Holland high point social types: Is consistency related to persistence and achievement?

This study concerns Social personality types and assesses the relationship of Holland's secondary construct of consistency to persistence in college and academic achievement. The sample consisted of 211 Social subjects who completed the Self Directed Search (SDS) as college freshmen in 1970. Evidence of persistence/nonpersistence and cumulative grade point averages were determined from college records. Hypotheses concerned the relationship of consistency to (a) termination status (persistence/nonpersistence), and (b) cumulative grade point average, for both persisters and nonpersisters. Results indicate that the relationship between consistency and termination status was significant, with high- and medium-consistency subjects persisting in college at a higher rate than low-consistency subjects. The relationship between consistency and CGPA was also significant. Results indicate that for both persisters and nonpersisters in college, subjects with higher levels of consistency achieve higher CGPAs than do subjects with lower levels of consistency. Implications of these findings for academic retention and counseling, as well as for future research, are indicated.     

Considerations in the choice of interobserver reliability estimates

Two types of interobserver reliability values may be needed in treatment studies in which observers constitute the primary data-acquisition system: trial reliability and the reliability of the composite unit or score which is subsequently analyzed, e.g., daily or weekly session totals. Two approaches to determining interobserver reliability are described: percentage agreement and "correlational" measures of reliability. The interpretation of these estimates, factors affecting their magnitude, and the advantages and limitations of each approach are presented.     

Flooding therapy: Effectiveness,stimulus characteristics,and the value of brief in vivo exposure

Three analogue experiments examined flooding therapy. Experiment 1 showed that flooding was more effective than standardized desensitization in reducing snake phobia. Experiment 2 examined three different modes of presenting the feared stimuli in flooding: taped auditory presentation, pictorial presentation, and a combination of these two. An additional combination group were given a brief in vivo exposure to the feared object immediately after each of three treatment sessions. Both a behavioral test and subjective estimates of fear showed advantages for the combined group that had the in vivo exposure, although it appeared that auditory instructions to imagine interaction with the snake was the best method for presenting the feared stimuli. Experiment 3 compared the auditory imagined method with and without ‘aversive’ or ‘implosive’ scenes, and with either an immediate or a delayed in vivo exposure. The only procedure to produce marked effects was the one that omitted ‘aversive’ scenes and provided immediate post-treatment in vivo exposure.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.     

Figural emphasis and person perception

Based on Jones and Nisbett's (1972) proposition that actor-observer differences in causal attributions derive from differences in attentional focus, it was hypothesized that observers' focus of attention would influence their causal attributions for an actor's behavior. More specifically, it was predicted that the behavior of an actor who was the focus of attention by virtue of some salient physical attribute would be attributed by observers more to dispositional causes and less to situational causes than would the behavior of a less physically salient actor. The manipulations of physical salience were based upon Gestalt laws of figural emphasis in object perception. They included brightness (Study I), motion (Study II), pattern complexity (Study III), and contextual novelty (Studies IV and V). The results revealed that the salinece of the actors' environments (i.e., the other people present) rather than the salience of the actor him/herself had the most consistent influence on causal attributions. When environmental salience was high, behavior was attributed relatively more situationally than when it was low. Prior research findings are considered in light of the proposition that causal attributions for an actor's behavior vary only with the salience of his/her environment, and additional implications of this phenomenon are suggested. Some ambiguities in the application of Gestalt principles to the perception of people are discussed.     

On Herrnstein's equation and related forms

In 1970, Herrnstein proposed a simple equation to describe the relation between response and reinforcement rates on interval schedules. Its empirical basis is firm, but its theoretical foundation is still uncertain. Two approaches to the derivation of Herrnstein's equation are discussed. It can be derived as the equilibrium solution to a process model equivalent to familiar linear-operator learning models. Modifications of this approach yield competing power-function formulations. The equation can also be derived from the assumption that response strength is proportional to reinforcement rate, given that there is a ceiling on response rate. The proportional relation can, in turn, be derived from a threshold assumption equivalent to Shimp's “momentary maximizing”. This derivation implies that the two parameters of Herrnstein's equation should be correlated, and may explain its special utility in application to internal schedules.     

Numerical taxonomy of aphasia

Two hundred consecutively seen aphasics, 142 of them with infarcts, were examined by tests of fluency, comprehension, repetition, naming, and information content. The language scores were subjected to a minimum variance clustering algorithm separately for the total and for the infarct groups. The latter generated 10 clusters on a dendrogram. Attribute analysis of each cluster provided a clinically meaningful profile of language performance for these groups. The degree of correlation of most computer generated clusters with clinically recognized groups was high, and the homogeneity of some of the clusters is striking. An exception appears to be “conduction aphasia,” which is bimodally distributed. One of these clusters, with high fluency and low comprehension scores, was renamed “afferent conduction” aphasia, and the other, with lower fluency and higher comprehension, was renamed “efferent conduction” aphasia. The Principal Components Analysis was used to evaluate the discriminatory value of language characteristics, and the Nearest Neighbor Network Analysis was used to evaluate the significance of clustering. The dendrogram for all aphasics showed a less specific and less homogenous six clusters.