The purposes of laboratory experimentation and the virtues of deliberate artificiality

Critics of the laboratory experiment have maintained that artificiality (the intrusion into the experiment of “unrealistic” conditions) vitiates any possibility of generalizability beyond the confines of the laboratory. It is argued here that such artificiality in laboratory experimentation is a defect or flaw only within the context of verification and may be a distinct virtue in the context of discovery. Indeed it is argued that social psychological experiments may not be artificial enough when contrasted with the most fruitful experiments in the natural sciences. One purpose of an experiment may be to maximize artificiality deliberately so as to discover regularities that do not presently obtain under the “real” conditions outside the laboratory but which are capable of existing. When such observed laboratory regularities produce potentially beneficial outcomes, an attempt may be made to create the specific artificial laboratory conditions outside the laboratory to benefit mankind. This logic, exceedingly common in the natural sciences, has been virtually ignored in social psychology, even in the laboratory experiment, in favor of “realistic” reproduction of existing or reasonably plausible situations. Theoretical benefits of this additional modality of experimentation are illustrated by two recent developments in psychology.     

Attributed influence: The importance of observing change

The presence of a target's unexpected change in behavior following an influence attempt was hypothesized to be a critical variable for attributing influence to a particular agent. Observers read a brief story in which an agent's intervention was followed by the target's compliance, noncompliance, or countercompliance to the request. The results indicated that influence was attributed to the agent in the conditions demonstrating change, i.e., compliance and countercompliance, regardless of the direction of that change. Additional findings indicated that influence attributed to an agent decreased if the target delayed final compliance with the intervention.     

Long-delay taste aversion learning in an unpoisoned rat: Exposure to a poisoned rat as the unconditioned stimulus

M. J. Lavin, B. Freise, and S. Coombes (Behavioral and Neural Biology, 1980, 28, 15–33) have shown that if two rats consume a flavored solution and one is poisoned, the unpoisoned partner will also exhibit a flavor aversion during a later preference test. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a sufficient condition for obtaining this aversion is that the poisoned partner be present with the unpoisoned rat after it has consumed the flavored solution. It is not necessary that the poisoned partner be present when the flavored solution is consumed or indeed have had any exposure to the flavored solution. Experiment 3 showed that the unpoisoned partner can exhibit a flavor aversion when there is a temporal gap of as long as 6 hr between consumption of the flavored solution and exposure to the poisoned rat.     

Locus of control and the perception of freedom in an agent of reinforcement

Internals and externals observed a staged videotape presentation that portrayed a “teacher” and a “learner” engaging in a 20-item anagrams task. For externals, any variability (10, 50, and 90% schedule) in the reinforcing behavior of the “teacher” (agent of reinforcement) resulted in significantly greater perceived freedom than when no variability (0 and 100% schedule) occurred in behavior. For internals, perceived freedom was a negative linear function of the amount of reinforcement administered. Internals indicated that they could influence the behavior of the “teacher” in all reinforcement conditions, whereas externals indicated that they could influence only the “teachers” in the variable reinforcement conditions. It was concluded that greater freedom is attributed to a person whose behavior is perceived as congruent with the person's inner disposition.     

Subgroups of developmental language impairment

Nineteen children with developmental language impairments were given tests which measured syntactic and phonological skills in both comprehension and production conditions, semantic ability, syllable sequencing, and digit span. The results of discriminant function analysis show that the children could be divided into two groups. Group 1, expressive, was characterized primarily by deficits in the production of syntax and phonology. Group 2, expressive-receptive, was more impaired on measures of phonological discrimination, digit span, and semantic ability in addition to showing global syntactic deficits. An auditory-perceptual basis for the language impairments was not supported.     

Effects of real vs pretend shock on semantic differential judgments and the GSR in some classical conditioning paradigms

In two experiments subjects were shown different color 1-sec lights, one just before the end of a 4-sec UCS and the other coming 10 sec after UCS termination and 25 sec before the next UCS. For some groups the UCS was strong electric shock; for others it was a tone which subjects were instructed to imagine was a strong shock. The primary data were changes in semantic differential ratings of the lights before and after 12 “conditioning” trials. There were no differences among the groups. In a third experiment a 6-sec delay CS was used for GSR conditioning, some subjects receiving actual shock and others pretend shock. Only the former showed conditioning. The results are discussed in terms of a model of experimental demand.     

Reaction times and speed-of-processing: Their relationship to timed and untimed measures of intelligence

Eighty-one university students were given a battery of reaction time tests, measuring the speed with which they performed various elementary cognitive processes, and a group test of intelligence which yielded timed and untimed scores. Multiple regression analyses indicated that speed of information-processing was an equally good predictor of timed and untimed intelligence test performance, and that various combinations of speed-of-processing variables accounted for as much as 48% of the variance in intelligence test scores. Different speed-of-processing variables varied relatively systematically in the extent to which they correlated with the individual subtests and scales of the intelligence test.     

Right hemisphere appreciation of prosodic and linguistic indications of implicit attitude

Appreciation of attitudes conveyed through prosodic cues and lexical content was examined in subjects with temporal lobe seizure foci. One task involved auditory judgments of the consistency of verbal and intonational meaning of sentences. Errors on judgments of consistent verbal and prosodic stimuli were not only more frequent in the right temporal group than in left temporals or controls but were strongly related to neuropsychological indices associated with extent of right temporal involvement. Answering questions based on written narratives in which multiple attitude markers were either redundant or conflicting comprised the second task. Right temporal patients as a group had difficulty in answering inferential questions about paragraphs with inconsistent indicators of attitude. Even low-scoring right temporals were able, however, to answer inferential and factual questions when the verbal context markers consistently reinforced a particular attitude.     

Self-monitoring behavior in a case of severe auditory agnosia with aphasia

This case report describes an unusual combination of speech and language deficits secondary to bilateral infarctions in a 62-year-old woman. The patient was administered an extensive series of speech, language, and audiologic tests and was found to exhibit a fluent aphasia in which reading and writing were extremely well preserved in comparison to auditory comprehension and oral expression, and a severe auditory agnosia. In spite of her auditory processing deficits, the patient exhibited unexpected self-monitoring ability and the capacity to form acoustic images on visual tasks. The manner in which she corrected and attempted to correct her phonemic errors, while ignoring semantic errors, suggests that different mechanisms may underlie the monitoring of these errors.     

慢性乙型肝炎T细胞功能与HBV前C区变异的研究

通过研究慢性HBV感染者前C区变异及T细胞免疫功能与疾病的相关性,评估前C（preC）区变异及T细胞免疫功能对于慢性乙型肝炎（chronichepatitisB,CHB）预后的影响。分别采用实时荧光法、突变特异PCRmsPCR法及微粒酶免疫分析法对150例HBV-DNA阳性的CHB及50例健康体检者进行血清HBV-DN...