The interaction model of anxiety: An empirical test in an athletic competition situation

The person by situation interaction model of anxiety was tested in the field setting of a track and field meet. Forty-one male runners served as subjects. State anxiety was assessed just prior to a routine training session and again 2 weeks later just before a meet. Five facets of trait anxiety were measured after the routine training session. As predicted there was a significant interaction between social evaluation trait anxiety and the stressful meet situation. No interactions were observed for the interpersonal, ambiguous, and physical danger facets of trait anxiety. In general, the results supported the interaction model of anxiety.     

Regional cerebral blood flow patterns during verbal and nonverbal auditory activation

Current views of the relationship between audition and cerebral function suggest that increases in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) would occur in the superior, mid, and posterior portions of the temporal lobes, and that these changes would be more lateralized to the left hemisphere for a verbal than a nonverbal auditory task. We measured rCBF using the xenon inhalation technique in a group of healthy subjects during three conditions: (1) resting baseline, (2) auditory verbal activation (listening for word meaning), and (3) auditory nonverbal activation (listening for reduction of intensity in a series of noise bursts). Both verbal and nonverbal conditions produced highly significant increases in rCBF over the left posterior Sylvian region with a trend for verbal activation to evoke a wider area of flow increase than the nonverbal task.     

Recognition and discrimination of emotional faces and pictures

In order to learn whether patients with right-hemisphere disease (RHD) had a deficit in their ability to discriminate and comprehend emotional faces and pictures, we studied nine patients with RHD, nine patients with left-hemisphere disease (LHD), and nine controls. The subjects were presented with six picture tests that comprised either emotional faces or emotional scenes. Their task was either to denote (name or choose) an emotion or to discriminate (same, different) between two faces or emotions. Patients with RHD performed significantly worse than subjects with LHD when asked to discriminate between faces, to discriminate between emotional faces, and to name emotional scenes. There was also a trend for the RHD group to be more impaired than the LHD group when asked to name the emotional face or choose the emotional face. Except for the facial and emotional discrimination tests, the LHD patients also performed worse than controls.     

Locus of control and causal attribution for positive and negative outcomes on university examinations

One-hundred-five internal and external locus of control subjects attributed responsibility for their positive and negative outcomes on a university examination. Internal and positive outcome subjects attributed responsibility to internal causal factors while external and negative outcome subjects were more external in their causal attributions. Overall ratings of the four causal components ability, effort, task, and luck were not always in accord with the Weiner model two-dimensional classification.     

Hemispheric functions in the processing of agent-patient information.

Left and right hemisphere processing capabilities for pictorial information about agent (performer of an action) and patient (recipient of an action) relations were assessed in a tachistoscopic study. Subjects were presented pictures in either the right or the left visual field depicting an agent-action-patient event. They were asked to locate which side of the drawing contained the agent and, in separate trials, which side contained the patient. Reaction times to locate the agent were significantly faster than to locate the patient, regardless of the field of presentation. The results are discussed in terms of a general nonlinguistic processing constraint that favors agent information. It is suggested that this processing asymmetry may underlie syntactic asymmetries regarding the expression of agents and patients in language.     

Symptomatic cluttering in adults.

Two patients with symptomatic cluttering due to acquired neurological disease are described. One patient suffered a brainstem infarct (stroke), and the other appeared to have a typical clinical picture of multiple sclerosis. Linguistic analysis of the two patients is provided along with a comparison of idiopathic cluttering of childhood. The implications of cluttering as an acquired speech disorder are discussed.     

The effectiveness of visual and gustatory conditioned stimuli in human classical aversive conditioning with electric shock

Thirty-six undergraduate volunteers, divided into three equal groups, were given electric shock while sipping a colored, unflavored solution (Group I): a flavored, colorless solution (Group 2); or a colored, flavored solution (Group 3), in order to determine whether human Ss respond differentially to visual and gustatory cues when the UCS is aversive electric shock. Using a standard classical discrimination procedure, the CS + was blue water for Group 1, citric acid solution for Group 2, and blue citric acid solution for Group 3. For all groups the CS- was plain water, which was never paired with electric shock. The dependent variables were derived from Staats' A-R-D theory: attitudinal change (A) and a performance measure of sip-size taken during conditioning trials (D) both confirmed the hypothesis that taste can be an effective CS when the UCS is shock, in contrast to results typically obtained with rats where visual but not taste cues are effective with a shock UCS.     

Is attention shared between the ears?

This study tests the locus of attention during selective listening for speech-like stimuli. Can processing be differentially allocated to the two ears? Two conditions were used. The simultaneous condition involved one of four randomly chosen stop-consonants being presented to one of the ears chosen at random. The sequential condition involved two intervals; in the first S listened to the right ear; in the second S listened to the left ear. One of the four consonants was presented to an attended ear during one of these intervals. Experiment I used no distracting stimuli. Experiment II utilized a distracting consonant not confusable with any of the four target consonants. This distractor was always presented to any ear not containing a target. In both experiments, simultaneous and sequential performance were essentially identical, despite the need for attention sharing between the two ears during the simultaneous condition. We conclude that selective attention does not occur during perceptual processing of speech sounds presented to the two ears. We suggest that attentive effects arise in short-term memory following processing.