Visual discrimination learning with a 1-min delay of reward

Eight rats were successfully trained in a black-white discrimination with a 1-min delay of reward. The procedure was unusual in that the rat spent the delay outside the apparatus in its home cage. Immediately after the rat responded, whether correctly or incorrectly, it was removed from the choice compartment and placed in its home cage. When the delay ended, it was returned to the startbox. If the preceding response had been correct, the rat received a reward of sugar water; otherwise, it was allowed to make another choice response. Mediation by external cues was excluded because there was no difference in the way the rats were treated after a correct or an incorrect response until the delay interval ended. Mediation by proprioceptive stimuli was excluded because position was an irrelevant cue.     

Knowing,feeling, and liking a psychophysiological study of attraction

Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded during verbal exchanges in which subjects were either agreed or disagreed with on a variety of issues. The manipulation of attitude similarity had significant effects on interpersonal attraction, perceived competence, and skin conductance, but not on heart rate. Disagreement produced higher skin conductance than agreement, and speaking was more arousing than listening. The correlations between arousal and attraction showed that heightened arousal was associated with both attraction toward agreers and dislike toward disagreers. As predicted, the linear relationship between attitude similarity and attraction increased in slope (0.00, 3.75, 8.75) with increasing levels of conductance (low, medium, high). The failure of subjects to prefer agreers to disagreers under conditions of low arousal suggests that information without affect does not influence attraction.     

Achieving consistency: A Study of basketball officiating

This study investigates the characteristics of professional basketball referees which can account for their successful or unsuccessful performance on the court. Several role inactment skills such as achievement via independence contribute to the prediction of this performance. The main determinant identified, however, is at the group or organizational level. Superior referees have less interindividual variance than do average or relatively unsuccessful referees. This result is discussed in terms of the role requirements of performance in this case. Interpersonal consistency of judgment is relied on for matters permitting only consensual validity. Extensions of these findings to other role enactments are suggested.     

Acquisition of spatial antonym pairs

Twenty-eight children (mean age 4.3 yr) were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results showed that: (a) the most common error was to point to an object representing the same polarity (marked-unmarked) as the word requested; (b) there was not a high degree of confusion within antonym paris; (c) unmarked antonyms tend to be acquired before marked antonyms; and (d) the order of acquisition of the pairs was: tall-short, long-short, high-low, thick-thin, deep-shallow, wide-narrow. The results were interpreted as supporting a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension.     

Brain stem electrical responses of stutterers and normals by sex,ears, and recovery

Auditory brainstem electrical responses (BSER) of right and left ears of active stutterers, recovered stutterers, and nonstutterers, both male and female adults, were obtained at click rates of 11.1 and 71.1/sec. Latency intervals of waves I, III, and V were measured. The auditory systems of subjects were stressed using a rapid rate of 71.1 clicks/sec. The latency of wave V was used as the measure of the stress condition.Analysis of variance was used to determine statistical significances of main effects and interactions of mean BSER (waves I, III, V, and wave V in stress condition) of left and right ears of male stutterers (active and recovered), female stutterers (active and recovered), and male and female nonstutterers.With one exception, all main effects and all higher order interactions were nonsignificant. The one main effect that was significant was gender. Females have significantly faster rates of neural transmission than do males. The question was raised, does this finding contribute toward an explanation of the sex ratio in stuttering?     

Belief discrepant behavior and the bogus pipeline: Impression management or arousal attribution

Based on recent studies impression management theorists conclude that following belief discrepant behavior, persons will feign attitude change on paper measures, but report their “true” beliefs when attached to a lie detector (the bogus pipeline). A dissonance arousal explanation of these bogus pipeline results suggests that subjects may attribute their arousal to the bogus pipeline equipment instead of to dissonance and therefore may not be motivated to change their attitudes. The present study examined these competing interpretations and yielded results which support the dissonance arousal attribution explanation. Subjects who were attached to a (bogus pipeline) lie detector exhibited attitude change if given the opportunity to get accustomed to the equipment (which made attribution of arousal to the equipment less plausible), but showed no attitude change if no habituation experience was provided.     

The relationship of participation in school activities to abilities and interests in a high school student sample

Participation in school activities is hypothesized to be related to the multiple abilities and interests of high school students. The Ball Aptitude Battery (yielding 14 ability scores), Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory, and a biographical information blank (to obtain information about participation in 53 extracurricular activities) were administered to over 900 high school seniors of both sexes. Correlational and multiple regression analyses showed different patterns of activity participation to be related to different abilities and interests. The degree of relationship was generally low, generally higher for the males than for the females, and higher for interests than for abilities. Activity correlates of abilities differed for the sexes, but activity correlates of interests tended to be similar. This suggests that the same ability can result from differential participation in activities, but the same interest develops from similar activities.