A noninvasive index of hemispheric activity

Tympanic thermometers were used to measure fluctuations in the temperature of the left and right hemispheres of 22 normal high school students while performing verbal and nonverbal visual discrimination tasks. The nonverbal task involving face recognition demonstrated the predicted effect of hemispheric bias on performance: The subjects performed better when they showed a relative rise in right-hemisphere temperature. No significant relationship between hemispheric temperature and level of performance was observed during the verbal task, perhaps owing to the opportunity to treat effectively the nonwords as either linguistic strings or visual patterns. It is concluded that tympanic temperature effectively measures hemispheric activity during cognitive processing.     

Patent Productivity of Research Chemists as Related to Age and Experience

Some previous publications have indicated that the creative skills of chemists tend to decline once they are past their thirties or early forties. These conclusions have been based on such criteria of creativity as merit ratings, citations in the literature, etc. In the present study, patent records for all 89 professional men (mostly chemists and chemical engineers) in one division of a large industrial scientific organization were analyzed to determine whether creativity as measured by the production of patentable ideas tended to decrease with age, to increase, or to remain about the same. In the statistical treatment of data both longitudinal and cross-sectional methods were used. All the results were consistent in revealing no decline in creative productivity with increase in age, and indicated instead a tendency for productivity to increase as chemists mature.     

Social Identity,Relative Deprivation,and Coping With the Threat of Position Loss: A Field Study Among Native Shopkeepers in Amsterdam1

The present study investigates how native shopkeepers in Amsterdam respond to the threat experienced by the emergence of immigrant stores. A survey among 101 native shopkeepers confirmed that psychological, rather than instrumental, considerations play an important role. First, perceptions of fraternal deprivation were relatively independent of the amount of egoistical deprivation people perceived. Instead, the experience of fraternal deprivation was related to people's identification as native shopkeepers. Second, egoistical deprivation resulted in negative perceptions of all other entrepreneurs, regardless of their ethnic origin. Third, regardless of perceived egoistical deprivation, native shopkeepers were more likely to discredit immigrant entrepreneurs, as they thought they were more fraternally deprived.     

An auto-adjusting shaping procedure

A variable interval (VI) schedule is described that automatically adjusts the programmed rates of reinforcement in accordance with the rates of responding of subjects during the two immediately preceding 30-sec time intervals. The schedule prescribes that as rate of responding decreases, programmed reinforcement rate increases, and that when rate of responding increases, reinforcement rate decreases. Thus, programmed reinforcement rate is adjusted continuously until some target value is reached. Ten rats were exposed to this procedure five times a day at 1-h intervals. The target, set at VI 120 sec, was reached by most subjects within 4 days of training. Subsequently, all subjects responded consistently during five daily 1-h sessions with VI 120 sec. This procedure speeds up the training of subjects on long VI schedules and substantially reduces the time and effort spent observing the subjects and adjusting the schedule parameter value during the early development of responding.     

Ret in the college classroom

Thirty-five undergraduates participated in an outcome study which compared the results of enrollment in an RET seminar with enrollment in a seminar on another psychotherapy topic, Humanistic Psychology, and two seminars which lacked a psychotherapeutic orientation: Social Development and Extra Sensory Perception. RET instruction failed to decrease irrationality significantly. However, students who received RET instruction had significantly higher perceived self-efficacy than did those in the two nontherapy oriented seminars. There was a significant, inverse relationship between academic achievement (grade point average) and irrational beliefs about need for comfort, need for approval, awfulizing, and low frustration tolerance. Perceived self-efficacy was significantly and positively associated with high academic achievement. Superior students were significantly less likely than their peers to awfulize or exhibit low frustration tolerance; the poorest students were the least likely group to perceive themselves as effective. The implications of these findings for educators and counselors were addressed.A fellow in Rational-Emotive Therapy, Naomi McCormick, Ph.D. is a professor and William Tooke, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Plattsburgh. An earlier version of this article was presented at the World Congress on Mental Health Counseling: A 35th Anniversary Celebration of Rational-Emotive Therapy, Keystone, Colorado: June 13–16, 1990. The authors are grateful to H. Morlock for his methodological insights and thank G. Brannigan, N. Smith, and P. Jarvis for assisting in data collection. Special thanks go to H. Rock for providing information on students from the college's Office of Institutional Research.     

Perceived depth vs. structural relevance in the object-superiority effect

When subjects must identify a barely visible line in a briefly flashed display, their accuracy depends on the configuration of the context in which the target line appears. Weisstein and Harris (1974) found that accuracy is highest when the target is part of a pattern that resembles a unified, three-dimensional object, and lowest in a flat-looking pattern composed of disconnected lines; they labeled this phenomenon the object-superiority effect. In the three experiments reported here, identification accuracy was found to correlate highly and significantly (r =.78) with the judged depth of the patterns. Judged structural relevance of the target line to the pattern (McClelland & Miller, 1979) was uncorrelated with accuracy (r=?.28). Even when the target line appeared as an isolated fragment within the context pattern, a pattern perceived as three-dimensional yielded higher identification accuracy than one perceived as flat.     

Using Three Reporters to Identify Pre-Adolescent Peer Victims through Latent Profile Analysis

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The goals of the current study were to use a three-reporter methodology and multi-level Latent Profile Analysis: (a) to determine the victim...