Reacting to reactance: An Interpersonal interpretation of the need for freedom

This study was designed to investigate the conditions under which the negative consequences of social influence attempts can be mitigated by freedom-affirming interventions. Eighty-eight high school girls received an influence message, presumably written by a co-worker, containing either a threat or a promise. In addition, subjects were or were not given a choice option as to mode of compliance, if they chose to comply with the message. In half the cases, the Interpersonal condition, subjects received their choice/no choice option from their co-worker; in the other half of the cases, the Noninterpersonal condition, subjects were assigned the choice/no choice option by a random event unknown to the influencing agent. As anticipated, in the Interpersonal as compared to the Noninterpersonal condition, (a) threats produced greater compliance when a choice was offered than when it was not, and (b) promises and threats were more equivalent in gaining compliance when a choice was offered than when it was not. These results, which suggest that in a social setting individuals' concerns about freedom are interpersonally motivated, are discussed in terms of their relation to and implications for reactance theory.     

Intelligence research at the interface between differential and cognitive psychology: Prospects and proposals

There seems to be widespread agreement among theoreticians and methodologists alike that new approaches to studying intelligence should somehow combine the differential and cognitive (information-processing) approaches that have been used in the past, and that the combination should somehow enable the investigator to isolate components of intelligence that are elementary (at some level of analysis). Researchers disagree, however, as to how the differential and cognitive approaches should be combined, and consequently, in how elementary components of intelligence should be isolated and in what they are. How does an investigator choose from among the multiple paths available for theory and research? In this article, I propose some guidelines that may help investigators make informed choices. The article is divided into three major parts. In the first, I propose guidelines for choosing from among various methodologies for studying intelligence, and then describe briefly at least some of the methods that meet (or come close to meeting) these guidelines. In the second part, I propose guidelines for the specification of subtheories (and eventually, full-fledged theories) of intelligence, and illustrate how these guidelines can be met. Finally, I describe the direction in which I believe our subtheories and methods should lead us.     

Some effects of gaze on subjects motivated to seek or to avoid social comparison

In a conceptual replication and extension of Sarnoff and Zimbardo's study (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1961, 62, 356–363), subjects were motivated to seek (Fear Arousal) or avoid (Embarrassment Arousal) social comparison. They were then required to affiliate with another person who either encouraged social comparison by gazing directly at the subject or discouraged it by averting his gaze. This other person was either an appropriate reference person (similar saate) or irrelevant for social comparison purposes. As predicted, Fear subjects liked a companion who looked at them and felt less tense in his presence, while Embarrassed subjects preferred the person who looked away. This interaction occurred only in the Appropriate Reference Person condition, a result consistent with an explanation based on social comparison processes.     

Cognitive and motivational determinants of children's humor responses

Cognitive and motivational influences on children's humor responses were examined. Forty-eight Caucasian children from three economically heterogeneous schools were tested. Equal numbers of middle SES and lower SES boys and girls from kindergarten and third grade were shown 12 aggression and dependency cartoons of different difficulty levels. Three responses to each cartoon were recorded: mirth, funniness rating, and comprehension score. Results support aspects of both psychodynamic and cognitive theories of humor response. All children preferred aggressive themes to dependency themes, and third graders especially showed attenuated response to dependency cartoons. Funniness ratings decreased as difficulty levels increased. IQ, as assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-R, was positively related to humor. Mirth responses and funniness ratings increased as comprehension increased.     

A triarchic theory of intellectual development during adulthood

A triarchic theory of intellectual development during adulthood is proposed. The theory comprises three parts: a contextual part that emphasizes the role of intelligence in successful adaptation to the environment; a componential part that specifies the mental mechanisms and processes underlying intelligent behavior; and an experiential part that indicates that intelligence is best manifested in instances in which the task or situation requiring the application of these processes is relatively novel or is becoming automatized. A selective and brief review of the literature on adult intellectual development is provided as evidence for the triarchic theory. The triarchic theory is then compared with four other theoretical approaches to adult intellectual development. It is argued that the triarchic theory provides new insights regarding the ways in which intelligence changes from early to middle to late adulthood and suggests certain properties of tasks and situations that make them more or less useful as measures of intelligence at various points in adult intellectual development.     

Aptness in metaphor

We propose that in understanding a metaphor, an individual sees a concept from one class or domain in terms of its similarity in two different respects to a concept from another class or domain. The two kinds of similarity are within-domain similarity, or the degree to which two concepts occupy similar positions with respect to their own class or domain; and between-domain similarity, or the degree to which the classes or domains occupied by the concepts are themselves similar. To test this dual notion of similarity, we obtained ratings of the aptness of 64 metaphors from one group of subjects and ratings of their comprehensibility from another group of subjects. The terms of the metaphors had been scaled (based on the ratings of pretest subjects) to give measures of distance both within and between domains. Aptness of metaphors related positively to betweendomain distance, negatively to within-domain distance, and not at all to overall distance. Metaphors are thus perceived as more apt to the extent that their terms occupy similar positions within domains that are not very similar to each other. Comprehensibility also related to aptness. In a second experiment, subjects ranked a set of terms as possible completions for metaphors. For both groups of subjects in this experiment, the rank of an alternative's within-domain distance correlated with its relative popularity. Quantitative models, patterned after a model proposed by D. Rumelhart and A. A. Abrahamson (Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5, 1–28) for analogical reasoning, afforded significant prediction of the choices of the group of subjects in which all the possible completions of a metaphor were from a single domain. The same models did not predict the choices of a group of subjects in which the possible completions of the metaphors were from different domains.     

A transitive-chain theory of syllogistic reasoning

A new theory of syllogistic reasoning, called the transitive-chain theory, is presented. The transitive-chain theory proposes that information about set relations is represented in memory by pairs of informational components. The theory further proposes that information about set relations is integrated by applying a small set of rules to transitive chains of these set relations. The rules that are applied to these chains are specified in detail. The theory is cast in terms of information-processing models for variants of the syllogistic reasoning task, and then mathematical models that quantify each of these information-processing models are presented. In a series of five experiments, the transitive-chain theory provides a good account of the response-choice data for syllogisms with various types of content, quantifiers, and logical relations (categorical and conditional). The results of these experiments offer tentative answers to four issues in the theory of syllogistic reasoning: (a) representation of premise information; (b) combination of premise information; (c) sources of difficulty in syllogistic reasoning; and (d) generality of the processes used in syllogistic reasoning.     

Novelty-seeking,novelty-finding,and the developmental continuity of intelligence

This article suggests that novelty-seeking and novelty-finding, as well as the ability to learn and reason with novel kinds of concepts, are critical aspects of intelligence at all ages from infancy, onward. The results of studies by Lewis and Brooks-Gunn and by Fagan and McGrath regarding intelligence in infancy are reviewed, and these results are found to be compatible with some of my own results regarding intelligence in adulthood. It is suggested that a major aspect of intelligence, attitude toward and performance with novel kinds of concepts, is continuous in nature throughout the life span, although by necessity, they must be measured in different ways at different times of life.     

Discriminability of brightness change for infants

Four-month-old human infants who were habituated to a 490-nm stimulus of 3.5 cd · m^?2 luminance did not show recovery when the stimulus was increased or decreased in luminance by a factor of 2 but not changed in hue. A fourfold luminance increase produced a recovery in looking time. When compared with earlier results on simultaneous discrimination of brightness change, the results imply that infants differ from adults more in ability to code or retrieve than in ability to detect intensive differences. The implication is further supported by the differentiating response of infants to changes in hue.     

Is it just reading?: Comments on the papers by Mann,Morrison, and Wolford and Fowler

Comments on the stimulating papers by V. A. Mann (Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 1–15), F. Morrison (Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36–47), and G. Wolford and C. A. Fowler (Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 16–35) come under four headings. First, their differences with respect to the organizing themes are identified. Second, the central difficulty, for theories of reading disability, posed by the high correlation between reading and IQ, and ways of dealing with this difficulty, are discussed. In the third and fourth sections, comments on the individual papers and a summary of the main lessons to be learned from this collection are presented.