OVERJUSTIFICATION EFFECTS IN TOKEN ECONOMIES

This study tested the relevance to clinical token economies of the overjustification hypothesis that tangible reward interferes with intrinsic interest in target behaviors and causes such behaviors to be less probable following a period of reinforcement than preceding such a period. The study was carried out in an ongoing token economy for chronic psychiatric patients. Alternated over an 8-week period were weeks of token and no-token reward for one of the program's target behaviors, toothbrushing. Two different amounts of token reward were employed in order to examine whether reward magnitude might influence the presence or extent of overjustification effects. Little evidence was found for the presence of overjustification effects in token economies. However, maintenance of toothbrushing was greater in no-token weeks following weeks of low amounts of token reward than in no-token weeks following weeks of higher amounts of reward. The importance of such complex functional relationships is discussed.     

Developmental patterns in the encoding and combination of logical connectives

A total of 224 subjects in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, high school, and college solved problems requiring comprehension of the logical connectives and, or, if-then, only if, and if and only if, as well as the terms is and is not. Half the subjects were required merely to encode the connectives; the other half were required to combine as well as encode them. Problems were presented in two replications (over two sessions) via two different content vehicles. Quantitative analyses revealed significant effects of task, age, session, and connective, with comprehension of different connectives developing at different rates. In general, comprehension of the conjunctive connective was easiest; comprehension of the conditional and biconditional connectives was most difficult. Qualitative analyses indicated just how the logical connectives were interpreted at each grade level, and also investigated individual differences within each grade level.     

What children say when asked “What?”: A study of the use of syntactic knowledge

The present study explores two questions: What is the nature of older children's syntactic knowledge; how is that knowledge used in an everyday speech situation? Six-, eight-, and ten-year-olds repeated grammatical sentences as read by the first experimenter. Half the sentences were syntactically clear, half slightly distorted. Clear versions displayed basic grammatical relations and constituent structure perspicuously. The second experimenter, who sat at the other end of the room, asked “What?” after each sentence. The syntactic changes children might make to accommodate the listener were examined. Although the children made a variety of changes, at all ages they tended to change distorted versions to clear ones, and to repeat clear versions. The results suggest that children's syntactic knowledge is deeper and more accessible than had been supposed.     

The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.     

The effect of self-recording and social reinforcement components of parent training programs

This investigation attempted to assess the effectiveness of two components of parent training programs: (1) the effect of a self-behavior management project prior to intervention with deviant child behaviors, and (2) that of social reinforcement from peers and the consultant. Four groups of parents were exposed to a basic training program and were measured on their success in an intervention program in the inappropriate behavior of their children (ages 7–9 years). Two groups of parents were requested to do a self-modification program prior to the intervention with deviant child behavior; two groups did a child intervention program without a self-management project. One group in the self-management and one group without self-management received verbal social reinforcement from peers and the consultant during interventions. Results obtained indicate that the parent group whose training involved a self-behavior management project prior to intervention with their child's inappropriate behavior and verbal social reinforcement achieved a significantly greater reduction of these behaviors when compared to the groups where either self-management of social reinforcement was used.     

The executive control of mnemonic activity

The present study focused on the executive monitoring of a rehearsal strategy by sixth (11 years 5 months), tenth (15 years 8 months), and twelfth (17 years 9 months) graders and adults (27 years 4 months). The results showed that all of the adults spontaneously adopted an “optimal” strategy and generalized it to a second task. However, none of the sixth graders and only two tenth and three twelfth graders did so. All of the school subjects subsequently trained to rehearse, maintained the strategy without prompting, and showed evidence of transfer. In comparison to adults, the trained subjects' generalized routines became more similar to the adults' as grade increased. This study supports the notion that efficient executive functioning includes the case where continued use of a mnemonic routine is a reasonable response to an objective change in an information-processing task.     

A reappraisal of the relation between performances of quantitative identity and quantitative equivalence conservation tasks

Previous studies of children's performance on quantitative identity and equivalence conservation problems in the number domain are suggested to be flawed because of the low numbers of items in the arrays. In Experiment 1, children were tested on three different number versions of identity and equivalence conservation tasks. Their performance varied with the number of items and no child was found to pass a large number version of an equivalence conservation task and fail the corresponding version of an identity conservation task. In Experiment 2 the notion that the contextual effect of asking two similar questions might underlie the difference in performance on the two tasks was tested and rejected. The results are discussed in relation to recent analyses of conservation problems.     

Affective and cognitive mediators of reactions to spatial invasions

At a crosswalk on a busy street, a confederate, sketching a drawing or not, stood close or far from a pedestrian for 10 sec before the street light indicated “Walk.” In the first study, pedestrians were given the opportunity to subsequently help this confederate or another accomplice by calling attention to a dropped pen. In the second study, crossing speeds were timed and pedestrians were asked to record their mood and reactions to “another pedestrian,” who happened to be the confederate. These studies tested and found evidence for both cognitive and arousal explanations of reactions to spatial invasions. Cognitive and attributional theories imply that characteristics of the invader are important mediators of reactions to the invasion. The close nonartist was judged to be more inappropriate, produced faster escape speeds, and was helped less than the close artist or the far confederates. Arousal explanations imply that any invasion produces a generalized reaction which would be unrelated to characteristics of the invader. The other accomplice was helped less when the subject had been invaded and this reduction in helping was unaffected by the artist manipulation. These findings suggest a general arousal response to any invasion with a subsequent reliance on cognitive interpretations.     

The interactive effects of facial expressions of emotion and verbal messages on perceptions of affective meaning

The influence of facial expressions of emotion on perceptions of affective sentence meaning was investigated by pairing happy, angry, suprised, and sad faces of “teachers” with sentences of varying affective tone. Ninety-five students judged the overall meaning communicated by these paired stimuli. The design allowed exploration of unique facial-verbal combination effects, overall cue integration effects, and sex differences. Clear effects of cue combinations emerged. Perceived sincerity was found to be a function of the consistency of evaluative (positivity) but not dominance cues. Perceived positivity was an interactive function of both evaluative cues and dominance cues. Perceived dominance was affected by the interaction of evaluative cues. The subtleties of cue combination were clarified through open-ended dependent measures. Also, as expected, females were found to be more sensitive than males to verbal-nonverbal cue conflict in perceptions of sincerity. However, no other sex differences were found. The findings were discussed with regard to the need for a firm empirical base upon which to integrate verbal and nonverbal research traditions in the communication of affective meaning.     

Relative influence of sincere,insincere, and neutral symbolic models

The study investigated how the sincerity of models affects their influence, using a delay-of-reward paradigm. Subjects were 40 fifth and sixth graders (ages 9 and 10 years, respectively), selected for delayed gratification patterns. In the experimental manipulation, sincerity or insincerity was explicitly attributed to the model or, in a neutral-model condition, no information about the model's sincerity was given. Subjects then observed the symbolically presented model's immediatereward choices, opposed to their own preferences. Immediately after treatment, children in all model conditions and in a fourth, no-model control group responded to a second delay-preference test. It was found that the influence of models varied substantially as a function of experimentally attributed sincerity. Insincere models had considerably less effect than sincere and neutral models, who provoked substantial and equivalent changes. Insincere models did not evoke significantly different change than occurred in the control group. A postexperimental inquiry showed the experimental manipulation had affected perceptions of the model's sincerity and liking for the model, with the insincere model rated considerably lower than the sincere and neutral models. The relevance of cognitive appraisal in observational learning was discussed.