Individual functions of subjective time distance and emotional reaction

Lundberg, U. & Ekman, G. Individual functions of subjective time distance and emotional reaction. Scand. J. Psychol., 1973, 14, 29–33.-Data from a previous study ere analysed on an individual level. It was found that a simple power function could describe the relation between subjective and objective time, while an exponential function fitted the data for the relation between emotional reaction and subjective time distance. The same simple alternative functions also described the group data in the previous study.     

Bullies and victims: Their ego picture, ideal ego picture and normative ego picture

The ego picture, ideal ego picture and normative ego picture of bullies and their victims in a school situation were measured with semantic differentials. The bullies considered themselves to be dominant, had high ideals concerning dominance and thought this was what the social norms require. They felt themselves to be impulsive and lacking in self-control. The victims considered themselves to be depressed, lacking in intelligence and personal attractiveness, and displayed in general feelings of inferiority. These characteristics can be partly a cause and partly an effect of the bullying situation. Girls scored in general lower than boys on socially valued characteristics and higher on socially undesirable ones.     

Note on detection of cue intercorrelation in multiple-cue probability learning

Abstract.— After completion of learning tasks with two different levels of cue intercorrelation (r _u=0.00 and 0.80) the detection of cue intercorrelation was tested with either a reproduction or a recognition method in a 2×2 factorial design. The reproduction method yielded an almost perfect matching between the reproduced intercorrelations and the intercorrelations of the tasks, while the recognition method resulted in systematically lower subjective intercorrelations. For the recognition method the subjective intercorrelation was found to vary with the criterion of recognition, so that the stricter the criterion, the higher the subjective intercorrelation.     

Multidimensional analysis of twenty-one odors

Berglund, B., Berglund, U., Engen, T., & Ekman, G.¹ Multidimensional analysis of twenty-one odors. Scand. J. Psychol., 1973, 14, 131–137.-The present paper reports an experiment on the application of multidimensional scaling to the sense of smell for the purpose of revealing basic psychophysical dimensions of odorants matched in perceived intensity and varying only in perceived quality. The results showed clear evidence for the existence of individual odor spaces, but in apparent contradiction to related studies in the literature individual differences were too large to establish a representative odor space for the whole group. For nearly all individual subjects one of the factors extracted seemed to represent a unique hedonic dimension apparently unrelated to the physical attributes of the odorants. It is suggested that such psychological factors may be as important a basis for the judgment of the similarity of odors as the physical attributes of the odorants. Both the interpretation of multidimensional analysis and the extent to which the sense of smell is analytic or synthetic depend on an understanding of this problem.     

Task predictability and performance as determinants of confidence in multiple-cue judgments

Two experiments were performed in order to study judges' confidence in their judgments. Experiment I showed that judges' confidence is a direct function of the cue intercorrelation. r_ij in a pure judgmental task. When judges recieved feedback, the effect of r_ij on confidence was, as predicted, reduced. Confidence was, however, systematically related to neither R ²_c nor performance in the feedback condition. Experiment II was a further study of the effect of feedback on confidence. In addition, the hypothesis that the lack of relation between performance and confidence is due to judges' poor knowledge of how they actually perform in probabilistic inference tasks was tested. The experiment showed that differences among judges' confidence is a direct function of task predictability and that judges' confidence is related to how they believe that they perform rather than to how they actually perform. The theoretical as well as the practical importance of studies of confidence in probabilistic inference tasks was discussed.