On the basis of early transitivity judgments

This research had two aims. The first was to test three explanations of performance on N-term series tasks by young children: the labeling model of B.DeBoysson-Bardies and K. O'Regan (1973), Nature (London), 246, 531–534, the sequential-contiguity model of L. Breslow (1981, Psychological Bulletin, 89, 325–351), and the ordered array or image model of C. A. Riley and T. Trabasso (1974, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 17, 187–202). In the first experiment, 5-year-old children were taught additional premises which would interfere with labeling and sequential-contiguity processes, but not with forming an ordered array. Reasoning performance was essentially comparable to previous results with the paradigm, thus supporting the ordered array model. The second aim was to reexamine children's ability to learn sets of premises which can be assembled into an ordered array, since there was reason to believe that previous studies had created false positives. In the second experiment, 3- to 7-year-old children were taught either overlapping (a > b, b > c, …) or nonoverlapping (a > b, c > d, …) premises. Overlapping premises can be integrated into an ordered array (a, b, c, d, e), but nonoverlapping premises cannot. However, the overlapping condition proved more difficult, and the success rate for preschoolers ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-olds}$) was of zero order. This raises doubts about their ability to learn a set of premises of the kind required for transitive inference. These doubts were strengthened by the third experiment which showed that when premises were not presented in serial order, preschool ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-old}$) children could not learn the premises of an N-term series task.     

Social Activism's Possibility through Perspectives of Gloria Anzaldúa,Walter Benjamin and C. G. Jung1

This paper explores the vertices of Jung's, Anzaldúa's and Benjamin's distinct ontologies and the way in which they connect in the shared recognition that what has been estranged in human history is enigmatically lodged in the world's fabric today. Cultural distress, in other words, is the outcome of what has become repudiated in the self and the collective across time. From this perspective, the paper argues that we have a collective responsibility to listen to the claims of the dead laid bare in moments of contemporary real-world danger and it elaborates the psychical dimensions of being that are cultivated in times of danger. The author contends that these psychical presences are the dead of human history including our ancestral heritage that linger and possibly may penetrate our awareness. They haunt and hold a potential to animate our movement towards a sublimatory process that can be seen as a precursor to social responsiveness and action. The author explores this through her own experience with an example of the spawning of spiritual activism within the socio-political maelstrom of AIDS.     

Realism,instrumentalism, and the intentional stance

One of Dennett's principal arguments for an instrumentalistic construal of intentional attributions (e.g., attributions of belief, etc.) is that such attributions are environment relative. I argue that one can and should adopt a realist perspective toward such attributions, but accommodate their environmental relativity by treating intentional properties as relational properties. By doing so one acquires a useful perspective on experimental cognitive psychology; in particular, one can overcome the temptation to treat ecological accounts and information processing accounts as incompatible alternatives and come to see them as mutually supportive. Treating intentional properties as relational may be counter-intuitive, but I provide examples of how other sciences have had to treat what seem to be intrinsic properties as relational.     

The stability of status orientations among young,white, rural women from three southern states

This paper reports the results of a panel study of young, white, rural women from Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas (N = 138). The study was primarily concerned with how social origin variables affected early educational and occupational orientations and how early states of these orientations affected the orientations themselves at a later point in time. The results indicated that mother's education had a greater effect than father's education, but in either case the effect is mediated by intervening influences such as early aspirations and expectations. These young women held very traditional status orientations (with 60% projecting the occupations of beautician, nurse, stenographer, or school teacher), and their orientations were quite stable between their sophomore and senior years in high school. Since there has been so little work reported on the status attainment process for women, and rural women in particular, this study does offer a limited insight into this phenomenon.     

Age changes in nonverbal decoding as a function of increasing amounts of information

A test of nonverbal decoding skill (the PONS test) was administered to 632 subjects of eight different age levels, ranging from third graders to adults (Ages 8–33 years). Females were more accurate than males, older subjects were more accurate than younger ones, and all samples tended to decode more successfully when more information was available. Three different analyses showed that the increase in accuracy with increasing amounts of information was more pronounced for the older than for the younger groups. This differential effectiveness in the utilization of available information was discussed in terms of processing capacity, effort, and strategies for sampling a diversity of cues.     

Attitudinal qualities relating to the strength of the attitude-behavior relationship

A study was conducted to examine the relation between each of several attitudinal qualities and attitude-behavior consistency. Subjects' attitudes toward volunterring to participate in psychological research were assessed. The number of experiments in which each subject volunteered to participate was employed as the measure of behavior. Attitude-behavior consistency was significantly related to (1) the amount of direct experience upon which the subject's attitude was based (specifically, the number of experiments in which the subject had previously participated), (2) the degree of certainty with which the attitude was held, and (3) how well-defined the subject's attitude was, as measured by the width of his latitude of rejection. These three attitudinal qualities were significantly intercorrelated, suggesting that direct experience with an attitude object may produce an attitude that is both better defined and more confidently held than an attitude formed through more indirect means.     

Effects of attack and uncontrollable noise on aggression

After being either attacked or treated in a more neutral manner by an experimental confederate, male subjects shocked the confederate while being stimulated by loud noise. Among previously attacked subjects, possession of control over offset of the noise led to the delivery of shocks significantly shorter in duration than those given by subjects who did not have control. Mere predictability of noise offset did not have the same effect. Subjects who could control the noise did not differ from those who heard no noise with respect to the duration of shocks given. Noise had no effect on shock duration among nonattacked subjects. In a follow-up study subjects who were given bogus information that they were aroused by noise were less punitive toward an attacking confederate than subjects given no such information. The overall conclusion is that noise facilitates aggression in subjects who have been instigated to aggress to the degree that noise-produced arousal is misattributed to the instigating stimulus.