Imagery intervention in open and closed tennis motor skill performance

To assess use of imagery intervention in performance of two tennis motor skills the quasi-experimental design included a pre- and posttest and a control group. The tennis service shot and service receiving skill were selected as representative of open and closed skills, respectively. 48 subjects, male tennis players, whose ages ranged from 16 to 18 yr. (M = 17.2), were divided into two groups: (1) Technical practice only which was used as control group and (2) Imagery group who received both imagery and technical practice. Analysis of covariance showed a significant main effect for the imagery intervention on the closed skill (p = .002). Findings suggest that imaging a positive outcome may be more powerful in improving performance of closed skill movements than of open skill movements.     

Learning to sleep through the night: Solution or strain for mothers and young children?

Is the process of helping infants and young children learn to sleep through the night a solution to family sleep problems or does it exacerbate matters for mother and child? Retrospective and current accounts from a nonclinical, convenience sample of 102 mothers of preschool‐aged children provided information on sleep issues from early infancy through preschool age. Child, mother, and parenting characteristics, along with family sleep arrangements, were differentially related to the age at which children learned to sleep through the night and to the extent of difficulty that characterized this experience. Mothers who indicated more difficulty as their children learned to sleep through the night also reported more depressive symptoms and more strain in the mother–child relationship. Later age at sleeping through the night was more common among early bedsharers, but timing of sleeping through the night was not associated with preschool children's reported independence in several nonsleep domains. Sleep arrangements and the importance placed on sleeping through the night were the strongest contributors to variance explained in whether children learned to sleep through the night during infancy or toddlerhood. When advising parents about sleep interventions, practitioners should seek to understand whether families' parenting values fit their nighttime sleep practices.     

Intra‐sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy⋆

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoreticalwork [Computational Linguistics 17 (4) (1991) 409; The Generative Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995] predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra‐sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data.     

Psychosocial correlates of eczema in a non-treatment-seeking population

Data from the Vietnam Experience Study were used to examine psychosocial correlates of eczema. Based upon the results of dermatologic examinations, three groups of male veterans were identified: (a) subjects with eczema (n = 80), (b) subjects with tinea (n = 282), and (c) subjects with no medical diagnosis (n = 176). These three groups were compared on measures of anxiety, depression, hostility, and social support. The Diagnostic Interview Schedule (Version III-A) was used to determine diagnoses of anxiety and depression and level of social support. MMPI Scales 2 and 7, the Wiggins content scale of Depression, and the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale were used to assess anxiety, depression, and hostility. Eczema subjects did not differ from tinea or no-disease control groups on dependent measures. These results are contrasted with previous studies of treatment-seeking patients, which showed greater prevalence of anxiety and depression among individuals with eczema. Directions for future research are suggested.This paper is taken from the first author's dissertation.     

Similarities in the control of the speech articulators and the limbs: kinematics of tongue dorsum movement in speech

The kinematics of tongue dorsum movements in speech were studied with pulsed ultrasound to assess similarities in the voluntary control of the speech articulators and the limbs. The stimuli were consonant--vowel syllables in which speech rate and stress were varied. The kinematic patterns for tongue dorsum movements were comparable to those observed in the rapid movement of the arms and hands. The maximum velocity of tongue dorsum raising and lowering was correlated with the extent of the gesture. The slope of the relationship differed for stressed and unstressed vowels but was unaffected by differences in speech rate. At each stress level the correlation between displacement and peak velocity was accompanied by a relatively constant interval from the initiation of the movement to the point of maximum velocity. The data are discussed with reference to systems that can be described with second-order differential equations. The increase in the slope of the displacement/peak-velocity relationship for unstressed versus stressed vowels is suggestive of a tonic increase in articulator stiffness. Variations in displacement are attributed to the level of phasic activity in the muscles producing the gesture.     

Premarital sexual intercourse among single college students: A discriminant analysis

This study assesses the relative importance of interpersonal psychological variables in the prediction of the number of premarital sexual partners of single college students. Using data from a sample of 466 college students from a large mid-Atlantic university, various discriminant functions were formulated and used to predict a student's premarital sexual partners group membership. A virgin group, a monogamous group, a moderate partners group, and a extensive partners group were identified. The variables selected by the computer for inclusion in the functions are of theoretical importance. Males and females differed in the sets of weighted variables chosen by the computer to enter the discriminant functions. Different functions were found to best discriminate the virgin group from the monogamous group, the moderate partners group, and the extensive partners group, especially for males. When subjects were reclassified using the discriminant functions, the predictive accuracies were significantly increased above chance in 14 instances of reclassification. The data support the view that male and female single college students are moving toward an equal standard with regard to premarital intercourse behavior. However, the interpersonal psychological correlates of sexual intercourse appear to be quite different for males and females. Male variation along the power or dominance dimension of Leary's Interpersonal Adjective Checklist was most reflective of their sexual partners group, while females were best discriminated using variables related to the affiliation or affection dimension. A three-stage theory of normative change is formulated to explain the existing data.     

Delayed escape from light by the albino rat

Two albino rats were trained to terminate an aversive light for 1 min by pressing a bar. After 19 hr of conditioning they were exposed to successive delays of 1, 2, 5, and 10 sec imposed between occurrence of the escape response and light termination. No stimulus change accompanied the delay interval, and any additional responses made at this time reset the delay timer. For both rats the relative frequency of escape responses with very long latencies increased as the delay interval increased. The modal escape latency, however, remained essentially unchanged for all delay values of greater than 1 sec. “Superstitious” responding was observed during the delay interval.