some of the peculiar trends of computer application in experimental psychology. If there is any single point on which I would prefer to end, it would be a reiteration of my belief that, on the whole, the positive attributes and contributions to our science of on-line computers have far outweighed some of these nagging aggravations. Regardless of what has been done and in what way it has been done, it is certainly better to have done something than never to have done anything at all. Our science, like a computer program, is also contingent and self-adapting, and most minor strategic errors are quickly corrected. But no one can debug a computer program or a major technological movement without at least having pushed the startbutton.     

BASIC subroutines for on-line experiments using Hewlett-Packard computers

Modifications of the Hewlett-Packard version of the BASIC language to permit its use in data acquisition and control of on-line experiments are described. The resulting software system is an easy-to-use interpretative compiler.