Self-concept conflict indicators and learning.

"The present study tests the hypothesis that it will be more difficult to learn syllables associated with conflictual adjectives than it will be to learn syllables associated with neutral ones." On the basis of the results of the Bills-Vance-McLean Index of Adjustment and Values, six conflict and six neutral words, each paired with a nonsense syllable, are presented to 94 college freshman Ss and required to be learned by the anticipation method. The syllables paired with the conflict words require a significantly greater number of trials to learn, supporting the hypothesis of defensive behavior, in terms of elevated learning thresholds, for material associated with words identified as conflictual. 24 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some effects of "suspicious" versus 'trusting" training schedules.

The structure of child training was translated into the paradigm of learning in a human engineering situation. The parent is conceived as having a role for the trainee (the child) to learn and employs a schedule of reinforcement. The "suspicious" training schedule involved the trainer always assuming an incorrect response has been given, and uses punitive action (electric shock); "trusting" schedule assumes a correct response, reward being a green light to proceed. Ss were college students; the task involved deciding which of 2 statements reflected greater psychopathology. S had the choice of revealing his selection or not. The hypothesis was that the S exposed to the "suspicious" routine would be more inclined to bring his response to the attention of the evaluater to correct the impression of being wrong, and to more readily learn to adopt trainers' frame of reference. In general, the results support the hypotheses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Responses to "neutral" pronoun presentations and the development of sex-biased responding.

Investigated whether 36 kindergarten and 36 1st-grade children, like college students, would give male-biased responses to a "he" presentation and examined how Ss would respond to the use of "they" and "he or she" pronoun presentations. The effects of pronoun use on memory were also investigated, as were possible sex differences in responding. Each S was assigned to 1 of 3 pronoun presentation groups, each of which contained an equal number of girls and boys. Ss in the different groups listened to the exact same story except that Group I Ss heard the pronoun "they" used throughout the story, Group 2 Ss heard "she" or "he" used throughout the story, and Group 3 Ss heard the pronoun "he" throughout the story. Ss were then asked to retell the story and were shown pictures of a boy and a girl and asked to indicate which one the story was about. Results support the pronomial dominance theory of pronoun functioning for young children. Results also support the hypothesis that boys initially use a self-imaging response to neutral presentations. The time of transition away from this response was identified as the 1st-grade level. There was no indication that kindergarten or 1st-grade girls use the self-imagining approach. The "they" presentation appeared to be the most neutral. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Sensitivity" of depressed individuals to aversive stimuli.

Conducted 2 studies to test the hypothesis that depressed individuals are more sensitive to aversive stimuli than nondepressed individuals. Undergraduates were classified into depressed, psychiatric control, and normal control groups (n = 24) on the basis of therapist ratings, interview techniques, and MMPI subscale scores. Autonomic response (skin resistance) to aversive stimulation was studied both before, during, and after Ss were given a mild electric shock. Adaptation over repeated presentations of the same aversive situation was also studied. It was found that depressed Ss showed a significantly greater autonomic response during, but not before or after, the presentation of the aversive stimulus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Threat-expectancy, word frequencies, and perceptual pre-recognition hypotheses.

"In order to investigate whether delayed perceptual report of threatening words would occur under conditions of threat-expectancy in an experimental setup which makes possible examination of the operation of possible conscious inhibition as well as differential word frequencies, 59 Ss were given a series of 16 booklets, each containing 30 carbon copies of one five-letter stimulus word, to decipher. Eight of these words were considered neutral and eight threatening… . Significantly more trials were required for correct report of threat words as compared to neutral ones. No correlation between number of trials required for correct identification of the test words and word frequency was found… . The findings are interpreted as consistent with a concept of perceptual defense." 20 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Etiquette of verbal conditioning.

Explored the role of ambiguity in producing verbal conditioning by using 2 E types and 2 S types. Es, designated "craftly" because they conditioned their Ss without S becoming aware, were assumed to be more ambiguous than normal Es. Ss uninformed about the correct response were considered to be in a more ambiguous position than informed Ss. 6 college students were assigned to each role within each of the 4 kinds of E-S groups. 1 set of 4 groups sat face-to-face while a visual barrier was interposed between another set. The barrier had no effect on conditioning. As expected, crafty Es were more effective conditioners and their verbal style was rated less clear and less certain. Informed Ss conditioned better than the uninformed. Certain types of ambiguity increase verbal compliance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional factors in the forgetting of word associations.

Systematic explorations of the hypothesis that emotional factors influence memory has eventuated in both acceptance and rejection of the premise. The present study is patterned after the experimental model used by Rapaport et al. The modification introduced concerns the nature of the stimulus words; herein the "neutral" and "emotional" words are equated with regard to frequency of usage. The dependent variable included an evaluation of the emotionality of each word by Es, by Ss, and S's GRS. Factor analysis of the data revealed 2 factors affecting recall: emotionality and "response variability" (between Ss and between testing sessions) suggesting that "the forgetting of word associations is a function of both emotional and non-emotional determinants." From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:3CL99L. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Anxiety and Verbal Learning": Erratum.

Reports an error in the original article by S. J. Korchin and S. Levine (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1957, 54, 234-240). It was erroneously stated that Dr. Korchin is now at the Research Division, Columbus State Institute of Psychiatry, Ohio State University. This statement applies to Dr. Levine. Dr. Korchin remains with the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training, Michael Reese Hospital. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1959-05616-001). 3 groups, differing in anxiety, learned 2 different types of paired-associate materials and then half of each anxiety group were tested under "immediate" and half under "delay" conditions of intertrial spacing. The first 2 groups were college students selected from extreme scorers on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the third group was composed of hospitalized anxious patients. "Among the students, the high and low groups, tested under both delay and immediate conditions, showed no significant differences in their learning of the word-associate material. With the more novel and difficult false equations, however, the high anxiety Ss learned significantly less over all and showed a somewhat slower rate of learning from trial to trial. Among the patients, those tested under the delay condition performed about as well as the high-anxiety students, while those under the immediate condition learned a lesser amount both of the word and equation materials." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adaptation to aversive maternal control and perception of simultaneously presented evaluative cues: A further test of a developmental model of paranoid behavior.

The adaptive style theory proposes that given a sustained aversive maternal control experience children will come to adopt 1 of 2 perceptual orientations toward evaluative cues. The open-style adapter maintains vigilance to negative evaluative cues, whereas the closed-style adapter defends against negative cues. This postulate, also critical to a narrower model for paranoid development, was tested by exposing 78 male undergraduates to an array of evaluative words, which they were told came from a maternal source. The words were composed of favorable, neutral, and unfavorable adjectives. After a period during which the S could freely scan a display of these words, retention was tested by recognition procedures. As predicted, open-style Ss, considered to be predisposed to paranoid behavior, extracted the most negative meaning, and closed-style Ss were the most defended against negative meaning. This effect held only for cues having a maternal source. (20 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety level and the "doubtful" judgment in a psychophysical experiment.

This study investigated the effect of anxiety upon the use of the "doubtful" category in a psychophysical experiment. Ss were required to judge length of lines, using the method of constant stimulus differences, with 3 categories of judgment. A total of 195 judgments were required of each S. It was hypothesized that "anxious" Ss, with high scores on Welsh's "A" Scales, would give significantly more "doubtful" judgments than "non-anxious" Ss with low scores on the same instrument. This hypothesis was fully confirmed. Further analysis also showed that the "non-anxious" group did not differ from the "anxious" group in terms of greater judgmental sensitivity. It was concluded that anxiety apparently can be measured psychophysically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Music discriminations by pigeons.

In Exp I, 2 White Carneaux pigeons responded at more than 80% correct in a single-operandum discrimination learning task when the S+ was a 1-min excerpt of Bach flute music and the S– was a 1-min excerpt of Hindemith viola music. In Exp II, 4 Ss responded at more than 70% correct when they were required to peck the left of 2 disks during presentations of any portion of a 20-min Bach organ piece and to peck the right disk during any portion of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for orchestra. These discriminations were learned slowly. However, the Ss generalized consistently and independently of the instruments involved when presented with novel musical excerpts in Exp III. They preferred the left "Bach disk" when novel excerpts from Buxtehude and Scarlatti were introduced and the right "Stravinsky disk" when novel excerpts from Eliot Carter, Walter Piston, and another Stravinsky work were introduced. Seven college students responded similarly. Therefore, the pigeon's response to complex auditory events may be more like the human's than is often assumed. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A procedural critique of "Desensitization and the experimental reduction of threat."

Suggests that conclusions from an experiment by C. H. Folkins, K. D. Lawson, E. M. Opton, and R. S. Lazarus (see 42:6) be tempered with respect to 2 procedural flaws: (1) Their control for relaxation unpaired with aversive stimuli is unsatifactory because Ss relaxed while viewing the test stress film; and (2) Ss in the "simulated desenisitization" condition were not allowed to escape aversive images when they became disturbing, this error in design violating the principle in desensitization that aversive scenes be paired with relaxation, not with emotional upset. The results cannot be taken as evidence either for or against the importance of any desensitization variables or combinations thereof. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity and children's word recognition.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine the word recognition processes of 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders. In Exp I, 72 Ss named target words that were primed by words that had more than 1 meaning. Targets were related either to the more or less frequent sense of the ambiguous prime or were unrelated to it. Findings indicate that older Ss were more likely than younger Ss to restrict processing of ambiguous words to the most frequent meaning. While younger Ss showed approximately equal facilitation for words related to either meaning, regardless of each one's relative frequency, 6th graders apparently retrieved only the most frequent meaning. Exp II, with 36 Ss, was similar to Exp I but included neutral primes and varied the interval between presentation of prime and target. Results show that all groups showed automatic retrieval of both meanings of the ambiguous word. For 6th graders, however, this retrieval was followed by a 2nd stage, in which attention was allocated to the more frequent meaning, maintaining it, while the less frequent meaning was inhibited. Overall data indicate that older children use meaning frequency to narrow the amount of information kept active following word recognition. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Argument strength, delay of argument, and anxiety in the "conditioning" and "selective learning" of attitudes.

Attitude learning through persuasive communication was studied in 2 experimental situations regarded as being analogous to instrumental conditioning and selective learning, respectively. The communications, which the originally neutral Ss read aloud, included a statement of the opinion to be learned followed by some supporting information (the argument) which did not repeat the opinion statement. Experiment I (2 X 2 factorial, N = 363) results were: speed (1/latency) of agreement with a statement of the opinion was an increasing function of argument strength and drive (MA scale), with argument strength and anxiety combining additively to determine speed of agreement. In Experiment II, 2 separate and unrelated opinions were persuaded for each S (N = 48), and Ss were then required to choose between the 2 opinions in a simultaneous presentation situation. The Ss learned to choose the opinion which was persuaded with the shorter delay of argument (time between opinion statement and argument), and this tendency was inversely related to drive. The results were predicted by a theory of persuasion based on analogies with learning research and Hullian learning theory. (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential ordering of stimulus presentation in systematic desensitization.

50 snake-phobic female Ss were matched on degree of behavioral avoidance and subjective fear and then randomly assigned to 1 of 3 desensitization or 2 control groups: (a) imagined stimuli presented in order of increasing aversiveness, (b) stimuli presented in a decreasingly aversive order, (c) random order presentation, (d) pseudodesensitization, and (e) no-treatment control. Ss in the 3 desensitization groups showed significantly greater improvement than did Ss in either control group. While no differences were found between Ss exposed to an increasingly aversive hierarchy and Ss who received a decreasing order, the random order tended to be less effective than the other 2. An ascending aversive order of stimulus presentations is not an essential and integral part of successful desensitization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schema training in analogical reasoning.

In 3 experiments, college students learned how to solve 20 verbal analogy problems and took transfer and memory tests. Ss learned from worked-out examples that emphasized relational terms such as "part-to-whole" or under 3 other instructional conditions that required responding to examples or that excluded mention of relational terms. The former Ss were more accurate and faster then other Ss on solving new problems involving the same relations but less accurate in recognizing words from previous problems. This pattern is inconsistent with active responding theory, which predicts students learn best by generating answers and receiving feedback to problems, and is consistent with active learning theory, which predicts that students learn best by inducing schemas for particular problem types. Results indicate that schema induction is maximized when the schemas are made salient and the cognitive system is not overloaded. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repression and hypnotic amnesia: A failure to replicate and an alternative formulation.

In an attempt to replicate and extend a study by S. R. Clemes (see record 1965-02178-001), 2 groups of 10 undergraduate hypnotic Ss learned a list of 18 words and were given an amnesia suggestion telling them they would be able to remember only 10 of these words. Half of the list words were critical (i.e., considered to be related to repressed conflictual material) and half were neutral (unrelated to conflictual material) as determined by Ss' responses to a word association test. Experimental Ss received their own critical and neutral words and yoked control Ss received the critical and neutral words of experimental Ss. Neither the experimental nor the yoked control group exhibited selective amnesia in favor of critical words, thus constituting a failure to replicate Clemes's result. However, variables affecting the degree to which words were initially learned (e.g., imagery value, serial position) predicted their resistance to amnesia. These findings are inconsistent with a repression hypothesis but congruent with an inattention hypothesis of suggested amnesia. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perception of disturbing and neutral words through the autokinetic word technique.

Disturbing and neutral words were selected individually for Ss by means of a word association test. It was then suggested to these Ss that an apparently moving but actually motionless point of light in a completely darkened room (autokinetic effect) would write a sentence containing a given word. The given word was either a disturbing or neutral word. The Ss reported perceiving fewer of the disturbing words. Those disturbing words that were perceived had a greater latency than perceived neutral words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal adjustment and the free recall of materials with affectively positive or negative meaningfulness.

Conducted 2 experiments on the role of affective assessment in human verbal learning. In Exp I, 40 high school students grouped according to Tennessee Self-Concept Scale scores were given consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams as learnable items. Ss with high self-concepts learned the trigrams they liked more rapidly than disliked trigrams. Ss with low self-concepts reversed this customary pattern and learned disliked trigrams more rapidly than liked trigrams. In Exp II, 64 undergraduates who had completed the Barron Ego-Strength scale were given real words as learnable materials. Results showed that it was possible for the same S to learn certain words along a negative and other words along a positive reinforcement-value sequence. This depended upon whether the word meanings involved reflected a problem area or an area of competence for the Ss being studied. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reduction of children's fear of the dark by competence-related and situational threat-related verbal cues.

Examined the effects of training children in the use of verbal controlling responses for darkness tolerance. 45 5-6-yr olds rehearsed 1 of 3 types of "mediating response": (a) sentences emphasizing the S's active control or competence, (b) sentences concentrating on reducing the aversive qualities of the stimulus situation, and (c) neutral sentences. Ss were trained in a well-lit room. Each S then remained in total darkness until he or she decided to increase the illumination. The duration of tolerance of darkness and terminal light intensity were assessed across 1 pretest and 2 posttraining trials. On a generalization trial the S was to reduce full illumination. Analyses revealed that differential training significantly influenced duration and intensity settings, with the "competence" group generally superior to the "stimulus" and "neutral" verbalization groups. Alternate interpretations of the findings are offered. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)