Pretty pleases: The effects of physical attractiveness,race, and sex on receiving help

The major purpose of this study was to investigate whether favoritism for the physically attractive, a phenomenom demonstrated amost exclusively on the basis of rating scales, generalizes to nonreactive, behavioral helping responses. Four hundred and forty-two males and 162 female white adult callers in public phone booths in a large metropolitan airport found a completed graduate school application form, a photograph of the applicant, and an addressed, stamped envelope. The picture was used to convey information as to the physical attractiveness (attractive vs. unattractive), race (black vs. white), and sex of the applicant. As predicted, delivery of the application was facilitated more for attractive than unattractive persons. There was also a significant race effect, with whites receiving more help than blacks. Implications of these findings for the physical attractiveness literature are discussed.     

Clogs in the bogus pipeline: Demand characteristics and social desirability

Jones and Sigall (1971) have advocated the use of a pseudophysiological monitoring device (the bogus pipeline) as a procedure to measure the “true” feelings of experimental subjects. A comparison of the bogus pipeline and a paper-and-pencil scale as measures of attraction indicated that the monitoring device is affected by experimenter demands among high social desirability (SD) subjects (p < .03) while the simple rating scale is not. Attraction to a stranger was determined solely by attitude similarity for high SD subjects using the paper-and-pencil measure and for low SD subjects in both measurement conditions. Use of the bogus pipeline in the typical attraction experiment thus would seem to be contraindicated. These results were discussed with respect to Ostrom's (1973) criteria of relative sensitivity and functional comparability of measurement techniques.     

Stimulus control of responding in the early trials of differential conditioning

In Experiment 1 two groups of rats were given 12 differential conditioning trials, seven to the rewarded alley (S+) and five to the nonrewarded alley (S?), prior to being extinguished in both alleys. Group S?S+ received S+ trials, following S? trials in acquisition, while Group S+S? did not receive S+ trials following S? trials in acquisition. In extinction S+ and S? trials were presented according to a quasi-random sequence for both groups. Running on the last 3 trials of acquisition was found to be faster following S+ than following S? trials. Group S?S+ showed greater resistance to extinction and less discriminative responding in extinction than Group S+S?. These results suggest that responding in differential conditioning is controlled not merely by S+ and S? but by the memories of reward (S^R) and of nonreward (S^N) as well. When the joint effects of both classes of cues were considered, e.g., S^R+S+, responding in the early trials of differential conditioning was shown to be highly orderly. Experiment 2 was highly similar to Experiment 1 except that Groups S?S+ and S+S? were equated along dimensions not equated in Experiment 1. The results obtained in Experiment 2 were highly similar to those obtained in Experiment 1.     

Young children's attention to global magnitude: evidence from classification tasks

Young children often compare objects holistically and not in terms of separate dimensions such as size and color. One holistic relation that often governs young children's object comparisons is overall similarity. Two experiments were conducted to examine the possibility that a holistic magnitude relation might also govern children's object comparisons. Objects varying on two dimensions of magnitude-size and saturation--were classified by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. The results indicated that the younger children were sensitive to global magnitude as well as overall similarity. They grouped together large and saturated objects or small and desaturated objects more often than they did large and desaturated (or small and saturated) objects and thus appear to have been classifying by combined magnitude across both dimensions. This new finding that young children classify by a global relation of magnitude refines the understanding of perceptual development and provides information about the structure of perception. Young children's use of global magnitudes in classification also fits well with recent findings about children's acquisitions of dimension words.     

Silent reading: Insights from second-generation deaf readers

Previous studies indicate that hearing readers sometimes convert printed text into a phonological form during silent reading. The experiments reported here investigated whether second-generation congenitally deaf readers use any analogous recoding strategy. Fourteen congenitally and profoundly deaf adults who were native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) served as subjects. Fourteen hearing people of comparable reading levels were control subjects. These subjects participated in four experiments that tested for the possibilities of (a) recoding into articulation, (b) recoding into fingerspelling, (c) recoding into ASL, or (d) no recoding at all. The experiments employed paradigms analogous to those previously used to test for phonological recoding in hearing populations. Interviews with the deaf subjects provided supplementary information about their reading strategies. The results suggest that these deaf subjects as a group do not recode into articulation or fingerspelling, but do recode into sign.     

Voice onset time in aphasia: Thai. I. Perception

This study investigated left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-damaged non-aphasic patients' ability to label synthetic speech continua differing in voice onset time (VOT) at three places of articulation. The language chosen for investigation was Thai, which exhibits 3 contrasting labial and apical stop categories (voiced, voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated) and 2 contrasting velar stop categories (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated). Results of the labelling task indicated an impairment in VOT perception at all three places of articulation across clinical types of aphasia. Normal performance by the right brain-damaged patient indicated that deficits in VOT perception can be attributed to pathology specific to the language-dominant hemisphere. No relation was found between the aphasic patient's level of auditory language comprehension and his performance on the VOT perception task. It is suggested that the aphasics' impairment reflects a deficit in phonological processing at the linguistic level.     

Resistance to satiation: Reinforcing effects of food and eating under satiation

It has been shown previously that rats which have learned a response when hungry will continue to make that response when tested satiated, a phenomenon labeled resistance to satiation. Here we showed that rats which were previously trained hungry will learn a new response for the opportunity to consume pellets in a new situation when tested satiated. In four experiments various groups received each of the components of the training given when rats learn an instrumental response when hungry. Rats were placed in the goalbox of a straight alley and given food pellets when hungry or were hungry only in their home cages prior to running a straight alley in the satiated test in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4 learning of a differential conditioning problem for pellets in S+ (nonreward in S?) was measured in the satiated test. Groups given pellets in their home cages when hungry with or without alley exposure learned to run more rapidly in S+ than in S? in the satiated test phase. The tendency to eat pellets in the apparatus and the reinforcing effect of eating the pellets was larger for rats which ate the pellets when hungry in their home cage than for rats which ate the pellets when satiated in their home cage. Being hungry in the home cage with no pellets was not sufficient to produce eating or running for pellets in the satiated test, indicating that any inherent reinforcing effect of the pellets is not sufficient to produce eating or running, and that incomplete satiation cannot account for the learning. These data indicate that a reinforcing effect of eating pellets under satiation is an important determiner of resistance to satiation.     

Functional similarity and interpersonal attraction

A pair of related experiments examined the relationship of functional similarity (i.e., the degree of similarity between two interactants in assessing mutually known others on personal construct dimensions) to interpersonal attraction. In Experiment I, 10 previously unacquainted college students of both sexes participated in 10 hours of dyadic disclosure exercises over a 5-week period. As predicted, members of high functional similarity dyads evidenced greater attraction to one another than did members of low functional similarity dyads. Experiment II investigated the relationship of functional similarity to level of acquaintance (i.e., friends, nominals) and type of assessment (i.e., physical, interactional, psychological) in a 2 × 3 factorial design. As hypothesized, “friendship” pairs of male undergraduates displayed greater functional similarity than did “nominal” pairs from the same population, particularly at the deeper level of “psychological” assessment. Results are discussed in relation to classical conditioning (D. Byrne, In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 4. New York. Academic Press, 1969), affect-reinforcement (G. L. Clore, In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction. New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) and information processing ( I. Ajzen, In S. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) models of interpersonal attraction, and are interpreted as supporting and extending (S. Duck's Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) filtering theory of friendship formation.     

Empathetic perception of emotional displays in films as a function of hedonic and excitatory state prior to exposure

A film clip depicting a young couple in a dysphoric encounter was seen following one of four film segments that were selected and pretested to effect a factorial variation in (a) hedonic tone (positive, negative) and (b) excitatory potential (low, high). Reactions to the subsequent film were assessed via ratings to test predictions from excitation-transfer theory and to determine sequential effects in hedonically valued experiences. In a first experiment, in which the subsequent film was viewed immediately after the antecedent film, a nearly significant distraction effect of excitation occurred, that is, affective responses to the subsequent film were less intense following high-excitation films than following low-excitation films. In a second experiment, in which the procedure employed in the interval between films was changed to foster close attention to the subsequent film, an excitation-transfer effect was observed, with the dysphoric encounter being perceived as sadder after high-excitation films than after low-excitation films. In both experiments, hedonic-set effects were also observed. The role of cognitive adjustment in excitation transfer was discussed.