Showing papers in "Psychological Bulletin in 1973"

What the Mind’s Eye Tells the Mind’s Brain: A Critique of Mental Imagery

Abstract: This paper presents a critique of contemporary research which uses the notion of a mental image as a theoretical construct to describe one form of memory representation. It is argued that an adequate characterization of ‘what we know’ requires that we posit abstract mental structures to which we do not have conscious access and which are essentially conceptual and propositional, rather than sensory or pictorial, in nature. Such representations are more accurately referred to as symbolic descriptions than as images in the usual sense. Implications of using an imagery vocabulary are examined, and it is argued that the picture metaphor underlying recent theoretical discussions is seriously misleading — especially as it suggests that the image is an entity to be perceived. The relative merits of several alternative modes of representation (propositions, data structures, and procedures) are discussed. The final section is a more speculative discussion of the nature of the representation which may be involved when people ‘use’ visual images.

Masculinity-femininity: An exception to a famous dictum?

Abstract: The major tests of masculinity-femininity (M-F) in adults are reviewed with special attention to the ways in which their construction and use reflect three untested assumptions about the nature of ...

Self- and interpersonal evaluations: esteem theories versus consistency theories

Abstract: Two social psychological theories are contrasted and different predictions are derived concerning the relation between self and interpersonal evaluations. The prediction from self-esteem theory is that the higher an individual's evaluation of himself, the less his tendency to reciprocate evaluations from others, whereas the prediction from self-consistency theory is that the higher the individual's evaluation of himself, the greater his tendency to reciprocate evaluations from others. Studies bearing on these predictions are reviewed, and the evidence tends to support self-esteem theory. Furthermore, two extensions of the assumptions of self-esteem theory are presented and discussed in terms of accounting for results which apparently support self-consistency theory. Finally, whether or not the experimental subject is the direct target of another person's actions appears to distinguish esteem results from consistency results. The implications of this distinction for other problems of person perception and social evaluation are discussed. A general conclusion is that cognitive consistency theories may be somewhat overworked as explanatory frameworks for the study of social evaluations. Although the interpersonal events involving the evaluations an individual receives from other people occur experimentally and in the "real world" with some regularity, confusions arise in attempting to explain these regularities. We observe that people typically talk more (e.g., Bavelas, Hastorf, Gross, & Kite,

Problems in the measurement of cognitive deficit.

Abstract: Several dozen studies of differential cognitive deficit appear each year. Artifacts cloud the findings in a majority of these studies because of differences in discriminating power of tasks coupled with generalized deficit of the patients. With two tests of differing reliability, the test with the higher reliability will yield greater performance deficit for the less able subjects. We argue for the advisability, in studies of differential cognitive deficit, of matching tasks on reliability, shape of the distribution of scores, and mean, variance, and shape of the distribution of item difficulty, using normal subjects alone as a standardization group.

The devil rides again: Correlation as an index of fit.

Abstract: Correlations between theoretical predictions and data can be higher for incorrect than for correct models, as illustrated by analyses of two sets of hypothetical data. This fact raises questions about the conclusions of recent studies that use correlation as an index of fit. Functional measurement provides a sounder basis for model evaluation by placing scaling in the context of model fitting and by testing deviations from prediction rather than concent rating an overall goodness of fit. Although widely recognized as an "instrument of the devil" when used to infer causation from confounded data, the correlation coefficient is still employed as an index of the fit of theoretical models. There are two serious criticisms of this usage. First, incorrect models can correlate highly with data (Anderson, 1971; Yntema & Torgerson, 1961). Second, based upon the assumption that the better model will correlate higher, investigators have recently used the correlation coefficient to compare the fit of rival models.3

On the subjective character of the empirical base of guilford's structure-of-intellect model

Abstract: Using data from three studies that have been cited as indicating support for the structure-of-intellect (SI) theory, analyses demonstrated that Procrustean factoring methods can be used to provide results that appear to support randomly determined theories. Such results can be obtained even when (

Laughter in young children.

Abstract: Research studies of laughter in children are reviewed, and a model describing eliciting conditions for laughter and related behavior is described. Following Spencer (1860), Berlyne (I960), and others, it is proposed that laughter occurs after conditions of heightened tension or arousal when at the same time there is a judgment that the situation is safe or inconsequential. The special case of laughter to discrepant or incongruous stimulation is described in detail, and it is suggested that laughter serves the function of signaling to a caretaker that a given stimulus is within the child's tolerable limits of arousal.