Situational and personality determinants of a victim's identification with a tormentor

The effects of two situational (tormentor legitimacy and tormentor justification) and two personality (victim's belief in the just world and victim's Machiavellianism) factors on several reactions of a victim to his tormentor were explored. Greater conformity by victims to their tormentor's opinions occurred when the victims believed strongly in the just world and when the tormentor was well justified for his behavior; there was a greater conformity towards the tormentor in these conditions than towards a neutral nontormentor. The tormentor received less positive evaluations from the victim when he acquired his role illegitimately or when the victim was Machiavellian; when the tormentor acquired the role legitimately, he was liked no less than the nontormentor. The experimental variables did not affect behavioral imitation of the tormentor or the interpersonal distance maintained by the victim. The results failed to conform to any simple identification process. Several explanations for these results are explored and directions for additional research are discussed.     

Auditory temporal perception, phonics, and reading disabilities in children

Reading-impaired and control children were given an experimental battery of nonverbal auditory perceptual tests which examined discrimination and temporal order perception. Stimulus tones were presented at various rates. There were no significant differences between groups on tests in which stimuli were presented at slow rates. However, when the same stimuli were presented more rapidly, the reading-impaired group made significantly more errors than the controls. The reading-impaired children's ability to use phonics skills (nonsense word reading) was also examined. There was a high correlation between the number of errors made on the phonics reading test and the number of errors made in responding to the rapidly presented stimuli in the auditory perceptual tests. The hypothesis that some reading impairments are related to low-level auditory perceptual dysfunction that affects the ability to learn to use phonics skills adequately is discussed.     

A study of alpha hemispheric asymmetries for verbal and nonverbal stimuli in males and females

The alpha hemispheric asymmetries of males and females were examined with electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques during exposure to connected speech and nonlinguistic stimuli. The subject selection controlled for familial handedness and each subject was administered the Block Design and Vocabulary Subtests of the WAIS as a general measure of “visual-spatial” and “verbal” ability. The results showed that there was less alpha in the right hemisphere for nonverbal tasks and less alpha in the left hemisphere for verbal tasks. The females showed significantly more “lateralization” during the tasks as compared to the males. The results are discussed in terms of processing differences and the possible effects of subject variables, stimulus mode, stimulus presentation, and task requirements on neurolinguistic research results.     

Behavioral similarity,confederate strategy,and sex composition of dyad as determinants of interpersonal judgments and behavior in the prisoner's dilemma game

The study was designed to test three distinct theoretical models relating player's attitudes toward a confederate in the prisoner's dilemma game: a reinforcing outcome model, a cultural norm model, and a social comparison model. A secondary concern of the study was to determine if player's sex, confederate's sex, and the confederate's strategy interactively influence player's choice behavior. Forty-eight male and forty-eight female subjects played 100 trials of the prisoner's dilemma game with a confederate who played either a 74% cooperative or 74% competitive predetermined strategy and then filled out the Interpersonal Judgment Scale rating the confederate. Behaviorally similar confederates received more positive evaluations than dissimilar confederates supporting the social comparison hypothesis. Further, the strategy of the confederate did not influence choice behavior in mixed-sex dyads, suggesting that sex roles may inhibit behaviorally based male-female interaction. The generality of previous gaming research which has dealt almost exclusively with same-sex dyads is called into question.     

Structural influences on organizational commitment

Relationships of several aspects of organization structure with organizational commitment were examined within a multiple regression framework for 262 public sector employees. As a set, the six structural variables accounted for over 20% (p < .001) of the variation in organizational commitment for the vocationally heterogeneous sample studied. Overall, these results suggest that future model-building efforts should take organization structure into account as one potentially important dimension of influences on organizational commitment.     

Visual scanning during pattern recognition in children and adults

Eye movement and fixation responses of 3- to 6-year-old children and adults were recorded during a pattern recognition task. During familiarization, fixations were more repetitive and less extensive for older subjects. The fixation patterns of older children who were consistently able to solve the recognition problems were like those of the adults. Unsuccessful 4- to 6-year-olds spent more time fixating the modified area of the nonstandard pattern presented in paired comparison with the standard, even though their final decision was false. Thus, preschool children were able to locate relevant visual information even when they did not use this information to solve tasks. The results suggest that visual fixations do not always reflect active attention, and that direct fixations of visual information are clearly not sufficient and may not be necessary for problem solving.     

Components of geometric analogy solution

Geometric analogy solution was investigated as a function of systematic variations in the information structure of individual items. Latency data from the verification of true and false items indicated that individuals decompose figural patterns in a way that represents a sequential determination of the various elements that need to be isolated. They also appear to identify and evaluate the transformations applied to elements in a way that represents a sequential determination of the separate or successive transformations that fully specify an item rule. Analysis and evaluation of transformations took more time than element analysis and was the primary source of errors. The combined effects of element and transformation processing violated a simple additive model and the best fitting functions suggested that nonadditive increases in solution latency and error rates were due to working memory limitations associated with the representation and manipulation of item features at high levels of rule complexity. Correlational data also indicated that these factors partially account for individual differences in performance on psychometric tests. The latency and error data for true and false items are used to develop a general theoretical system that incorporates assumptions about the form of item representation, working memory factors, and processing components and strategies in analogical reasoning tasks.