The Development of Attribute Dominance in the Knowledge Base

Two cuing, free-recall studies were conducted to test Bach and Underwood\u27s (1970) hypothesis that acoustic encoding is dominant among second graders and semantic encoding is dominant among sixth graders. When retrieval cues were presented with to-be-remembered items at both input and output (Experiment 1), and when cues were presented only at output (Experiment 2), semantic cues were more efficient in elevating recall than were acoustic cues for both second and sixth graders. When these and other results generally found using recognition, sorting, incidental learning, and free-recall experimental designs are compared, it seems plausible that item presentation and memory-testing formats interact with age, and that these factors account for the different patterns of attribute dominance found in the literature. The knowledge base cannot be understood by focusing on either subject or task analyses, but only by focusing on interactions between subject and task variables as they change over time. The educational implications for young grade-school children are discussed

The Role of Suggestions and Personality Characteristics in Producing Illness Reports and Desires for Suing the Responsible Party

For this project, 92 students entered an abandoned theater room in an old basement of the university where sand was scattered throughout. The purpose of the study was to experimentally demonstrate that psychological suggestions could produce illness reports and to explore who is most likely to say that they would sue for personal damages. The students filled out the Trait-State Anger Scale and two subscales, Anger Temperament and Anger Reaction as well as the Costello-Corey Anxiety Scale, the Hardiness Inventory, the Pennebaker Inventory of Limbic Languidness, and, embedded in the Hardiness Inventory, measures of current illness as a result of exposure to the basement room. Half the participants were met by a confederate student who claimed to be cleaning up the remains of a production of Lawrence of Arabia, and the other half were met by a confederate construction worker who claimed that The stuff will tear up your skin and your lungs. Those in the experimental groups who perceived danger and scored low in the hardiness dimension of challenge were more likely to report symptoms of illness. Willingness to file a law suit was predicted by a model including perceived danger and the personality characteristic of anger reactivity

The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ) : Scale Development

In line with dynamic systems and dialectical theories of development, it was theorized that a psychopathology such as an addiction could have several causes (equifinality) and that more specific diagnoses and treatments of the most salient clinical issuesfor individuals coming from different developmental paths could increase the success rates of most therapies. Further, the issues from a developmental dynamic systems perspective should include not only individual clinical issues, but also relational, familial, peer, and organizational functioning. The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ) was developed as a research and clinical instrument relevant to these concerns. The 29 scales were based on naturalistic observations of patients in treatment and 12-step groups, attachment theory, and the clinical literature dealing with the addictions. The attachment scales were taken from classic attachment theory but, in line with more recent formulations, included relations to mother, father, and partner. Study 1 found the ACIQ to have good coefficient alphas (.79), and factor analyses revealed that the eight factors loaded on different attachment figures and sets of clinical issues rather than attachment styles per se. Study 2 found test–retest reliability to be, on average, .79. The results were in line with the developmental hypothesis that partner and father attachments are different than attachments to mother, and that family and peer relations as well as clinical issues need to be consideredseparately

Comparing Measures of Attachment : “To Whom one Turns in Times of Stress,” Parental Warmth, and Partner Satisfaction

The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ; M. A. Lindberg& S. W. Thomas, 2011), was developed over an 18-year period containing 29 scales. Thepurpose of the present study was to test (a) the validity of the attachment scales in terms ofhow they predict to whom one turns in times of stress and for affective sharing, and (b) how the attachment scales compared with the Experiences in Close Relationship Questionnaire (ECR) in terms of concurrent, convergent, and discriminant evidence. The relevant secure scales of the ACIQ predicted to whom one turned in Study 1, and Study 2 demonstrated good convergent evidence with the ECR, but superior concurrent evidence in predicting partner satisfaction, and superior discriminant evidence in differentially correlating with mother and father warmth. Thus, the ACIQ passed essential validity and psychometrictests and was a more robust measure than the ECR with these defining characteristics of attachment

Comparisons of Three Different Investigative Interview Techniques With Young Children

After viewing a film of a mother hitting her son, a film not seen by the college student interviewers, children were misinformed about a detail (via exposure to a misleadingquestion) as well as explicitly coached to disclose 3 false details. The children were then interviewed by interviewers who had previously learned 1 of 3 different interviewing procedures: the Yuille Step-Wise Interview developed by J. C. Yuille, R. Hunter,R. Joffe, & J. Zaparniuk (1993); a doll play interview developed by Action for Child Protection Inc. (1994); or the Modified Structured Interview developed for this study. The Modified Structured Interview yielded more “where” information and was better at detecting if coaching had occurred. However, the interviewers were not very good at discriminating suggested versus coached versus correct witnessed information. The authors found that the deeper one digs for memories, the more one uncovers incorrect versus correct items. They concluded that although the Modified Structured Interview was superior tothe techniques currently in use, cautions are necessary

Similarities and Differences in Eyewitness Testimonies of Children Who Directly Versus Vicariously Experience Stress

This study tested questions of ecological validity by comparing the eyewitness testimonies of children directly experiencing a painful inoculation experience with those of children in a yoked-control group who vicariously experienced the inoculation on videotape. The study involved 86 5-year-olds, divided between 2 groups: the experiential and yoked control. The experiential group was followed through a health department with a video camera as they received diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus (DFT), and oral polio inoculations. They were tested immediately, 20 min later, and I month later. Each child in the yoked-control group merely watched the videotape of his or her counterpart in the expenential group, made similar ratings of pain, and was given the same tests and suggestions. Stress and personal experience affected items congruent with the stressor to produce flashbulb-like memories, with slower rates of forgetting for some items, such as nurse identifications, and greater suggestibility for other items, such as estimates of needle size. These and the apparently conflicting results in the literature were said to make sense when personally experienced stress was viewed from S.-A. Christianson’s (1992) interactive perspective rather than as a single ubiquitous variable

Wundtian Psychology 100 Years Later

The functionalist perspective rather than the structuralist perspective has dominated the study of mind throughout most of the history of psychology in America. This paper first discusses the theoretical and philosophical reasons for this domination. Then, by analyzing learning texts written over the last 27 years, it is shown that this functionalist emphasis has diminished in the last 10 years and that current treatments of learning and memory are starting to go back to a structuralist emphasis. The final section deals with some issues and problems of this current structuralist psychology and the obstacles it has to overcome if it is to be a persistent viable force within psychology

A test of four proposed new dimensions of semantic space

Four new dimensions of the Osgood semantic space, proposed by Bentler and LaVoie (1972), were tested utilizing the PI release design. The two dimensions of density and reality showed significant release from PI, but the dimensions of familiarity and organization did not. The results were discussed in terms of a second study, which showed measures of dependency of the four new dimensions upon the original three Osgood semantic differential dimensions

Are incidental learning tasks measuring elaboration of coding, or just overloading retrieval cues?

Craik and Tulving (1975) suggest that an overloading of retrieval cues explanation might serve as an alternative to their elaboration of coding theory of incidental learning data. Physical processing instructions require items to share the same encoding question, and thus can create more competition at recall than items of semantic instructions, which have unique questions. In an incidental learning task, 100 subjects named the colors in which words were printed. Recall of congruent words, for example, money printed in green, was superior to recall of incongruent words, for example, money printed in yellow, which in turn was superior to that of color-neutral control words. Since the items differed qualitatively in richness of information, and not in number of retrieval cues, it was concluded that the overloading of retrieval cues explanation cannot serve as a complete account of incidental learning phenomena