Knowing,feeling, and liking a psychophysiological study of attraction

Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded during verbal exchanges in which subjects were either agreed or disagreed with on a variety of issues. The manipulation of attitude similarity had significant effects on interpersonal attraction, perceived competence, and skin conductance, but not on heart rate. Disagreement produced higher skin conductance than agreement, and speaking was more arousing than listening. The correlations between arousal and attraction showed that heightened arousal was associated with both attraction toward agreers and dislike toward disagreers. As predicted, the linear relationship between attitude similarity and attraction increased in slope (0.00, 3.75, 8.75) with increasing levels of conductance (low, medium, high). The failure of subjects to prefer agreers to disagreers under conditions of low arousal suggests that information without affect does not influence attraction.     

Acquisition of spatial antonym pairs

Twenty-eight children (mean age 4.3 yr) were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results showed that: (a) the most common error was to point to an object representing the same polarity (marked-unmarked) as the word requested; (b) there was not a high degree of confusion within antonym paris; (c) unmarked antonyms tend to be acquired before marked antonyms; and (d) the order of acquisition of the pairs was: tall-short, long-short, high-low, thick-thin, deep-shallow, wide-narrow. The results were interpreted as supporting a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension.     

The recall and use of belief statements as bases for judgments: Some determinants and implications

When people are asked to report their beliefs in a (target) statement, they may search memory for other, “informational” propositions that bear on its validity, and may use their beliefs in these propositions as bases for their judgments. Several factors were hypothesized to affect the particular propositions that subjects are likely to recall under such conditions. Subjects first familiarized themselves with a list of informational and target propositions. Then, they reported either their beliefs in these propositions or their attitudes toward them. In a second session 1 week later, they recalled as many of the propositions as they could. Both informational and target statements were better recalled when the informational propositions were unlikely to be true. In addition, the target statements were better recalled when the informational propositions associated with them had unclear implications for their validity. Recall of one proposition was more likely to cue the recall of the other when subjects had previously reported belief in the target proposition (rather than attitudes toward it). However, it was more likely to occur when subjects had reported attitudes toward the informational proposition (rather than beliefs in it). The effects of these variables were interpreted in terms of their mediating influence on the strength of association between the informational proposition and both (a) the target proposition and (b) contextual and environmental cues in the situation where target beliefs are reported.     

On construct validity: A critique of Miniard and Cohen's paper

Miniard and Cohen's conclusion that our measures of attitudes and subjective norms lack construct validity is rejected. It is shown that the data from their study are entirely consistent with data from previous investigations and that the data provide additional evidence for the predictive validity of our theory and for the construct validity of our operations.     

Remembering,understanding, and representation

Starting with the facts that not everything that is understood is remembered, and that not everything that is remembered is understood. this paper urges that models of language processing should be able to make a distinction between comprehension and memory. To this end. a case is made for a spreading activation process as being the essential ingredient of the comprehension process. It is argued that concepts activated during comprehension not only restrict the search set for candidate concepts to be used in a top-down fashion, they also constitute part of an episodic representation that can come to be p e of long-term memory. The way in which these representations atrophy is discussed, as is the way in which their idiosyncratic components are eliminated in producing representations in semantic memory. Some observations on the comprehension and memory of text are made and arguments are presented to show how intrusions and omissions in recall can be handled. Some existing experimental data is reanalyzed in terms of the proposed model and alternative interpretations consistent with the model are shown to be possible.     

Transfer of training: Effects of successive pretraining of components in a dimension-abstracted oddity task

An experiment was conducted investigating the effects of training two components of a dimension-abstracted oddity problem, oddity responding and attention. All Ss were given a series of three problems. Type of oddity training was manipulated on Problem 1, and Ss learned (1) an oddity response in a problem whose format was the same as the final transfer problem, (2) an oddity response in a problem whose format was different from the final problem, or (3) no oddity response. Attention training was manipulated on Problem 2. The results indicated that Ss given same format oddity training and appropriate attention training were able to integrate that information on the final problem, that the probability of transferring the oddity response learned on Problem 1 to Problem 3 depended upon the similarity of the task formats, and that the two trained components tended to combine in an interactive fashion.     

Causes of racial and socioeconomic differences in cognitive tests

Correlations among profiles of means based upon 75 cognitive variables from Project TALENT are presented for groups defined by race, socioeconomic status, sex, area of the country, and grade in high school. Sex makes by far the largest contribution to differences in shape of profiles. Race and socioenconomic status, in turn, make much larger contributions to differences than grade and area. Sex differences in shapes of profiles are a function primarily of race and, to a lesser extent, of social class. Race differences are larger than socioeconomic differences and the former, in particular, are also a function of sex. Black males differ more from white patterns than black females. There is lack of substantial overlap in the causes of race and socioeconomic differences in shape of cognitive profiles.     

Self-punitive behavior with changing percentages of reinforcement: The proper role of discrimination

Past research on self-punitive behavior has been interpreted as supporting a theoretical éxplanation based on a vicious circle rather than a discrimination hypothesis. Using rats, Melvin (1964) found that self-punitive behavior is not reduced when discrimination is aided by changing the percentage of shock trials from acquisition to extinction. This past research is inconclusive because it is based on a misinterpretation of what is the critical discrimination for extinction, namely the new response-punishment contingency. Using humans, the present study provides evidence that subjects can and do discriminate the change in percentage, but continue to show self-punitive behavior until they make the discrimination that responding results in shock rather than escape.