Preinteraction expectations, marital satisfaction, and accessibility: A new look at sentiment override.

This study investigated spouse expectations immediately prior to a marital interaction and also examined whether the accessibility of evaluative judgments about the partner and the marriage advances understanding of marital satisfaction and its correlates. Ninety-two couples participated in the study. As hypothesized, marital satisfaction correlated with preinteraction expectations of partner behavior and with current affect, and expected partner behavior mediated the relation between satisfaction and affect. Response latency to make evaluative judgments of the partner and the marriage moderated the relation between satisfaction and expected partner behavior for husbands. The findings are integrated with basic research on attitudes, and their clinical implications are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Peekaboo: A new look at infants' perception of emotion expressions.

Infants' responsiveness to others' affective expressions was investigated in the context of a peekaboo game. Forty 4-month-olds participated in a peekaboo game in which the typical happy/surprised expression was systematically replaced with a different emotion, depending on group assignment. Infants viewed three typical peekaboo trials followed by a change (anger, fear, or sadness) or no-change (happiness/surprise) trial, repeated over two blocks. Infants' looking time and affective responsiveness were measured. Results revealed differential patterns of visual attention and affective responsiveness to each emotion. These results underscore the importance of contextual information for facilitating recognition of emotion expressions as well as the efficacy of using converging measures to assess such understanding. Infants as young as 4 months appear to discriminate and respond in meaningful ways to others' emotion expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word and person effects on decoding accuracy: A new look at an old question.

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on decoding by bringing together two lines of research, namely person and word factors that affect decoding, using a crossed random-effects model. The sample was composed of 196 English-speaking Grade 1 students. A researcher-developed pseudoword list was used as the primary outcome measure. Because grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC) knowledge was treated as person and word specific, it was concluded that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a student to know all GPCs in a word before accurately decoding the word. Controlling for word-specific GPC knowledge, students with lower phonemic awareness and slower rapid naming skill have lower predicted probabilities of correct decoding than do counterparts with superior skills. By assessing a Person × Word interaction, it was found that students with lower phonemic awareness have more difficulty applying knowledge of complex vowel graphemes compared with complex consonant graphemes when decoding unfamiliar words. Implications of the methodology and results are discussed in light of future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use in person perception and stereotyping: Simulation with a recurrent connectionist network.

Connectionist models contrast in many ways with the symbolic models that have traditionally been applied within social psychology. In this article the authors apply an autoassociative connectionist model originally developed by J. L. McClelland and D. E. Rumelhart (1986) to reproduce several well-replicated and theoretically important phenomena related to person perception and stereotyping. These phenomena are exemplar-based inference, group-based stereotyping, the simultaneous application of several stereotypes to generate emergent characteristics, and the effects of recency and frequency of prior exposures on accessibility (the probability of a representation's use). Though many of these phenomena are explained by current theories in social psychology, the simulation contributes to parsimony and theoretical integration by showing that a single, very simple mechanism can generate them all. The model also predicts a new phenomenon—rapid recovery of accessibility after it has declined to zero. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-serving biases in person perception: A reexamination of projection as a mechanism of defense.

Examines the evidence on projection as a mechanism of psychological defense, with emphasis on D. S. Holmes's (see PA, Vols 42:10594 and 62:3649) reviews. In contrast to Holmes's conclusions, it appears that there is strong support for 2 distinct mechanisms: (a) attributive projection in which a self-ascribed undesirable trait is projected onto favorably perceived target persons and (b) classical projection in which an undesirable trait that is denied is projected onto unfavorably perceived target persons. Although there is no research on the effects of classical projection, there is reliable evidence indicating that attributive projection has a stress-reducing effect. A broadened interactional formulation of self-serving biases in person perception is presented, and the implications for future research are discussed. (44 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Second-hand personication: A new model for "person perception" research.

An impression formed about someone on the basis of direct observation of him and/or communication from him is basically different from one formed on the basis of a third individual's report. The analysis of the variables involved leads to a general model of "personication." Twelve specific hypotheses are derived from this model and discussed in terms of "person perception" experiments. E is shown to be always one of several "personicators" who form and communicate impressions about others and necessarily influence each other in the impression forming process. E is also the subject of the impression forming process of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new look at pelvic relaxation

The concept is presented that most cystoceles and/or urethroceles result from insolated defects in the connective tissue supports of the anterior quadrant of the pelvis. Four areas in which defects have been found to occur are identified. Sixty patients are presented who were found to have isolated defects in the endopelvic fascia at the lateral sidewall of the pelvis with significant cystourethroceles and stress urinary incontinence. The surgical treatment consisted only of a direct approach to and closure of the isolated defect. The operative results at 3 to 48 months were excellent in 91.7 per cent, improved in 5 per cent, and failed in 3.3 per cent. Discussion is offered of the possibility of the study of the pelvic floor from the viewpoint of a mechanical engineer.     

A developmental look at pattern symmetry in perception and memory.

A speeded sequential same–different paradigm was used to measure the pattern goodness effect at a visual encoding stage and a short-term memory stage in observers aged from 6 to 22 years. Pairs of nine-dot patterns varying in goodness were presented to subjects in three experiments. Experiment 1 used a 1-s retention interval and found larger goodness effects in short-term memory than at encoding for all observers. Furthermore, the memory effects decreased with age, whereas no age change was observed for the encoding effects. Experiment 2 generalized these findings to other retention intervals (0 and 3 s). No age differences were found in the O-s condition, whereas the 3-s condition showed large changes with age. An unexpected result indicated that an additive model of encoding and memory could not be assumed. Experiment 3 used new subjects and a mixed-trials design to replicate this finding. It is suggested that pattern goodness may affect information processing at three stages: encoding, retention, and pattern comparison. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new look at vigilance and defense.

2 hypotheses were tested: (a) "Threatening tachistocopic stimuli are recognized at thresholds both higher and lower than thresholds for matched control words. The extent of deviation is related to degree of anxiety induced by the threat"; and (b) "When the associated anxiety is removed, then threshold deviations diminish. The degree of reduction is related to the decrease in anxiety." 22 adults of mixed sexes served as Ss. 2 matched lists of words were presented in an anagram-solving exercise. One list was constructed to produce failure. When all words were presented tachistoscopically for a second time, it was found that anxiety aroused by the failure correlated significantly with the absolute difference between recognition thresholds for failure and control words. This relationship persisted even after the artificial nature of the anxiety had been explained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consciousness and stress reduction in defensive projection: A reply to Holmes.

Discusses D. S. Holmes's (see record 1982-03660-001) critique of the author's (see record 1982-03692-001) article on self-serving biases in person perception. Holmes's critique is not compelling for 2 reasons: (a) His contention that there is no evidence to support classical projection is defensible only if an essentially untestable concept, the unconscious, is considered to be a vital component of the mechanism; and (b) his conclusions regarding the stress-reduction effects of attributive projection rely on research that is methodologically flawed or unavailable for public scrutiny. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new look at British graduate students.

Discusses findings of a survey of British graduate students in psychology conducted in late 1972 and 1973. Responses were obtained from 34 of the 89 British departments offering advanced courses or supervision for research leading to the PhD in psychology or one of its subspecialties. The total enrollment of all postbaccalaureate students in psychology was 1,112, but only 277 of these were in PhD programs; the number is almost 8 times higher in the US. UK postgraduate training in psychology seems to be conducted on a much smaller scale than in the US, the students enter doctoral training at an earlier age than American students, and females and non-White minority students are well represented in UK doctoral training programs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new look at the effects of noise: A rejoinder.

Outlines a composite theory to account for the effects of noise upon performance. The 4 main determinants are (a) masking, both of acoustic cues and of inner speech; (b) distraction; (c) a beneficial increase in arousal when the noise begins, which gradually lessens and falls below normal to produce a decrement in performance when the noise stops; and (d) positive and negative transfer from noise to quiet. Positive transfer results from the more effective learning of the task in noise under the influence of the increase in arousal. Negative transfer results from the techniques of performance used in noise to counteract the masking or distraction, when they are not appropriate in quiet. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rorschach revisited: A new look at an old test.

Two control samples (21 and 27 college students) and a sample of 21 short-term psychiatric patients (aged 21-26 yrs) scaled all pairs of Rorschach inkblots for perceived similarity. Data were analyzed using J. D. Carroll and C. C. Chang's individual scaling (INDSCAL) model, which resulted in a good fit in 2 dimensions. These 2 dimensions were interpreted as a dimension of color and 1 of form ("twoness"), and empirically validated in a 2nd study, using 2 groups of controls (20 and 33 college students) and 6 short-term schizophrenic patients. It was also found that the saliences estimated by INDSCAL for each S formed 3 virtually nonoverlapping distributions. This implies a possible use of the method within a diagnostic context. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Taking a long look at action and time perception.

Everyone has probably experienced chronostasis, an illusion of time that can cause a clock's second hand to appear to stand still during an eye movement. Though the illusion was initially thought to reflect a mechanism for preserving perceptual continuity during eye movements, an alternative hypothesis has been advanced that overestimation of time might be a general effect of any action. Contrary to both of these hypotheses, the experiments reported here suggest that distortions of time perception related to an eye movement are not distinct from temporal distortions for other kinds of responses. Moreover, voluntary action is neither necessary nor sufficient for overestimation effects. These results lead to a new interpretation of chronostasis based on the role of attention and memory in time estimation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)