A psychological perspective interpretation of the attitude-behavior relationship

In two experiments subjects were shown seven items that described uses for photographs taken of them with an opposite-sex black. The uses formed a graded series ranging from a situation in which only other researchers would see the photos to one in which they would be employed in a nationwide campaign for integration. Subjects were either asked to sign releases so that the photographs could actually be taken and used in the ways specified (behavior) or to indicate their hypothetical agreement or disagreement with each release as part of a survey on attitudes (attitude). In both experiments, the attitude subjects agreed to more of the releases than did the behavior subjects. This difference has been termed an attitude-behavior discrepancy by some researchers. However, in both experiments, behavior subjects judged themselves as no less prejudiced than attitude subjects and scaled agreement with each photographic release as reflecting less prejudice than did attitude subjects. These data are consistent with the interpretation that subjects changed their psychological perspectives (Ostrom & Upshaw, 1968) in order to interpret their own behaviors as attitudinally consistent.     

A critical analysis of the attention hypothesis of Zeaman and House: problems of parameter interactions in multiparameter models

The attention hypothesis of Zeaman and House [in N. R. Ellis (Ed.), Handbook of mental deficiency. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963] was examined through a systematic, computer-simulation analysis of the parameter interactions found in the One-Look model. The hypothesis states that mental retardates and normals differ in their initial attention habits but not in their learning rates in the context of discrimination learning. The analysis showed that possible differences in the learning rates cannot be ruled out. The result was used to suggest how shift designs can unconfound the effect of the attention habits from the effect of the learning rates and maximize chances of observing possible differences in the learning rates between retarded and normal children.     

Married women's work status: The influence of parents and husbands

The working or nonworking status of married women free of the financial need to work was studied in relation to the balance between their instrumental and expressive needs and in relation to their own and their husbands' attitudes towards women's roles. Also studied were women's needs and attitudes towards women's roles in relation to their parents' child-rearing practices, needs, and attitudes towards women's roles. These variables were rated by 67 working and 48 nonworking women on three sets of scales, each set composed of items reflecting instrumental (I) and expressive (E) orientations. A single score for each set of scales reflected the balance between the sum of the I and E ratings, or (I-E). In 10 of 13 possible correlations, the subjects' I-E needs and attitudes towards women's roles were significantly related to their parents' I-E child-rearing practices, needs, and attitudes towards women's roles. The work status of the subjects was significantly related to their own I-E needs, to their own and their husbands' attitudes towards women's roles, and to whether their mothers worked.     

Students' ratings of occupational dimensions of traditionally male and traditionally female occupations

The purpose of the present study was to investigate four traditionally male occupations and four traditionally female occupations on a number of dimensions which people use to judge the prestige or importance of a job. Workers were pictured on one form in their traditional roles and on a second form in nontraditional roles. Results indicated a tendency for subjects to give lower ratings to workers in nontraditional jobs. More importantly, for the two “objective” dimensions, money and education, boys and girls agreed on job ratings; however, on the two more “subjective” dimensions, respect and importance to the community, boys gave higher ratings to the male jobs, while girls gave higher ratings to the female jobs.     

The decrement in conditioned fear with increased trials of simultaneous conditioning is not specific to the simultaneous procedure

Three experiments using a conditioned punishment paradigm with rat subjects examined the possibility that the nonmonotonic acquisition function previously found to characterize simultaneous conditioning was due to the noninformative nature of the conditioned stimulus (CS). In Experiment 1 the suppressive effects of a CS previously presented with an unconditioned stimulus (US) in a simultaneous and forward (informative) manner were compared following 20 and an additional 60 conditioning trials. Excitatory conditioning similarly diminished with increased trials for both the simultaneous and forward procedures. Experiment 2 employed a between-groups design. Simultaneous, forward, and trace conditioning procedures were compared following 20 or 100 trials. Each of the three 100-trial groups showed less resistance to extinction than their 20-trial counterparts. Experiment 3 determined that the decrement in excitatory conditioning for the 100-trial groups was not due to the greater number of US presentations, per se, but rather to the number of CS-US pairings. The nonmonotonic acquisition function observed with all three conditioning procedures indicated that informational factors were not responsible for the decrement observed in simultaneous conditioning. The pattern of results suggested that subjects receiving extended conditioning trials were better able to discriminate between training and testing.     

Repetition in the transcortical aphasias

Transcortical aphasic patients were assessed on a repetition task comprised of both well-formed and deviant sentences. The patients faithfully repeated those sentences that were factually incorrect but grammatically well formed, and those sentences that were ungrammatical because of selection restriction violations. In contrast, presented with sentences featuring only minor syntactic violations (e.g., lack of number agreement), the patients spontaneously, and without awareness, resisted exact repetition; moreover, the resultant changes most often served to correct the syntactic deviations. Repetitions of sentences of this latter type also revealed a difference between the patients as a function of level of comprehension. The transcortical motor aphasic patient was influenced by semantic factors in his alterations of the minor syntactic violations, while the transcortical sensory aphasic was not. These findings are discussed in relation to the notion of autonomous syntactic processing. They are taken to suggest that syntactic facts such as number agreement are represented at a level in the processing chain that is distinct from that of semantic representation.     

Dichhaptic hand-order effects with verbal and nonverbal tactile stimulation

The palms of normal right-handed subjects were stimulated dichhaptically, i.e., with competing, bimanually presented tactile stimuli consisting of pairs of letters, pairs of digits, or pairs of line orientations. The subjects were required to identify both stimuli in a particular order, and order of report was compared between hands and across stimulus materials. Results indicated right-hand superiority for letters and left-hand superiority for lines; no hand differences occurred for digits. However, observed differences between hands appeared with second reports only, suggesting that measures of tactile storage are more sensitive to laterality differences than measures closer in time to actual stimulation.     

Dissociations of language function in dementia: A case study

In this report we describe and attempt to characterize the deterioration in semantic knowledge occurring in a victim of a progressive dementing disease. The subject was unable to match even highly familiar naming words with their actual or pictured referents; instead, she consistently overextended verbal labels to closely associated distractors. The alteration in scope of referential meanings suggested by this overextension effect was apparently related to a breakdown in the structure of underlying categories. On a nonverbal match-to-sample procedure, for example, dogs were treated as exemplars of the cat family. Evidence for the breakdown of semantic knowledge was not limited to picture labeling paradigms. Thus, we found that the subject was unable to utilize semantic context in the written disambiguation of spoken homophones but could, at the same time, use even minimal syntactic cues as the basis for proper lexical selection. This last result was consistent with other lines of evidence pointing to the relative preservation of syntactic operations, in marked contrast to the semantic loss. The importance of this dissociation of function in organic pathology is considered from a number of perspectives, including its relevance to models of language organization in the brain.     

Some aspects of language comprehension in anterior aphasia

The competency of language comprehension was evaluated in three groups: anterior aphasics, posterior aphasics, and normal control subjects. Test material was divided into two sentence groups (Fill in the Blank and True/False) emphasizing either (1) semantic, “real world,” identity words or (2) syntactic, relational words, and one paragraph interpretation task. Matching auditory and visual (written) presentations were given. The control subjects performed almost flawlessly but many errors were made by each aphasia group. Qualitative study revealed a marked difference in the comprehension problem of the two groups. The anterior aphasic group performed well on semantically weighted sentences but made errors on syntactically weighted material, regardless of mode of presentation. In contrast, the posterior aphasics made almost the same number of errors on both types of material, regardless of mode of presentation. These findings support the concept of defective language comprehension in anterior aphasia and further suggest that the defect centers on the syntactical structures which are also poorly handled in expressive output.     

Extraversion and the orienting reaction habituation rate to visual stimuli

Eysenck's (1967) proposal that introversion is characterized by increased levels of activity in the cortico-reticular loop was treated in a series of experiments which compared high, middle, and low extraversion groups on the basis of OR habituation rate to visual stimulation. Generally, introverts were observed to have longer OR habituation rates to chromatic and word stimulation than extraverts as evidenced by cardiac, electrodermal, and vasomotor indices of habituation rate, a result which endorses Eysenck's hypothesis. Results are also discussed from the standpoint of individual differences in autonomic response.