A feature analysis of stuttered phonemes

Stuttered and nonstuttered phonemes of 20 adult males were analyzed for distinctive feature patterns using the Chomsky-Halle system. The features (+ consonantal), (- voice), (+ continuant), and (- strident) occured significantly more often in stuttering than in nonstuttering instances. Results suggest that adult stuttering is most likely to occur when the primary sites of tension and discoordination are lingual and laryngeal and when the speaker must shift from (- voice) to (+ voice).     

Proofreading errors in good and poor readers

Seven-year-old children classified as good and poor readers carried out a proofreading task on two passages varying in level of difficulty. Misspellings were introduced by transposing two adjacent letters in the work "the," other three-letter words, and longer words. While both groups of readers were able to identify the correct spelling of the misspelled words on a spelling test, poor readers made significantly more proofreading errors. Word length had a significant effect on performance, indicating that sensitivity to word configuration is important for successful proofreading. The pattern of proofreading errors did not reflect underlying differences which might relate to strategies used by the two groups in normal reading. The results are compared with those from other proofreading and letter detection experiments in order to highlight methodological implications when such tasks are used to verify hypotheses concerned with normal reading strategies.     

Applied developmental psychology

Applied developmental psychology is emerging as a new subspecialty in psychology. The perspective provided in this paper is grounded in the premise that it is primarily a research discipline of scholars and researchers who will carry out their activities in a university setting. The students of the described program have found academic or research institute positions. Most of these have been in an academic department of psychology. Some have been in medical schools or research institutes with university affiliations. I believe there is a further market, for example in hospital or school settings, where a research and evaluation program or center is maintained. However, applied developmentalists, as such, should not be expected to be in the business of primary care delivery.This paper is based on the experience of establishing an applied developmental program that is described briefly below. In addition, the content is influenced by a consulting role in establishing a program at another university and from the small conference on Training in Applied Developmental Psychology held at the Mailman Center in 1980.     

Causal ambiguity and heterosexual affiliation

A male's decision to approach a physically attractive female stranger may be fraught with ambivalence. He is drawn by her beauty but he may fear rejection. The conflict lessens, however, if approach can occur under the guise of a motive other than desire to be with the attractive woman. This is because keeping one's true approach motive ambiguous may make direct personal rejection less likely. The effect of ambiguity on males' tendencies to approach females was explored in two experiments. In the first study, presented to subjects as a movie rating exercise, an excuse to sit with an attractive female confederate (a movie preference) was available to some subjects but not to others. As predicted, males only sat with the confederate when a reason for their affiliative behavior, other than her attractiveness, was available. In the second study, male-female dyads were run through the film rating paradigm with the female subjects in the role played by the confederate in Study I. The results of Study I were replicated for the dyads which included attractive females, as expected. The relationships between fear of failure and attributional ambiguity in social and achievement settings are examined. The tendency to discount a person's physical appearance as a cause of social behavior is discussed.     

Contiguity and contingency in instrumental conditioning

There have been several attempts to construct molar theories of conditioning on the empirical basis that response-reinforcement contingency is important in determining conditioning. Such theories claim to explain behavior in terms of molar level processes which transcend the molecular level and, therefore, are not reducible to molecular processes or their interaction. These molar theories are critically examined and found to be seriously flawed because they fail to account for the effects of delaying reinforcement (degree of contiguity). Observed molar level relations, such as the matching law, do not require a molar theory, but may be more usefully considered as a product of molecular processes.     

Immunization of opioid analgesia: Effects of prior escapable shock on subsequent shock-induced and morphine-induced antinociception

In Experiment 1, it was shown that experience with escapable foot shock 4 hr prior to a session of 80 inescapable tail shocks prevented the occurrence of an analgesic response normally observed immediately following the tail shock. It has been suggested by J. W. Grau, R. L. Hyson, S. F. Maier, J. Madden, and J. D. Barchas (Science, 1981, 213, 1409–1411) that the analgesia that occurs following this number of inescapable tail shocks is mediated by endogenous opioid systems. To further explore the influence of escapable shock on opiate-mediated analgesia, Experiment 2 examined the effects of prior escapable shock on the long-term analgesia reaction that occurs upon brief exposure to shock 20 hr after morphine administration. Rats were given escapable shock, inescapable shock, or no shock 4 hr prior to a morphine injection. Twenty hours following the injection, all subjects received 5 brief foot shocks and were then immediately given tail-flick analgesia tests. Subjects which received inescapable shock or no shock prior to the morphine injection displayed a significant analgesic response. However, subjects which received escapable shock prior to morphine were not analgesic following brief exposure to shock. Thus, escapable shock seems to directly influence the activation of opioid analgesia systems.     

Modality-specific interference with overt mediation by pigeons in a delayed discrimination task

Pigeons were trained on a delayed discrimination task in which they were rewarded for pecking a white terminal stimulus (TS) presented 5 sec after a green initial stimulus (IS) and for not pecking the white TS when it followed a red IS. Each bird bridged the memory interval (MI) with overt mediational behaviors. Nevertheless, sustained retroactive interference (RI) effects were produced by houselight illumination (Experiments 1 and 3), and mild shock pulses (Experiment 5) but not white noise (Experiment 2) presented during the MI. Although the magnitude of the light-induced RI effect was proportional to the duration of houselight illumination (Experiment 4), the beginning-end effect described by W. A. Roberts and D. S. Grant (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 1978, 4, 219–236) was not observed. These results not only attest to the between-task robustness of both light-induced RI and modality-specific effects with pigeons, but also support the hypothesis that RI effects result from the disruption of mediational activities possibly analogous to rehearsal. The results further demonstrate that an event interpolated within the MI need not be unexpected or novel to produce RI. Furthermore, the interpolated event can produce modality-specific RI effects even though it effects a different sense than do the IS and TS.     

An analysis of situation and person components of jealousy

Previous studies on jealousy have focused on person factors or on situational factors, but none has compared their relative importance. Two studies are presented which analyze the contributions of persons, situations, and their interaction, with respect to jealous reactions. The first study examined intraperson variability in the intensity of jealous responses of 302 males and females when presented with four types of hypothetical jealousy situations (work, family, social, and sexual). The results of the first study supported a dispositional explanation of jealousy (i.e., substantial person and situational variance). In addition, a sizable interaction effect was revealed. Study 2 examined the nature of this interaction for sexual jealousy. Jealousy situations were broken down by distinguishing between the event, characteristics of the partner, and the relationship as separate components of the situation. Seventy-one female respondents indicated their perception of threat and their degree of upset when considering the same hypothetical jealousy-evoking events with three different partners. A substantial person component was found. In addition, responses to the jealousy-evoking events were found to vary as a function of which partner was being considered. The second study demonstrated that aspects of the relationship (i.e., relative involvement) were more important than personality characteristics of the partner in determining this intrasubject variability in the intensity of jealous rections.     

The use of expectancy theory in the explanation of turnover in ROTC

A questionnaire was administered to 142 mate students who were enrolled in ROTC and 18 male students who had dropped out of ROTC. Several months later seven of the above 142 subjects dropped out of ROTC. A ratio expectancy theory model was developed from the questionnaire as an operational definition of motivation to remain in ROTC. The results indicated that the 25 dropouts had a significantly lower (p < .001) score on this motivational measure than the 135 subjects who were still enrolled in ROTC, and also that these latter subjects were as strongly attracted to a civilian job as they were to an Army job. The implications of these findings relative to the ability of the Army to attract career officers were discussed.     

Sex-role stereotyping in the lower grades: Part of the solution

Twenty-one boys and twenty-one girls in grades 1, 2, 3 and 4 were tested on sex-role attitudes. The results demonstrated that the thinking of young children is typically sexist-oriented. However, evidence also indicates that children will accept the concept of people in nontraditional roles if models are visible in these roles.