Spatial ecology: Its effects on the choice of friends and enemies

The present research examined relationships between physical distance, frequency of face-to-face contacts, and the probability that individuals would be chosen as friends or enemies. Consistent with previous research, the probability of being chosen as a friend increased as the distance between people decreased. There was also a positive linear relationship between the frequency of contact and the strength of linking. In contrast, the probability of being chosen as a disliked individual was even more dependent upon physical distance (more disliked than liked individuals lived close to the subjects), but the strength of disliking was unrelated to the frequency of face-to-face contact. Friends also tended to live farther away from the subjects the longer the latter had lived in their residences, but the distance that disliked individuals lived from the subjects did not depend upon time. The overall pattern of results was consistent with an “environment-spoiling” hypothesis which proposed that many negative interpersonal relationships primarily occur because the actions of specific others spoil one's living environment, whereas most positive interpersonal relationships result from frequent face-to-face contacts.     

Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall

An analysis of the underlying structure of simple stories is presented. It is claimed that this type of representation of stories is used to form schemata which guide encoding and retrieval. A type of tree structure containing basic units and their connections was found to be adequate to describe the structure of both single and multi-episode stories. The representation is outlined in the form of a grammar, consisting of rewrite rules defining the units and their relationships. Some transformational rules mapping underlying and surface structures are discussed. The adequacy of the analysis is first tested against Bartlett's protocols of “The War of the Ghosts.” Then a developmental study of recall is presented. It is concluded that both children and adults are sensitive to the structure of stories, although some differences were found. Finally, it is suggested that the schemata used to guide encoding and recall are related but not identical and that retrieval is dependent on the schemata operative at the time of recall.     

Situational and personality determinants of a victim's identification with a tormentor

The effects of two situational (tormentor legitimacy and tormentor justification) and two personality (victim's belief in the just world and victim's Machiavellianism) factors on several reactions of a victim to his tormentor were explored. Greater conformity by victims to their tormentor's opinions occurred when the victims believed strongly in the just world and when the tormentor was well justified for his behavior; there was a greater conformity towards the tormentor in these conditions than towards a neutral nontormentor. The tormentor received less positive evaluations from the victim when he acquired his role illegitimately or when the victim was Machiavellian; when the tormentor acquired the role legitimately, he was liked no less than the nontormentor. The experimental variables did not affect behavioral imitation of the tormentor or the interpersonal distance maintained by the victim. The results failed to conform to any simple identification process. Several explanations for these results are explored and directions for additional research are discussed.     

Auditory temporal perception, phonics, and reading disabilities in children

Reading-impaired and control children were given an experimental battery of nonverbal auditory perceptual tests which examined discrimination and temporal order perception. Stimulus tones were presented at various rates. There were no significant differences between groups on tests in which stimuli were presented at slow rates. However, when the same stimuli were presented more rapidly, the reading-impaired group made significantly more errors than the controls. The reading-impaired children's ability to use phonics skills (nonsense word reading) was also examined. There was a high correlation between the number of errors made on the phonics reading test and the number of errors made in responding to the rapidly presented stimuli in the auditory perceptual tests. The hypothesis that some reading impairments are related to low-level auditory perceptual dysfunction that affects the ability to learn to use phonics skills adequately is discussed.     

Self-esteem and beliefs about memory in environmentally stable and relocated students

This research examined beliefs about the utility of environmental, semantic, and phonological cues for remembering, as these beliefs are related to feelings of self-esteem, assertiveness, and locus of control. We proposed different types of relationships between self-esteem (and assertiveness) and metamemory for two group of college students, based on their differential experiences with distinctive memory failures. For students who were familiar with their current environment, self-esteem was positively related to confidence in having a good memory. It was only for newcomers—students who had recently moved to a new environment—that beliefs about the benefits of environmental cues were positively related to self-esteem and assertiveness. These results suggested that if newcomers were less aware of the utility of environmental cues, they were more likely to attribute their memory failures to their own inadequacies. We also obtained evidence that subjects with an internal locus of control were more knowledgeable regarding the utility of environmental cues than were externally oriented subjects.     

Identification of language-impaired children on the basis of rapid perception and production skills

Discriminant function analysis was used to determine whether performance on temporal perception and production tasks alone could correctly classify children as language-impaired or normal. The analysis identified six variables, all of which assessed temporal perceptual and production abilities, which taken in combination correctly classified 98% of participating subjects. None of these variables assess the higher-level linguistic abilities (semantic, syntactic, pragmatic) that have classically been considered to be deficient in language-impaired children, or have been used to diagnose them clinically.