Is horror a necessary component of flooding (implosion)?

Experimental results indicate that presentation of horrifying scenes is not necessary to obtain a favorable outcome in the treatment of phobias by flooding. Prolonged exposure to the feared object, even under relatively pleasant conditions is sufficient. Subjects were college students who rated highly fearful of rats. They were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups and to a no treatment-control group. Treatment groups differed along the dimension of harshness of scene presentation. Control group subjects received no treatment but were assessed repeatedly as were experimental subjects. All experimental subjects showed improvement irrespective of treatment received-after treatment they were all willing to come closer to a live rat and experienced less anxiety at the closest point. However, subjects exposed to horrid scenes were judged by an independent evaluator as less likely to avoid fearful situations. The discussion centers on the discrepancy between rater's evaluation and other measures, implications of the results for treatment, and on the generalizability of findings to a patient population.     

Partial reinforcement and autoshaping of the pigeon's key-peck behavior

Pigeons were exposed to continuous and partial reinforcement (25%) schedules in an autoshaping procedure. The number of trials and/or pairings per session were equated across two factorial group sets and all groups were trained for a fixed total number of acquisition trials (192). When acquisition was analyzed as a function of reinforcements delivered, the groups receiving fewer number of trials per session acquired the response faster, independently of the percentage of reinforced trials. Moreover, the number of reinforcements to satisfy an acquisition criterion was a monotonic function of the number of trials per session but not of the schedule. The results are discussed in relation to the neocontinuity and the scalar expectancy theories.     

Producing simple utterances: How far ahead do we plan?

The subjects were presented pictures depicting a man, woman, girl, or boy touching, kicking, greeting, or standing beside one of the others. The subjects, constrained to using only these names, produced utterances whose lengths and grammatical forms were prespecified. The latencies for subject-verb utterances (e.g., The man is greeting) were longer than for naming the actors (e.g., The man). However, the latencies for subject-verb utterances when the actor was already known were shorter than for naming the actions (e.g., Greeting). Together these results imply that some, but not all, verb selection is performed before subject-verb utterances are initiated. Three control experiments eliminated alternative interpretations. Finally, it was demonstrated that the same degree of advance planning occurs before the initiation of subject-verb-object utterances (e.g., The man is greeting the woman).     

Mismatching the opponent's offers in negotiation

Mismatching in negotiation involves responding with high demands to the opponent's low demands and with low demands to the opponent's high demands. Prior research has shown that the opponent's demands are often mismatched but that this effect is attenuated when information is available about the outcomes achieved by the opponent from the available alternatives. The present research showed that mismatching was also attenuated when the negotiator knew the location of the opponent's limit (the alternative beyond which the opponent would not concede). Two new interpretations of the attenuation effect were suggested on the basis of this finding. In addition, women were found to engage in more mismatching than men, being particularly likely to exploit a soft opponent.     

Language and speech recovery in a case of viral encephalitis

The speech and language recovery course of a 47-year-old man with viral encephalitis is described. Over a 3-month period, the patient was evaluated six times using the same selected battery of tests. Results show that viral encephalitis can deleteriously affect communicative performance and that improvement in medical status is accompanied by rapid and dramatic gains on most standard speech and language measures. For this case changes appeared related to improved auditory attention and retention, increased efficiency in word retrieval, and improved mental status.     

Effects of sound frequency on behavioral and cardiac orienting in newborn and five-month-old infants

Alert newborn and 5-month-old infants' responsivity to variations in spectral composition of a rattle sound was examined. Each child received four stimulus conditions: low-, mid-, and high-frequency bandpass-filtered rattles and an unfiltered broadband rattle. Stimuli were played through a single loudspeaker laterally positioned, and head orientation and cardiac responses to sound were recorded. Compared to other stimuli, the low-frequency sound elicted less head turning in both age groups, with this effect exaggerated in younger infants. Head orientation toward the mid-frequency, high-frequency, and broadband stimuli did not differ with age. For all conditions, latency and duration of newborns' head turning was longer than that of 5-month-olds. Newborns responded with cardiac deceleration only on trials when they failed to turn. When head turns occurred, an acceleratory cardiac response was obtained. Five-month-olds responded with reliable cardiac deceleration irrespective of head turning toward the sound. Heart rate change did not vary as a function of frequency at either age, suggesting that all stimuli were equally effective in eliciting the infant's attention.