A new look at selective exposure

The relevance of the personality dimension “repression-sensitization” (D. Byrne in B. A. Maher (Ed.), Progress in experimental personality research, Vol. 1, NY: Academic Press, 1964, pp. 169–219) to selective exposure processes was investigated. Experimental repressors (who typically employ “avoidance” strategies in dealing with threatening stimuli) and experimental sensitizers (who generally “approach” threatening stimuli) were allowed to choose and keep one of two pairs of painting reproductions, each pair containing one positively and one negatively valued painting. After the decision, which experimental subjects believed terminated the experiment, subjects were allowed to inspect the alternatives ad libitum for 75 sec. Eye gaze during this period was unobtrusively videotaped. Compared to their matched controls, who were simply asked to inspect the paintings in order to decide which ones they liked best, experimental repressors inspected paintings that were consonant with their choices and avoided looking at paintings that were dissonant with their decisions. Experimental sensitizers did not manifest such postdecisional selective exposure. The implications of these results for past and future research on dissonance-produced selective exposure were discussed.     

基于传统人性论的德育思考

传统人性论蕴含着丰富的德育资源,为我们提供了多方厩的经验、教训和启示：教化成善,发挥德育潜移默化的作用;顺乎人性,坚持德育中和适度的原则;修身养性,注重道德主体自觉的培养;以人为本,落实德育科学发展的理念。     

INCREASING RECYCLING IN ACADEMIC BUILDINGS: A SYSTEMATIC REPLICATION

We placed recycling receptacles in two locations in academic buildings and studied recycling behavior within an ABA multiple baseline design. During baseline, recycling receptacles were placed in a central location. During the intervention, receptacles were moved into classrooms where beverages were primarily consumed. Baseline conditions were then reinstated. The percentage of cans recycled daily increased during intervention and returned to near-baseline levels during withdrawal. The percentage of cans discarded daily in the trash decreased during the intervention and increased to near-baseline levels during withdrawal. Implications of this study include making recycling more convenient in institutional settings.     

If You Can't Change What You Believe,You Don't Believe It

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one's rational character, whether or not those activities are under one's voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle.     

Development and training of role-taking abilities with emotionally disturbed preschoolers: A pilot study

The purposes of the present study were to verify whether emotionally disturbed preschoolers admitted to a medical day-care center would evidence a developmental lag in role-taking skills as compared to nondisturbed kindergartners and to study the effects of a training program with as its purpose to teach the MDC children to deal with their own and others' emotions. Forty-three children from a kindergarten (n=22; mean age of 4.11 years) and a medical day-care center (n=21; mean age of 4.11 years) participated in this study. The MDC children were randomly assigned to a control (n=9) and to a training condition (n=12). The training for the latter group covered a 10-week period. The results from this pretest and posttest design revealed no differences in performance for emotional role-taking (i.e., Borke-task) and social guessing (i.e., De Vries-task) between the disturbed and nondisturbed children on the pretest. On the posttest, however, a significant developmental lag was evident for the MDC-children who did not receive the training and those who did and the control group.     

Inspection time and its relation to intelligence

Inspection time, defined as the minimum duration for which two different stimuli must be presented if they are to be perceived as different, was measured for both auditory and visual stimuli. The minimum durations were determined by means of a two- alternative forced-choice task for 50 children whose average age was 12 years 2 months. The times were correlated with the children's verbal (Mill-Hill vocabulary) and nonverbal (Raven matrices) intelligence. The Kendall correlation coefficients were ?.3188 and ?.0929 for the auditory and visual inspection times with verbal intelligence, and ?.2322 and ?.2676 for those times with nonverbal intelligence. Auditory and visual inspection times were correlated .1721 with each other. These results do not support earlier claims that inspection time is closely related to conventional measures of intelligence.     

Deprivation and reward stimuli as compound stimuli

In Experiment 1 the experimental group was tested with a deprivation level and a reward magnitude which it had experienced previously but which it had not experienced in combination. This group was inferior in test performance to a group which had experienced the test deprivation-reward combination prior to test. These results were interpreted as indicating that deprivation stimuli and reward stimuli form a compound stimulus and training on the elements of the compound produces performance inferior to training directly on the compound. In Experiment 2, the decrement associated with two different shifts in deprivation and reward did not differ despite the different size change of total incentive involved in the two shifts. The results were interpreted as indicating that the deprivation-reward stimulus is not produced by a single underlying incentive mechanism.     

Categorical and schematic organization and the development of retrieval strategies

This study investigated the effects of schematic and categorical organization on young children's recall. Preschool and kindergarten children recalled either a taxonomic list or a story in one of two presentation conditions: an alternate condition, in which the material was presented, children recalled it and the procedure was repeated, or a successive condition in which the material was presented twice and children recalled it twice. Although preschool children's story recall was well organized, their list recall was poorly organized, and organization did not increase over recall trials in either presentation condition. In contrast, kindergarten children's recall of both the story and the list was well organized, and their recall was better organized on the second recall trial than on the first in both presentation conditions. These results are discussed in terms of the development of retrieval strategies during the preschool years/     

Sex differences in retention of verbal and spatial characteristics of stimuli

Males and females from Grades 3, 6, and college viewed sets of five or seven letters in a 4 × 4 matrix, and remembered either (a) names of the letters, (b) positions of the letters within the matrix, or (c) both letters and positions. At all grade levels females remembered letters more accurately than positions, while males remembered letters and positions equally well. However, there was also evidence that verbal and spatial information was processed independently by both males and females. Results are discussed in terms of neurological development and sex differences in specific abilities.