Relative status and interpersonal presumptuousness

Previous research has shown that, in status-discrepant dyads, the higher-status member's verbal behavior tends to be more presumptuous, that is, to have a higher proportion of utterances that imply a presumption of knowledge of the other, including Advisements, Interpretations, Confirmations, and Reflections as defined by a taxonomy of verbal response modes (VRMs). However, members of these dyads have differed in absolute status in an external social hierarchy as well as in relative status within the dyad. The present study was designed to distinguish relative status from absolute status. Eighteen senior psychology majors each participated in two similar conversations—one with a freshman and one with a professor. Conversations were coded using the VRM system. In freshman-senior dyads, seniors were more presumptuous and in senior-professor dyads, professors were more presumptuous, replicating previous findings. Seniors' presumptuousness was greater toward freshmen than toward professors, supporting the hypothesis that presumptuousness varies with relative status. Absolute status was not highly predictive of presumptuousness; there were no significant differences between seniors with freshmen and professors with seniors or between freshmen with seniors and seniors with professors.     

The role of the right hemisphere in the apprehension of complex linguistic materials

To secure information on which aspects of linguistic functioning might be mediated by the nondominant hemisphere, a test battery assessing sensitivity to narrational and humorous materials was administered to a population of right-hemisphere-damaged patients, as well as relevant control groups of normal, aging, and aphasic individuals. While elementary linguistic functioning was adequate, the right-hemisphere-injured groups exhibited consistent difficulties in respecting the boundaries of a fictive entity, assessing the plausibility of elements within a story or joke, selecting the appropriate punch line for a joke, and integrating elements of a story into a coherent narrative. Certain elements—specifically emotional content and noncanonical facts injected into a narrative—also posed characteristic difficulties for these patients. The results suggest that, in contrast to the other populations, right-hemisphere patients exhibit special difficulties in processing complex linguistic entities and in utilizing the surrounding context as they assess linguistic messages.     

Processing of locatives “in,” “on,” and “under” by aphasic patients: An analysis of the regression hypothesis

The present study investigated the comprehension of aphasic subjects as to locative prepositions “in,” “on,” and “under.” Patients had to locate a movable object with reference to a stationary referential object in order to achieve the spatial relations requested under oral instructions. The influence of two types of contextual relations between the objects in each stimulus pair on the subjects' performances was examined. Spatial relations were biased by the conventional knowledge of the most normal relationship between the two elements in everyday life in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, perceptivomotor constraints constituted the contextual bias. Analyzing the patients' responses in the light of developmental strategies did not lend support to the regression hypothesis. Broca's aphasics were sensitive to the two contextual factors investigated; Wernickes' performances were affected only by the perceptivomotor contextual bias. The results are discussed with reference to earlier studies on the differential syntactical comprehension skills of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics in sentence-picture matching tasks and production tasks.     

Control of social desirability in personality inventories: Principal-factor deletion

Rational and statistical techniques for controlling social desirability (SD) in scales derived from self-report inventories are reviewed. The principal-factor deletion technique is explained in detail. It is applied during factor analysis when derived content scales are expected to be tainted with SD. If one principal factor is found to represent social desirability, the implicated factor is dropped and the communalities adjusted before the remaining factors are rotated to a desired simple structure criterion. Subscales derived from resulting factors are free of SD bias. Principal-factor deletion is compared with other approaches including rational techniques, covariate procedures, and target rotation.     

Modality-specific information processing and intellectual ability

Two groups of children, one of below average intelligence and one of above average intelligence, were adminitered nine tasks involving matching information between auditory and visual modalities and temporal and spatial presentations. The below average intelligence children made more matching errors than the above average intelligence group, with no indication that matching problems were particular to one modality or particular to cross-modal as opposed to intramodal matching. Factor analyses did suggest, however, that matching processes varied according to levels of intelligence. The results are discussed in terms of the differences between modality-specific and nonmodal theoretical views of sensory systems, and it is noted that neither view alone is adequate to account for the variations found for the two intelligence groups. It is suggested that the results are consistent with Luria's research on neurological organization.     

Effects of imaginal exposure to feared disasters in obsessive-compulsive checkers

The combined effects of imaginal exposure to feared catastrophes and in vivo exposure to external stimuli were compared with the effects of in vivo exposure alone in 15 obsessive-compulsives with checking rituals. The first group received 90 min of uninterrupted exposure in imagination, which concentrated mainly on disastrous consequences, followed by 30 min of exposure in vivo to stimuli-situations which triggered rituals. The second group was given 2 hr of exposure in vivo only. Both groups were prevented from performing rituals. Treatment consisted of 10 daily sessions within a 2 week period.Assessments were conducted before and after treatment and at follow-up ranging from 3 months to 2.5 yr with a mean of 11 months. At post-treatment both groups improved considerably and did not differ. But at follow-up those who received imaginal and in vivo exposure maintained their gains, whereas the group who were treated by exposure in vivo alone evidenced partial relapse on four of the six dependent measures. The results tend to indicate that a closer match between a patient's internal fear model and the content of exposure enhances long term treatment efficacy.     

Constraints on Pavlovian aversive conditioning: Implications for avoidance learning in the rat

Four experiments investigated the relative degree of control exerted by several conditional stimuli when each stimulus: (a) preceded shock, (b) followed shock, and preceded a shock-free interval, (c) was independent of shock, or (d) was novel. When the onset of an auditory stimulus had preceded shock (Experiments 1, 2A, and 3), it always exerted conditioned excitatory control. When the same stimulus preceded a shock-free interval, it never exerted conditioned inhibitory control. When the onset of light (Experiments 2B, 4), silence (2C), or darkness (1, 2D) preceded a shock-free interval, it always exerted conditioned inhibitory control. However, when one of the latter stimuli preceded shock, it failed to exert excitatory control. Several models of this phenomenon were tested. The implications of these results for the species-specific defence reaction and two-factor theory accounts of avoidance learning were outlined.