Purdue pegboard performance of disabled and normal readers: Unimanual versus bimanual differences

Differences between dyslexics and controls in the unimanual and bimanual conditions of the peg placement section of the Purdue Pegboard Test were examined. Twenty-three disabled and twenty-three normal readers were studied. The groups were carefully screened on a neuropsychological battery. The disabled readers were comprised of a relatively homogeneous language-disordered subgroup exhibiting deficits in naming. Significant Group X Condition interactions were obtained for both raw and percentile scores and indicated that disabled readers performed worse than controls in the unimanual compared to bimanual conditions. The dyslexics performed particularly poorly compared with controls on the left hand condition. The implications of these data for hypotheses which argue for left hemisphere dysfunction, as well as those which posit interhemispheric transfer deficits in reading disabled children, are discussed.     

Developmental differences in empathy with a television protagonist's fear

An experiment was conducted to determine whether children at different ages (3-5 vs 9-11) differ in their tendency to share the emotion of a television character. Subjects were shown a videotape of either a frightening stimulus alone or a character's fear in response to a threatening stimulus that was suggested rather than shown directly. Contrasting predictions were made based on a cognitive-developmental view of the process of empathy vs an automatic conception. Both self-reported emotional reactions and physiological responses were consistent with the cognitive-developmental approach: The younger children were less emotionally aroused by the character's fear than by the fear-provoking stimulus, while the older children responded emotionally to both versions of the videotape. The younger children's lack of empathy was not due to a failure to recognize the nature of the character's emotion. There was some evidence that the older children exhibited a greater tendency to role take than did the younger children.     

Reversible operations in the balance scale task

The development of two types of reversible operations was examined in three tasks involving a two-armed balance scale. The first type of reversible operation, compensation between dimensions, was shown to undergo considerable development between eighth grade and college. Even eighth graders were inconsistent in applying compensation to those versions of the balance scale task that required it. Some subjects, primarily preschoolers, used the given information in a way that was the opposite of that required for correct answers, a result that has been reported for other tasks requiring compensation. A second type of reversible operation, termed “correspondence of patterns”, was also tested and it was tentatively concluded that the responses of the modal college student are not fully reversible in this sense. This finding is also similar to results obtained in judgments of time, speed, and distance and in social judgment studies with college students.     

Forms of social awareness and helping

People encounter situations from different forms of awareness; that is, they can attend to different focal topics (e.g., self, other person, or other person's situation) from different perspectives (e.g., the self's viewpoint, the other person's viewpoint). Two studies assessed whether brief interactions would produce different forms of social awareness, whether the form of awareness would persist to a subsequent interaction, and whether it would influence helping in that encounter. Pedestrians on a city sidewalk were induced to become self-focused (experimenter took their picture), become other-focused (they took experimenter's picture), or empathically adopt the perspective of another person (they advised experimenter where to take a picture). In Study 1, subjects were interviewed after leaving the experimenter. First- and third-person pronoun use and self-ratings suggested that subjects had different forms of awareness. In Study 2, pedestrians participated in one of the same three interaction conditions or a control noninteraction condition and subsequently encountered a confederate in need of help. Subjects in the self-focused and empathic condition helped more than subjects in the other-focused or control condition. Results suggest that forms of awareness created in a brief interaction do persist to subsequent interactions and influence helping. Other variables may influence helping by altering forms of social awareness.     

Demographic characteristics and treatment experiences of women and men who stutter

This paper reports interview data collected from ten men and ten women who stutter. The responses of the subjects tend to (a) highlight the multidimensionality of stuttering, (b) provide additional support for the conclusion drawn earlier of gender differences in stuttering symptomatology, and (c) raise questions about the manner in which stuttering is treated.