Extreme response tendency as a function of emotional adjustment.

3 pairs of groups each consisting of an "adjusted" and "maladjusted" group were compared on their tendency to use the extreme, neutral, and intermediate points on semantic differential rating scales applied to unstructured materials. As suggested by several theories of cognitive development, maladjusted groups tended to use extreme points more and intermediate points less often than their adjusted controls. Besides supporting certain theoretical positions these findings were described as holding implications for a new approach to personality assessment. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus–response compatibility as a function of stimulus code and response modality.

The concept of stimulus-response compatibility can be differentiated into set-level and element-level compatibility. The relation between these 2 types of compatibility was examined by varying stimulus code (spatial or verbal) and response modality (manual or vocal) in 2-choice tasks that used left-right stimuli and left-right responses. Element-level compatibility was an increasing function of set-level compatibility and larger for verbal than for spatial stimuli. The positive relation between set- and element-level compatibility was due to differences for the congruent mapping but not the incongruent mapping. The results can be characterized in terms of (a) a continuum along which the relative compatibility of the responses with spatial and verbal stimuli varies and (b) a dual-route conception of response selection in which a direct, or automatic, route is involved only when a congruent mapping is in effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reaction time and response amplitude as a function of anxiety and stimulus intensity.

"The present study was concerned with reaction time and response amplitude as a function of C S intensity and anxiety (Taylor scale). 5 presentations of 2 auditory stimuli varying only in intensity were given to each of 22 anxious and 22 nonanxious Ss. Increased intensity resulted in significant increases in amplitude and speed of reaction. Mean amplitude scores of the anxious group were significantly greater than those of the nonanxious group. A significant interaction was found between anxiety and intensity… . Significant sex differences were found on both measures. The results were discussed in terms of competing implicit response tendencies." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neonatal movement response decrement and recovery to sounds as a function of stimulus intensity.

Studied response decrement, novelty response, and dishabituation of body movements to repeated presentations of white noise stimulus (of 66, 76, and 86 db) to 89 2–3 day old Ss in the 1st epoch of active-quiet sleep following a feeding. In Part 1, Ss receiving the 86 db repeating stimulus had greater movement scores compared to Ss receiving the 76 db intensity, who in turn had greater movement scores than those receiving the 66 db intensity. All groups demonstrated movement response decline following repeated stimulation, and, in Part 2, a novelty response was observed when either a 66 or 76 db repeating stimulus was increased to 86 db. A novelty response was not observed when intensity was decreased. Dishabituation was not observed following a novelty response. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual response latencies in temporal lobe structures as a function of stimulus information load.

In a monkey performing a visual delayed matching-to-sample task, units and visual evoked potentials (VEPs) were sampled from the inferior bank of the superior temporal sulcus (STS; Areas TEa and IPa), the hippocampus, and the presubiculum. VEP latencies indicated that flash information—signaling the imminent presentation of a color sample to be retained—reached the presubiculum and the hippocampus substantially earlier than the STS. In contrast, color sample VEP latencies did not differ between sites, arriving at all sites appreciably later than flash VEPs. Unit data indicated generally excitatory responses to both stimuli at all sites and net inhibition during the interstimulus interval separating flash from sample. As with VEPs, unit latencies to flash were shorter than to sample stimuli. The alerting flash data imply activation of the hippocampus occurring before activation of the STS cortex, whereas the coincident arrival of color sample information suggests temporal synchronization between these structures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of stimulus ambiguity in conditional learning.

Three experiments using rats and the conditioned emotional response procedure examined the notion that when a conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with a reinforcer (US), that CS must be ambiguous if the CS–US association is to become the target of conditional control. CS ambiguity was manipulated by varying whether the CS had been preexposed prior to conditioning. In Experiments 1 and 2, it was demonstrated that a cue that accompanied pairings of a CS and shock acquired conditional control over the CS–shock association when that CS had been preexposed, but not when it was novel. The measure of conditional control in Experiments 1 and 2 was the ability of the (conditional) cue to enhance responding to the target CS. Experiment 3 used a blocking procedure to show that this enhancement reflected an amplification of the target CS's effective associative strength. These findings extend existing knowledge of the conditions required for conditional cue formation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Size constancy as a function of personal adjustment and disposition.

"A size-distance judging task was given to 40 men who were classified in 4 groups, respectively styled 'neurotic introverts,' 'neurotic extraverts,' 'normal introverts,' and 'normal extraverts.' Analysis of data from 4 distances under 2 conditions of judgment, i.e., objective and analytic, indicated that neuroticism was the major source of between-group variation. Under analytic conditions, neurotic persons tended to match the stimulus in terms of visual angle, and normals in terms of size." 15 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reaction time as a function of manifest anxiety and stimulus intensity.

"The present study was designed to investigate the relative increase in drive of anxious and nonanxious individuals as a function of different intensities of stimulation… The results indicated that both an increase in manifest anxiety and an increase in stimulus intensity were effective in increasing the speed of reaction during training, and in raising the height of the temporal gradient of response strength; neither factor was effective in steepening the slope of the gradient." 17 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patients' anxiety as a function of expectation and degree of initial interview ambiguity.

Each of 9 psychiatric residents administered 5 structured and 5 unstructured initial interviews to patients of an adult outpatient clinic. Patients' expectations about psychotherapy were obtained before the interviews. As predicted, when patients experienced interviews compatible with their expectations, they tended to rate their anxiety significantly lower than did patients experiencing interviews incompatible with their expectations. The kind of interview alone did not make a significant difference. Residents rated those interviews incompatible with the patients' expectations as most difficult. The implications for psychotherapy of these and related findings are discussed. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rabbit eyelid conditioning as a function of unconditioned stimulus duration.

Reports eyelid conditioning data for 85 male New Zealand white rabbits, employing UCS durations of 50, 100, and 200 msec. Ss with a 50-sec UCS were slower to start conditioning than the 100- or 200-msec groups. The 200-msec group reached a lower terminal performance level than the other 2 groups. Results are related to drive-reduction theory and to possible technical difficulties in the presentation of the cheek-shock UCS. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus generalization as a function of stimulus novelty and familiarity in rats.

Three experiments used rats as subjects to investigate the generalization of conditioned responding between stimuli as a function of the subjects' exposure to these cues prior to conditioning. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design, food as the reinforcer, and measured the tendency of subjects to approach the site of food delivery during the stimuli. Generalization of this response was more marked when the training and test stimuli were equated in terms of their novelty (i.e., when both were novel or both were familiar) than when the stimuli differed in this respect (i.e., when one was novel and the other was familiar). Experiments 2a and 2b used within-subjects designs to confirm the reliability of the results of Experiment 1. Implications of these results for current theories of stimulus representation are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adolescent adjustment following divorce as a function of familial conflict.

Assessed the effect of continued familial conflict on the adjustment and self-concept of 150 adolescents (mean age 16.63 yrs), as assessed by a battery that included the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Ss were divided according to family background (intact vs divorced), sex, and conflict (high vs low). Results indicate that high conflict produced lower self-esteem, greater anxiety, and less feeling of control regardless of whether family dissolution occurred and that low conflict did not differentially affect adjustment even if the S experienced divorce. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The interpretation of opinion statements as a function of message ambiguity and recipient attitude.

The purpose of this study was to replicate an earlier one by the author (Manis, 1960) to determine the validity that the interpretation of ambiguous statements permits of greater interpretation in the light of personal opinions than nonambiguous statements. College Ss having 3 opinions towards fraternity (positive, negative, neutral) were presented with statements regarding fraternities. Half the Ss were presented with nonambiguous statements, half with the same statements with every other word omitted (ambiguous). In general, the results supported the hypothesis. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GD76M. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reflex facilitation of the rabbit nictitating membrane response by an auditory stimulus as a function of interstimulus interval.

The ability of an auditory stimulus to facilitate the amplitude and latency of the unconditioned nictitating membrane (NM) response in rabbits was investigated over a wide range of interstimulus intervals (ISIs) for both delay (Experiments 1–4) and trace (Experiments 3 and 4) procedures. The auditory stimulus was a 1000-Hz tone (T) at either 85 or 95 dB, and the reflex-eliciting stimulus was a 2.0 psi (pounds per square inch) corneal air puff. The results indicate that (a) robust facilitation of the NM response, as measured by an increased amplitude and a reduced latency, can be obtained at long ISIs (2,000–32,000 ms); (b) increasing the tone intensity can increase reflex facilitation of the peak amplitude; (c) at comparable ISIs, delay procedures produce more facilitation of both amplitude and latency than do trace procedures; and (d) when trace procedures are used, amplitude and latency facilitation by a 125-ms tone follows an inverted U-shaped ISI function in which facilitation peaks between 125 and 500 ms, rapidly decreases between 1,000 and 2,000 ms, and disappears by 4,000 ms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speed of form recognition as a function of stimulus factors and test anxiety.

This study evaluated the usefulness of several theories about Rorschach color shock. Using an arabic-greco-latin square design, the influence of color, pattern of color, figure, and anxiety level on response time was investigated in 192 Ss. "The influence on response time of stimulus attributes affecting complexity was confirmed. The hypotheses that highly anxious persons are greatly affected by colors are not confirmed. Partially verified were predictions made from Hullian behavior theory. It was found that drive level and figure difficulty were related to response time in that highly anxious persons became slower with increasing difficulty of figure during warm-up trials. During the test series, however, the predicted relationship was not found." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in gradients of stimulus generalization as a function of psychiatric disorder.

On the basis of the "Dollard and Miller… principle that 'increasing the strength of the drive raises the entire gradient of generalization… ' [and that]… such emotional states as fear, anxiety, and guilt can acquire the properties of a drive… . The present research investigates the hypotheses that there are differences in the shape of the SG gradients among psychotic, neurotic, and control Ss… . The results indicate that (a) the psychotics showed more generalization than the nonpsychotics; (b) the neurotics showed less… than the psychotics, but did not differ from the controls; and (c) the brain-damaged Ss showed more generalization than the nonpsychotics, but they did not differ from the psychotics." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression.

An individual's self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials while individuals reporting features of anxiety and depression completed an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, and depression were associated with self-reported emotion abilities, consistent with prior literature. In addition, lower anxious apprehension and greater reported emotional clarity were related to slower processing of negative stimuli indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Higher anxious arousal and reported attention to emotion were associated with ERP evidence of early attention to all stimuli regardless of emotional content. Reduced later engagement with stimuli was also associated with anxious arousal and with clarity of emotions. Depression was not differentially associated with any emotion processing stage indexed by ERPs. Research in this area may lead to the development of therapies that focus on minimization of anxiety to foster successful emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Continual association as a function of level of creativity and type of verbal stimulus.

Continual word association was studied as a function of Remote Associates Test (RAT) performance, form class, associative hierarchy, and Thorndike-Lorge word frequency. Ss were selected as high creative (HC), low creative (LC), and medium creative (MC) on the basis of their RAT scores. It was found that HC Ss give the greatest number of associations and maintain a relatively higher speed of association throughout a 2-min. period. More responses were elicited by nouns than adjectives, flat hierarchy words than steep, and high frequency words than low. The S and stimulus variable did not interact. Relevance to an associative theory of creative thinking is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative interference in schizophrenia as a function of paranoid status and premorbid adjustment.

Administered a sorting task and a paired-associates-learning task, which included a built-in associative interference factor, to 80 hospitalized white male chronic schizophrenics, divided by paranoid or nonparanoid status and good or poor premorbid adjustment, and matched for age and education. Results added support to the associative interference theory concerning psychological deficit in schizophrenia. This was more pronounced in the case of the sorting task than the paired-associates-learning task perhaps because the latter is confounded by a strong memory factor. Findings also indicate that paranoid and premorbid status interactively affect performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preference as a function of absolute response durations.

The durations of 2 responses, 2 categories of reinforced nondiscriminated interresponse times, were varied while their relative durations were held approximately constant, with the longer about 2? times longer than the shorter. Three pigeons pecked for food. Reinforcers for the shorter and longer responses were arranged by a concurrent VI, VI schedule. Preference for the shorter response increased when both were lengthened. These results, taken together with previous results for discriminated interresponse times, show that preference for the shorter of 2 responses depends on their absolute durations, whether they are discriminated or not and regardless of autoshaped key pecks that may occur in the discriminated case. Time-allocation-matching was not generally obtained. The results qualitatively agree with an associative learner, a computational processing model derived from a molecular analysis of behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)