Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.     

Current status of the Rorschach Inkblot Method

The current scientific, clinical, and professional status of the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) is reviewed with respect to its psychometric properties, the applied purposes it can be expected to serve, the extent of its use, and the nature of prevailing attitudes toward it. Available evidence indicates that the RIM is a psychometrically sound measuring instrument that provides valid assessments of personality characteristics and can facilitate differential diagnosis and treatment planning and evaluation. The RIM continues as in the past to be widely used by both clinicians and researchers. However, the esteem in which it is held by practitioners, who are generally agreed that clinical psychologists should be competent in Rorschach assessment, is not universally shared by academicians, many of whom presently question the future place of Rorschach training in graduate education.     

杏仁复合体损毁对大鼠空间认知能力的影响

杏仁复合体损毁大鼠Ｍｏｒｒｉｓ迷宫作业学习成绩显著低于控制组,记忆成绩较显著低于控制组。其搜索目标时主要采用与控制组的图式策略相异的趋向式策略。策略差异提示：杏仁复合体参与大鼠空间认知的辅助加工。     

REFLECTIONS ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION GOALS IN PSYCHOLOGY ADMISSIONS

Four goals of affirmative action in higher education are described as they relate to psychology admissions. Broadly conceived, these goals are compensating for past injustice, correcting present inequity, promoting intellectual diversity, and enhancing the presence of role models. It is argued that the four goats differ in their underlying assumptions about the purposes of affirmative action and that these differences can result in disparate admission decisions. Data from three experiments on decision making in graduate psychology admissions are presented to illustrate the analysis. In these studies, academic psychologists rated the admissibility of hypothetical graduate student applicants who varied on a number of characteristics (e g., ethnicity, social class, interest in minority research) pertinent to affirmative action. A consistent pattern of ethnic group differences in admissibility ratings was documented, illustrating that compensation for past injustice can be interpreted as a salient affirmative action goal in graduate admissions decisions. Implications of the analysis for clarifying admissions decisions guided by affirmative action goals are discussed.     

Some determinants of task preference and the desire for information about the self

This research examined the influence of task difficulty and diagnosticity (ability information) on task choice and preference. It was found that males preferred diagnostic over non-diagnostic tasks, but among females significant preferences along this variable were not exhibited. Furthermore, the desire to obtain ability-relevant information decreased as a function of prior knowledge about one's ability. Both high and low ability self-perceptions, induced through prior experiences of success and failure, decreased the attraction toward diagnostic in formation. There was no indication that individuals with high ability self-concepts are especially avoidant of further ability-relevant information, as recent literature has suggested. In addition, and contrary to prior findings, difficult tasks were most preferred rather than easy or intermediate tasks, given that diagnosticity is held constant.     

Are there constraints on childhood disfluency?

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of eight stuttering and eight normally fluent children reveals that (a) the location of both stuttering and normal disfluent moments is constrained by sentential constituent structure, and (b) stuttering children experience fluency breakdown with a particular type of constituent (verb phrase) not usually disfluently produced by normals. A view of early stuttering as a sentence planning and integration disorder is present.     

An operant analysis of human altruistic responding

Human altruistic responding (called give responding), which delivered a reinforcer to someone other than the responder, was compared to responding where the responder was the recipient of the reinforcer (called earn responding). The same type of response (button pressing), the same reinforcer (a point representing a penny), and the same reinforcer contingency (a 40-response fixed-ratio schedule) were used for both give and earn responding. Since points representing pennies were used to reinforce give and earn responding, responding for points not worth money was also assessed. Give, earn, and point responding were arranged as concurrent incompatible operants. Lowest rates were obtained for point responding. Compared to earn responding, give responding occurred at lower rates, was more susceptible to cessation when point responding was possible, extinguished more rapidly in the absence of money, and produced less responding during reconditioning compared to conditioning when reconditioning followed a period of nonreinforcement. Give responding was less when it reduced the giver's opportunity to earn. Finally, histories of getting reinforcement from others were shown to determine give responding.     

The effect of aversive consequences upon persistent behavior

It was hypothesized that if a behavior is freely engaged in with the expectancy that an aversive consequence will follow, the intrinsic motivation to perform that behavior will increase when the aversive consequence is no longer present. Subjects either worked on a list of anagrams while receiving electric shock on a VR schedule, while being threatened by electric shock, or in the absence of shock. The experimenter then left the subject alone for 10 minutes with a new list of anagrams. Subjects in the shock condition solved more anagrams on the posttest than subjects in the threat-of-shock and noshock conditions. Subjects in both the shock condition and the threat-of-shock condition reported that they spent more of their free time on the anagrams than subjects in the no-shock condition.     

Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification