Selective migration among southern blacks: A reinterpretation of Lee (1951)

Comparisons of the mean IQs of Northern and Southern blacks have consistently shown a 7–12 point difference favoring the former group. Explanations of this difference have been highly polarized. Hereditarians have generally favored an hypothesis of selective migration; environmentalists have tended to ascribe the difference to such environmental causes as education, discrimination and cultural deprivation. Two studies (Klineberg, 1935; Lee, 1951) have been interpreted by many commentators as decisively vindicating the environmentalist position. In this paper this interpretation is questioned and certain neglected features of Lee's (1951) data are construed as providing strong evidence for selective migration.     

Social protest photography and public history: “Whose streets? Our streets!”: New York City, 1980–2000

“Whose streets? Our streets!,” a traveling exhibition that debuted at the Bronx Documentary Center in January 2017, brings together the work of 37 independent photographers who covered protests in New York City between 1980 and 2000. Collectively, they chronicle social justice struggles related to race relations and police brutality; war and the environment; HIV/AIDS and queer activism; abortion rights, feminism, and the culture wars; and housing, education, and labor. The exhibition and companion multimedia website demonstrate the role that photographers, activists, and ordinary people play in enacting democratic social change. They also highlight social protest photography as an important source for doing public history.     

Response-outcome contingency: Behavioral and judgmental effects of appetitive and aversive outcomes with college students

In two experiments, positive, negative, and zero response-outcome contingencies were responded to and rated by college students under a free-operant procedure. In Experiment 1, outcomes were either neutral or were associated with point gain. In Experiment 2, subjects were administered different outcome treatments: neutral outcomes, outcomes associated with money gain, or outcomes associated with money loss. In both experiments, subjects' judgments of response-outcome contingency and their operant responses were each strong linear functions of ΔP, the difference between the probability of an outcome given a response and the probability of an outcome given no response. Appetitive and aversive outcomes produced opposite and symmetrical response patterns. In Experiment 1, no differences in ratings occurred with neutral or appetitive outcomes; however, in Experiment 2, more potent appetitve outcomes led to somewhat more extreme ratings than either neutral or aversive outcomes. Increasing outcome probability produced only a slight bias in ratings of noncontingent problems in Experiment 1 and no bias in Experiment 2. Contrary to predictions derived from an analysis of superstitious behavior, increasing outcome probability in noncontingent problems decreased operant responding when outcomes were appetitive and increased operant responding when outcomes were aversive. Trend analyses revealed that Δ P was superior to several other metrics in predicting subjects' estimates of contingency and the behavioral effects of contingency. Operant responding was in closer accord with matching predictions than with maximizing predictions.     

The effect of pretraining and feedback on the reasoning of young children

Three experiments are reported in which kindergarten and first-grade children were given one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks that were modifications of those used by T. C. Toppino (1980, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30, 496–512). In the first two experiments, the nature of the stimulus compounds (partitioned or unitary) was varied in a series of tasks of increasing complexity. First-grade children (Experiment 1) and kindergarten children (Experiment 2) performed extremely well on all of the tasks presented. Experiment 3 was designed to identify factors that contribute to these high levels of performance, relative to those obtained under the conditions used by Toppino (1980). The results indicated that a combination of feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the tasks are sufficient to produce the high performance levels, and that the verbal labeling of stimulus components is not an essential constituent of the training.     

Phonemic imperception in aphasia

This study investigated characteristics of 14 aphasics with impaired phoneme discrimination identified from a population of 100 patients with left hemisphere lesions. All patients with impaired phoneme discrimination were significantly impaired in aural comprehension, but many showed intact sound recognition and some showed normal reading comprehension. Defects in phoneme discrimination were typically seen in the acute stage of aphasia resulting from stroke; and in most instances, defects in phoneme discrimination were no longer apparent 4 months postonset. All patients who recovered normal phoneme discrimination also made significant improvement in aural comprehension. The findings support the concept that some aural comprehension defects result from a specific disturbance in phoneme discrimination.     

Psychological studies of children who have cancer

Increasingly, more optimistic prognoses for children who have cancer have led investigators to study the adjustment reactions of children who survive this traumatic experience. There is considerable evidence that the experience of having cancer, receiving prolonged and often painful treatment, and the uncertain condition of cancer survivorship have profound emotional effects on children. The characteristic features of the psychological impact of cancer are the experience of continuing uncertainty in a life-threatening crisis and the resultant search for meaning. Studies are beginning to find that even very young children actively struggle to organize and make sence of this experience.     

The role of the magazine-response contingency on signal-directed responding in pigeons

Three experiments used a procedure for directly delivering water into the thirsty pigeon's mouth to explore the role that the instrumental magazine contingency plays in autoshaped responding. Magazine training was accomplished by requiring birds to contact a “magazine” key when it was illuminated, in order to obtain intraoral injections of water. Other subjects received water injections independent of a magazine-response contingency. Subsequently, magazine-trained subjects showed a transient enhancement in responding to the illumination of another “signal” key, whether that stimulus was presented alone or paired with water delivery. The overall level of maintained autoshaped responding was little influenced by the instrumental magazine contingency, although the within-trial time course of signal-directed responding was affected. When illumination of the signal key preceded access to water only when the signal was not contacted, pigeons directed many responses toward the signal key. However, there was no evidence that the instrumental magazine contingency enhanced responding on this omission schedule of reinforcement. These results thus confirm a small, but measurable contribution of the magazine-response contingency to signal-directed responding; they fail to support the conclusion that the instrumental magazine contingency greatly affects the outcomes of autoshaping studies.