Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Alcohol Consumption As A Function Of Applied Labels And Conception Of Alcoholism, Thomas Mitchell Boyd

Psychology ETDs

Much speculation but little experimental research has been directed toward the influence of the label "alcoholic" on drinking patterns. If, as has been theorized, attribution of behavior to a stable as opposed to an unstable determinant leads to maintenance of that behavior, then labeling drinking behavior as alcoholic, particularly among persons conceiving of alcoholism as a disease, may have a stabilizing influence on drinking behavior. Thirty-one subjects were first divided according to whether they regarded alcoholism as a "disease" or as a "bad habit." They were then randomly labeled as either "alcoholic or pre-alcoholic" or "social drinker," purportedly on the …

Emotion And Cognitive Perceptions In Response To Cinematographic And Non-Cinematographic Media, Stefani Nervig

Psychology ETDs

While the controversy continues over the extent to which responsibility for increases in social violence and aggression can be attributed to television and motion pictures, the accumulated evidence leaves little doubt that these media have come to have a tremendous influence on individual and social behavior. Both survey and experimental evidence have shown the film media to be capable of changing attitudes and values and of stimulating imitation and the observational learning of social behavior (Liebert, 1972; Robinson, 1972). These effects are most prominent, it would appear, in children and adolescents, but they are found also in older age groups.

Effects Of Individual Differences In Cognitive Flexibility And Motor Variability On Learning Processes, Merith Anne Cosden

Psychology ETDs

No abstract provided.

Deviations From Matching As A Measure Of Preference For Alternatives In Pigeons, Sam M. Leigland

Psychology ETDs

A growing body of literature indicates that animals and children tend to prefer situations which provide for a greater number of choice alternatives. In the present work, the problem was approached through the investigation of preference for larger or smaller response classes in a free-operant choice procedure. The method of assessing preference in the choice situation was afforded through the well-documented matching law of concurrent reinforcement schedules, which generally states that the ratio of responses or time allocated to each of two independent and concurrently-available schedules will equal the ratio of the reinforcements obtained on those schedules. A systematic and …

Developmental Aspects Of Nonsolution In Adults, Elliot Jay Rapoport

Psychology ETDs

The relationship between the complete learning concept task and Piagetian tasks used to evaluate the presence and extent of formal operations was investigated with adult college students. The results of this study demonstrate that both solving and nonsolving in concept tasks are a subject related parameter and are stable over twenty-four to thirty-six hour intervals. The generality of formal operations in adult college students was found to be significantly less than that predicted by Piaget. The relationship between the concept task and the Piagetian formal operations tasks was assessed using correlations and was found to be significant. In addition, the …

Effect Of Interpolated Stimulus Training On Generalization To A Reinstated Stimulus: Reciprocal Generalization, Ward Arthur Rodriguez

Psychology ETDs

Reciprocal and higher order reciprocal transfer or generalization effects are said to occur when performance in the presence of an interpolated stimulus influences performance to the reinstated original stimulus conditions. The present studies examined reciprocal and higher order reciprocal effects in the CER, free operant, and instrumental runway situations. In addition, first order reciprocal effects were examined when interpolated training was correlated with a less potent reinforcer.

Results showed that in the CER paradigm, first order reciprocal effects enhanced the disruption of the appetitive baseline behavior. In contrast, there were no first order reciprocal effects in either the operant or …

Assessment Of Long Term Deficits Produced By Early Total Social Isolation, Robert George Frank

Psychology ETDs

The long term effects of early total social isolation in rhesus monkeys have been assumed to be static. This assumption, that young isolates' behavior does not differ from older, fully mature isolates' behavior, may not be valid in view of behavioral changes which have been shown to occur as monkeys age. The present research examined the effects of early, total social isolation in fully mature monkeys.

Two groups were formed and allowed to live together for 14 weeks in an indoor-outdoor facility. The first group was composed of 7 controls reared for the first 9 months of life with peer …

Constructive Memory For Bizarre Verbal Material, Paula Trotter Hertel

Psychology ETDs

Sensible, interrelated sentences were presented with or without bizarre sentences which could be transformed to fit the context of the sensible sentences. Two experiments examined subjects' ability to recognize or recall both types of sentences, either immediately or after two weeks. For most subjects, representations of the bizarre were available at immediate testing only. In addition, results indicate that transformations of bizarre sentences were stored in memory but were not well incorporated within the structure for the sensible material. Finally, the results from both experiments suggest that processing bizarre information can lead to more accurate memory for the sensible context.

Intermodal Transfer Of Training In The Rat, Stephen V. Hayward

Psychology ETDs

Attempts to demonstrate the intermodal transfer of information in non-human organisms have been largely inconclusive, possibly due to the relatively complex nature of the tasks involved. At the same time, successful performance of intermodal transfer tasks by humans has not enabled clear-cut conclusions to be drawn regarding the nature of the mechanism employed. Although two hypotheses, the mediational and the invariant features, have been proposed in attempts to account for this ability, it has been virtually impossible to rule out mediational processes based on language in interpreting the results. This study employed rats in a simple transfer-of-training task so as …

Social Class And Ethnicity Effects Upon Cinical Judgments, Ricardo Martinez

Psychology ETDs

It has long been recognized that social factors influence clinical judgment, Szasz (1961) found the phenomenon so prevalent that he even proposed that mental "illness" is a myth, Tracing historical antecedents, he attributed the medical interpretation of abnormal behavior to the action of Charcot in the 19th century whose efforts contributed greatly to the legitimization of hysteria as a sickness in the medical sense. As an alternative, Szasz proposed that clinical judgments are products of social, historical and ethical factors affecting the motivation of clinicians, as opposed to their commonly claimed scientifically acquired standards applied to observed behavior.

State Dependent Learning Under Phenothiazines: Memory Functions Of Schizophrenics, Susan E. Cave

Psychology ETDs

State dependent learning as produced by a class of antipsychotic medication, the phenothiazines, was assessed for verbal recognition and recall memory functions in 24 schizophrenic inpatients. Subjects were initially trained on a paired-associate learning task (Phase I) and tested for stimulus recognition and response recall two weeks later (Phase II). Following double blind procedures for the administration of placebo, subjects were randomly and sequentially assigned to four drug treatment groups which specified their drug state during Phase I and II: no drug-no drug (ND-ND), drug-drug (D-D), no drug-drug (ND-D), and drug-no drug (D-ND). Subjects were also evaluated for cognitive skills …

Cognitive Process In Observational Learning, Howard Gordon Shore

Psychology ETDs

Recent theories of observational learning often make a distinction between the acquisition and the performance of new behaviors, yet these theoretical models invariably develop and test hypothetical acquisition processes using performance of the modeled behaviors as the independent variable, thereby introducing uncontrolled performance variables which potentially contaminate experimental results and increase the uncertainty of the conclusions. This study employed paired-associate learning tasks using modeled discrete actions and printed words as stimuli paired with two-digit numbers as the responses which are learned. The learning tasks were presented on film. Since the learned behavioral responses were numbers, rather than modeled behaviors, variables …