Interacting plans

The paper explores certain phenomena which arise in stories, conversations, and human activity in general when the plans of two individuals are formed and carried out in an interactive situation. A notation system for representing interacting plans is introduced and applied in the analysis of a small portion of “Hansel and Gretel.” The analysis illustrates how a single actor plan can be modified by the needs of cooperative interaction with others and how cooperative interactive episodes can be transformed and used deceptively by one party in achieving his or her own covert goals.     

Concurrent validity and Holland's theory

This study was designed to explore two areas: (1) the concurrent validity of Holland's theory for employed men using four different operational definitions of vocational orientation, and (2) the relationships among all possible combinations of same named scales across the four inventories. Concurrent validity was studied by administering the Vocational Preference Inventory, the Self Directed Search, and the Holland Scales (Set I and Set II) to 153 male workers established in occupational environments consistent with Holland's six vocational environments. The results revealed that five scales of the VPI and of the Holland Scales (Set I and Set II) and four scales of the SDS successfully differentiated the occupational groups consistent with Holland's theoretical framework. The correlation coefficients for same named scales for all possible combinations of the four inventories were all found to be significant. In general, the findings of this study tend to support the concurrent validity of Holland's theory for employed men.     

Age changes in nonverbal decoding as a function of increasing amounts of information

A test of nonverbal decoding skill (the PONS test) was administered to 632 subjects of eight different age levels, ranging from third graders to adults (Ages 8–33 years). Females were more accurate than males, older subjects were more accurate than younger ones, and all samples tended to decode more successfully when more information was available. Three different analyses showed that the increase in accuracy with increasing amounts of information was more pronounced for the older than for the younger groups. This differential effectiveness in the utilization of available information was discussed in terms of processing capacity, effort, and strategies for sampling a diversity of cues.     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

The psychological representation of musical pitch in a tonal context

In this series of experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The results of a scaling study, in which subjects judged the similarities between pairs of tones presented in an explicitly tonal context, suggest that musical listeners extract a pattern of relationships among tones that is determined not only by pitch height and chroma, but also by membership in the major triad chord and the diatonic scale associated with the tonal system of the context. Multidimensional scaling of the similarity ratings gave a three-dimensional conical structure around which the tones were ordered according to pitch height. The major triad components formed a closely related cluster near the vertex of the cone; the remaining diatonic scale tones formed a less closely related subset farther from the vertex; and, the nondiatonic tones, still farther from the vertex, were widely dispersed. The results also suggest that, in the psychological representation, tones less closely related to the tonality are less stable than tones closely related to the tonality, and that the representation incorporates the tendency for unstable tones to move toward the more stable tones in time, reflecting the dynamic character of musical tones. In the similarity ratings of the scaling study, tones less related to the tonality were judged more similar to tones more related to the tonality than the reverse temporal order. Furthermore, in a delayed recognition task memory performance for nondiatonic tones was less accurate than for diatonic tones, and nondiatonic tones were more often confused with diatonic tones than diatonic tones were confused with nondiatonic tones. These results indicate the tonality-specific nature of the psychological representation and argue that the perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch.     

Memory scanning,introversion-extraversion,and levels of processing

Individual differences in information processing were studied in the form of the hypothesis that arousal, as indexed by a personality measure of introversion-extraversion, affects the speed with which certain kinds of processing are completed. The Sternberg paradigm was used, and the results suggested that introverts and extraverts scanned for physical features equally rapidly, but that introverts were slower than extraverts at scanning for the semantic features of category membership. There was limited support for the hypothesis that introverts, thought to be more aroused than extraverts, are less able to engage in shared or parallel processing. It was concluded that information processing in introverts and extraverts may differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively.     

Conditioned inhibition of fear: Evidence for a competing response mechanism

In two experiments, inhibitory conditioning was attempted by presenting a discrete CS in a neutral stimulus environment shortly following the termination of either shock (Experiment 1) or a second discrete CS which had been paired in a forward manner with shock (Experiment 2). Evidence of successful inhibitory conditioning was mixed in Experiment 1, where the properties of the CS were assessed within an escape-from-fear procedure. Postresponse presentations of the CS enhanced performance, whereas the presentation of the CS prior to responding did not have the expected degrading effect on performance. In Experiment 2, the inhibitory properties of the CS were assessed by combining this stimulus with an excitatory CS and presenting the compound to rats engaged in a water-reinforced licking response. Less response suppression was found in reaction to this compound relative to three separate comparison conditions, thus witnessing the success of the inhibitory-conditioning procedure used. The common assumption that inhibitory conditioning results from the nonreinforcement of a CS in a situation where reinforcement is expected, i.e., one which contains previously reinforced cues, is not supported by these data, for no previously reinforced cues were simultaneously presented with the CS during inhibitory training. The data are in agreement with a conditioned antagonistic-response interpretation of inhibitory conditioning.     

The relationship of sex and sex role to trait and situationally specific anxiety types

While considerable research has investigated the relationship of sex and/or sex role to general or trait anxiety, little is known about their relationship to more specific anxiety types. Based on the postulate that sex and sex-role differences may depend on the extent to which an anxiety-producing situation represents a sex-stereotypic domain, the present study compared their relationships to four measures of anxiety: Math anxiety, test anxiety, and two measures of trait anxiety. Subjects were 180 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology courses. Although females reported higher levels of anxiety on all four scales than did males, a discriminant function analysis indicated that math anxiety was the strongest contributor to the separation of the sexes. Significant score differences as a function of sex role were found using the STAI A-Trait scale, and a significant sex × sex-role interaction was found for scores on the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness. Feminine-typed males and undifferentiated females reported highest anxiety levels in comparison to same-sex individuals. Implications for the understanding and treatment of both general and situationally specific anxiety are discussed.