Taste-mediated potentiation of noningestional stimuli in rats

Holtzman rats drank saccharin in a distinctive environmental chamber prior to lithium-induced toxicosis. This treatment was administered four times. These animals subsequently drank less water or familiar saline in the chamber than animals which received water in the environment during conditioning. In addition, these environmental stimuli blocked the formation of a lithium-mediated coffee aversion more if they were conditioned in the presence of saccharin than if they were conditioned in the presence of water. Such differential blocking provided further evidence that the presence of a taste during conditioning facilitated aversion learning to the environmental chamber.     

The use of conditional probabilities in applications of Holland's theory

The hexagon of J. L. Holland (1973, Making Vocational Choices: A Theory of Careers, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall) is a useful heuristic device for predicting congruency and consistency among the six personality/environment types specified by his theory. One limitation of the traditional hexagon is the implicit bidirectionality: the hexagon displays a single distance between two types. People in applied areas may assume a symmetry which does not exist. Examples are given of situations in which a consistent asymmetry occurs; e.g., in the illustrative data presented, C (Conventional) types are more likely to have E (Enterprising) as a secondary interest than E types are to have C as a secondary interest. Implications of such asymmetries are discussed and suggestions made concerning counseling and other applications.     

Dichotic testing of cerebral dominance in stutterers

Matched groups of right-handed male stutterers and controls received dichotic presentations of CVs and melodies on two occasions. Right ear advantages were obtained for CVs and left ear advantages for melodies, without significant differences between groups. However, a significantly greater number of stutterers than controls consistently failed to show the expected ear laterality for either type of material.     

Spatial localization in children after changes in position

Five experiments investigated the young child's ability to retrieve a target after a change in the position of the child or the target. In Experiments I–IV 2- to 4-year-old children were rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° about a stationary square table containing four identical hiding locations at each of the cardinal locations. The children tested performed this task significantly better than chance, but their errors reflected either their response biases in the absence of any information as to the location of the target, or the repetition of a response which had been successful in retrieving the target prior to the change in position. When the children were forced to respond rapidly, these errors increased significantly. In Experiment V a table top was rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° in front of 3- to 10-year-old children. There were two cue situations. The child saw the rotation, or the child had to infer the rotation. Young children made errors of the types observed in Experiments I–IV. The ability to inhibit these errors increased with age. By 7 years of age performance was virtually perfect when the child could observe the change in position of the hidden object. The ability to infer the positional change developed more slowly and was good but not perfect at 10 years of age.     

Occupational knowledge and career development in adolescence

In an effort to extend our knowledge of career development, two indices of career maturity were investigated in a sample of 6029 high school seniors sampled from 57 Texas public school districts. The study investigated both the degree to which late adolescents choose occupations whose educational requirements match their stated educational goals and the degree to which students' vocational interests are compatible with their occupational choices. The correlations between educational plans and educational requirements of the chosen occupations were .41 or less. Of the subjects who claimed to have at least considerable understanding of their first choice career, only about half planned to achieve the amount of education appropriate to enter that occupation. Subjects' perceptions of how well they understood their occupational choices were also negligibly related to the compatibility of their vocational interests and their career choices. Although educational understanding and interest compatibility both contribute to realism of occupational choices, the correlation between these two indices of career maturity accounted for less than 1% of the variance.     

Organizational communication,performance, and job satisfaction as a function of ethnicity and sex

Regression analysis was used to examine simultaneously the effects of supervisors' and subordinates' ethnicity and sex on organizational communication, supervisory-rated performance, and job satisfaction. The study indicates that female subordinates differentially perceive organizational communication. It also identifies interactions between the sex of the supervisor and subordinate on communication and between the ethnicity of the superior and subordinate on supervisory-rated performance. There were limited impacts of sex and ethnicity on job satisfaction.     

The informativeness and frequency of presentation of a social stimulus as determinants of its efficacy as a reinforcer

It was demonstrated that variations in the informativeness of a social stimulus place important limitations on the generality of the proposition that deprivation heightens, while satiation lowers, responsiveness to a social stimulus. Using 60 children 5 to 6 years of age as subjects, a social stimulus (“good”) was presented at either a high or a low frequency in one of three information-value contexts (high, medium, or low). Immediately following the exposure treatment the same social stimulus was employed as a reinforcer of nonpreferred responses in a two-choice discrimination learning task. The findings indicated that the heightened efficacy of deprivation relative to satiation only held for low information value; when initial information value was high the subsequent efficacy of a social stimulus was enhanced by its initial recurrent usage. Trend analyses revealed that the effects of variations in information value were strongest within the high-frequency-of-praise treatment. Possible mechanisms underlying the significant Information Value × Frequency interaction were discussed.     

Determinants of social perception in a naturalistic setting

Based upon the assumption that personality traits exist more in the eye of the observer than is actually reflected in the actions of the actor, Jones and Nisbett have proposed that a negative relationship exists between familiarity with an actor's behavioral history and the tendency to attribute traits to that individual. An alternative viewpoint is suggested by the present research. Members of a college fraternity attributed more personality traits to themselves than were attributed to them by their fellow members. In addition, the fraternity members tended to offer more dispositional attributions to other members with whom they were more familiar. Furthermore, evidence is presented that is suggestive of the validity of these attributions. It is concluded that the attribution of personality traits provides attributors with information that is both veridical and useful in guiding social interactions.