Intimacy in conversational style as a function of the degree of closeness between members of a dyad.

Analyzed 58 naturally occurring telephone conversations between pairs of female friends, acquaintances, and strangers to investigate how intimacy is conveyed by conversational style. In comparison with strangers, friends used more implicit openings, raised more topics, were more responsive to one another (e.g., by asking more questions), and used more complex forms of closing. Acquaintances were generally more similar to strangers than they were to friends. (50 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Components of activation: Repetition and priming effects in lexical decision and recognition.

Examined activation decay functions in 4 experiments in which 52 undergraduates performed 2 different tasks: lexical decision and word recognition. Activation (amount of facilitation) was measured both for item repetition and for priming between newly learned associates. Results indicate that there were at least 3 different components of activation: a short-term component that decayed with 1 or 2 intervening items and appeared to be common to priming and repetition, an intermediate component for repetition in recognition, and a long-term component for repetition. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Use Sociobiology?

An essay-review of the book and the field it proposed to establish looks at the uses of biological data and methods for communications research.
Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson.     

The physician perspective of health psychologists in medical settings.

Examined physician attitudes and utilization of psychologists in medical settings by administering a 15-item questionnaire to 397 26–78 yr old physicians (84% male) practicing family/general practice, surgery, internal medicine, or miscellaneous clinical medicine. Although differences in attitudes were associated with age, sex, and specialty, generally favorable attitudes toward psychologists were found among Ss. Results show a recognition by the majority of Ss of the role that psychological factors play in medical disease and an appreciation of clinical psychological skills by a large majority. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alternative student evaluation structures and a focused schedule of instruction in an innercity junior high school.

Examined the effects of a particular model of direct instruction, focused instruction (FI), and 2 alternative student evaluation structures—individual learning expectations (ILE) and relative standing (RS)—on students' mathematics achievement and attitudes. Ss were 307 7th-grade students in 10 classes, who studied mathematics for 11 wks. Results indicated that FI, along with certificates of recognition, whether awarded on the basis of ILE or of RS, caused significantly higher achievement. There were no significant differences between the ILE and RS evaluation methods. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automating Content Extraction of HTML Documents

Web pages often contain clutter (such as unnecessary images and extraneous links) around the body of an article that distracts a user from actual content. Extraction of useful and relevant content from web pages has many applications, including cell phone and PDA browsing, speech rendering for the visually impaired, and text summarization. Most approaches to making content more readable involve changing font size or removing HTML and data components such as images, which takes away from a webpages inherent look and feel. Unlike Content Reformatting, which aims to reproduce the entire webpage in a more convenient form, our solution directly addresses Content Extraction. We have developed a framework that employs an easily extensible set of techniques. It incorporates advantages of previous work on content extraction. Our key insight is to work with DOM trees, a W3C specified interface that allows programs to dynamically access document structure, rather than with raw HTML markup. We have implemented our approach in a publicly available Web proxy to extract content from HTML web pages. This proxy can be used both centrally, administered for groups of users, as well as by individuals for personal browsers. We have also, after receiving feedback from users about the proxy, created a revised version with improved performance and accessibility in mind.     

Selective associations in one-day-old rats: Taste–toxicosis and texture–shock aversion learning.

Three experiments investigated cue-consequence specificity and long-delay learning in 187 1-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats and determined whether selective associations are accompanied by long-delay learning early in life. Ss learned aversions to a novel taste paired with Li-induced distress and to a tactile stimulus paired with brief electric shocks. However, aversions did not develop when taste was paired with shock or when the tactile stimulus was paired with Li treatment. The aversions occurred only when Li treatment immediately followed taste exposure and when shock was concurrent with exposure to the tactile stimulus. Findings indicate that selective associations in aversion learning are mediated by innate mechanisms that govern conditioning in the absence of extensive ontogenetic experience and show that selective associations are not sufficient for the occurrence of long-delay learning. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and sex as factors influencing remission duration in African Burkitt's lymphoma

The frequency of Burkitt's lymphoma peaks in children six to nine years of age and is twice as high in males as in females. To determine if age or sex had any relationship to outcome of therapy, the authors examined the experience of 387 patients treated for Burkitt's lymphoma at the Burkitt Tumor Project, Accra, Ghana, between 1966 and 1978. No age or sex relationship could be demonstrated with overall survival. However, among children without central nervous system disease who achieved an initial remission, the relapse rates were higher for those diagnosed initially in the age interval 6-9 years than for those diagnosed at younger or older ages. This pattern was seen for each stage of the disease as well as overall. Sex did not influence relapse rate. The relationship of these findings to the Epstein-Barr virus and malaria, both suspected factors in the etiology of this disease, is discussed, but neither appears to explain our results.     

Separation protest in infants in home and laboratory.

Observations of 12-18 mo old children in their homes showed that they played less, cried more, and remained near the exit longer when left alone with a stranger than when left alone with either parent. Children tested in the laboratory exhibited greater distress than children tested at home when left with the stranger. No differences between being left with mother or father were found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)