Celebrity and Political Psychology: Remembering Lennon

This article is a contribution toward the task of constructing a distinctive political psychology and social theory of celebrity. The article begins by noting some recent approaches to the analysis of mass communications in political theory, and moves to consider what these theories mean for the conceptual analysis of celebrity. A substantive example of the political construction of celebrity is given in a case study of the ex-Beatle, John Lennon—specifically, the social drama surrounding his death in 1980. A number of issues, ranging from the denial of death in modernity to the multiplex modes of cultural remembering, are discussed as they relate to celebrity.     

Effect of preacquisition UCS exposure on classical conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response

Conditioning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response was found to be inversely related to the number (0, 50, 200, 350) and intensity, (0, 1, 3, 5 mA) of preacquisition UCS exposures and directly related to the interval between preexposure and acquisition (0 or 24 hr). The results were discussed in terms of sensory adaptation, habituation, blocking, and emotional reactivity.     

Syntactic facilitation of children's associative learning: An instructional effect

An experiment is reported in which connective recall, as well as noun recall, was obtained in a pair-associate learning, syntactic facilitation paradigm. Dfferences in the pattern of noun and connective recall, and a partial independence in the two types of recall, were obtained. These results were interpreted as consistent with the hypothesis that experimenter-supplied verb links facilitate noun pair learning by serving an instructional role, indicating to the subject how a pair might be coded.     

The effect of grammatical complexity upon disfluency behavior of nonstuttering preschool children

The effect of grammatical complexity on the disfluency behavior of nonstuttering 3- and 4-yr-old children was examined. Thirty normal children repeated after the examiner 30 sentences which represented six different grammatical constructions. These grammatical constructions represented a range of grammatical complexity.The total number of disfluencies that occurred in each sentence type was compared. The occurrence of specific disfluency categories in each sentence type was also examined. Subjects produced significantly more disfluencies on passive sentences than on any other sentence type. The passive elicited significantly more interjections, word repetitions, and revisions than the other sentence types.The effect of sentence type on imitation performance was also examined. The auxiliary Have and negative sentence types elicited significantly more imitation errors than other sentence types. Initiation and fluency performance for individual subjects were also examined.The results of the present investigation suggest that when grammatical complexity is controlled, the relationship between disfluencies and grammatical complexity is complicated. When grammatical constructions were relatively difficult for children, complexity affected the occurrence of disfluencies. However, factors other than grammatical complexity affect the occurrence of disfluencies in pre-school children.     

Affective isolation as a coping strategy for persons with low and high amounts of life stress

Previous research has investigated two diverse operational definitions of stress, experimentally induced, short-term stress and long-term, life stress. The purpose of this study was to intersect these two research methodologies and determine the effect of a laboratory-induced stress (failure feedback) on persons with differing levels of life stress. Women with high or low amounts of life stress were given failure feedback, no failure feedback, or a cognitive coping strategy (affective isolation) in addition to failure feedback. Failure feedback increased self-reported anger and anxiety immediately following feedback and also after a follow-up test and decreased expectations about performance for the second test. Affective isolation significantly reduced anger and anxiety but failed to affect expectations. Women with high amounts of life stress reported significantly less anxiety than women with low amounts of life stress in response to failure feedback. These results were interpreted within C. D. Spielberger's (in C. D. Spielberger & R. Diaz-Guerrero (Eds.), Cross-cultural anxiety, New York: Wiley, 1976) cognitive model. It was proposed that differing levels of previous life stress cause people to make varying judgments about the degree of threat in a short-term stressful situation. Persons with high amounts of life stress may not be aroused in response to short-term stress because they perceive the short-term stress as only a “drop in the bucket” compared to the other events which they have experienced.