Sex differences in restoring justice: The down payment effect

It was proposed that harmdoers who psychologically suffer (e.g., experience remorse, guilt) through victimizing another will be viewed as having already taken a step toward righting the injustice caused the victim. Consequently, they should be asked to make fewer reparations and assigned a lesser fine than those harmdoers who do not express guilt or remorse. Male and female subjects read scenarios depicting an accident in which the harmdoer either admitted or did not admit responsibility (Experiment 1) or expressed various degrees of remorsefulness (Experiment 3). Both investigations indicated that a show of remorse or of a remorseful gesture (i.e., assuming responsibility) can partially vindicate harmdoers by requiring them to make fewer reparations to a victim (Experiment 1) or pay less of a fine (Experiment 3) among females only. Thus psychological damages incurred in a wrongful act can serve as a “down payment” toward restoring justice. In corroboration with these findings of sex differences, Experiment 2 revealed that females consider to a greater extent than males reasons such as a harmdoer's feelings when assigning a fine.     

Imageability does not interact with visual field in lateral word recognition with oral report

Four lateral tachistoscopic experiments are reported which tested the hypothesis that the right hemisphere has a selective ability to process highly imageable words (the RH imageability hypothesis). The prediction that performance asymmetry would vary as a function of word imageability, in a lateral recognition task with oral report, was not fulfilled. Results suggested that several previously published studies which hitherto have been regarded as supporting the RH imageability hypothesis may be discounted on artifactual grounds. The implications of these findings for the overall status of the hypothesis were discussed.     

Components of syllogistic reasoning

The present research sought to understand the components of syllogistic reasoning used in a syllogistic evaluation task. In this task, subjects must indicate whether a conclusion such as “Some Yale professors are humbugs” is definitely true, or never true of a set of premises such as “Some humbugs study syllogistic reasoning; some Yale professors study syllogistic reasoning”. A modified form of componential analysis (Sternberg 1977, 1978) was used to decompose the syllogistic evaluation task with abstract content into encoding and encoding plus combination subtasks. The response-choice data from these subtasks were used to provide (a) direct tests of a proposed theory of syllogistic reasoning, and in particular, of its assumptions about sources of error in syllogistic reasoning; and (b) direct inferences regarding the representation of relations between the subject and predicate of the premises as encoded and combined. The results supported a proposed transitive-chain model of syllogistic reasoning.     

Factor structure of the McCarthy scales for school-age children with low GCIs

This study aimed to cross-validate the factor analysis of the McCarthy Scales and to determine the construct validity of these scales for children who score one standard deviation below the normative mean on general cognitive ability. The sample was comprised of 77 children aged 6 to $\text{8}\text{1}\text{2}$ with a mean General Cognitive Index (GCI) of 61.6. Principal factor analysis produced four meaningful factors which corresponded closely to four of the scales on McCarthy's battery. The present findings discourage the interpretation of the Quantitative Scale for school-age children with GCIs below 84. Other implications of the results for the interpretation of McCarthy profiles for low-scoring school-aged children are discussed.     

Second-order conditioning with diffuse auditory reinforcers in the pigeon

Pigeon subjects were used in five experiments investigating second-order conditioning with visual second-order and diffuse auditory first-order stimuli. Experiment 1 used a discriminative conditioning procedure to demonstrate reliable and substantial second-order conditioning with these stimuli. In Experiments 2 and 3, extinction of the auditory first-order stimulus after second-order conditioning had little effect upon responding to the second-order stimulus, when compared to a stimulus whose reinforcer was maintained. Experiment 4 compared directly the susceptibility of second-order responding to extinction of the first-order reinforcing stimulus as a function of the modality of that reinforcer. When a visual second-order stimulus was paired with a visual reinforcer, and the response to the latter was extinguished, then second-order responding was greatly reduced relative to control levels. In contrast, when that reinforcer was an auditory stimulus, second-order responding was not affected by the current value of the first-order stimulus after conditioning. Finally, in Experiment 5 the auditory stimulus was established as a reinforcer through discriminative-operant training. Following second-order conditioning, extinction of responding to this stimulus again had little impact upon responding to the second-order stimulus with which it had been paired. These results are discussed in terms of previous work on second-order conditioning with rat and pigeon subjects.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers during high- and low-pitched speech

This study was conducted to provide an indirect test of Wingate's “modified vocalization” hypothesis. In this formulation, the improved fluency that stutterers experience in various novel conditions is attributed to changes in the key correlates of stress, namely, fundamental frequency, vocal SPL, and rate.Normal speakers and stutterers read aloud in an habitual condition following instructions to read at higher- and lower-than-normal pitches. Objective measures were taken of subjects' fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency deviation, vocal SPL, and fluent reading rate. Disfluences were also counted. Findings showed that both stutterers and normals altered several features of voicing from the habitual to the two experimental conditions. Significant condition main effects emerged for fundamental frequency deviation, vocal SPL, fluent reading rate, and disfluency. The only meaningful between-group difference noted showed that the stutterers were more disfluent than the normals across all conditions. Results were interpreted as supporting Wingate's “modified vocalization” position and were discussed relative to how the vocal changes observed might act to promote fluency.