The present research is concerned with the transfer of meaning from meaningful, emotional words to nonsense syllables, when both are presented together m a fashion analogous to a classical conditioning procedure More specifically, it evaluates the effects of number of trials and percentage of reinforcement upon the conditioning of meaning A further aspect of the research involves an assessment of the effects of the independent variables on awareness of the purpose of the experiment which in turn could mediate the expected conditioning findings Thus, the various schedules of reinforcement constitute mdependent variables, while the classical conditioning of meaning and the awareness of conditioning are the two dependent variables being examined in this experiment Awareness as used in this study may be defined as 5"'s verbalizing an awareness of the contiguous relationship between a class of affective words and a nonsense syllable The general conclusion derivable from those studies which provide more than a passing reference to awareness is that there is little consistency with respect to the criteria for its presence and little agreement as to its determinants In fact, Tatz (as cited by Krasner, 1958) raises the question whether many 5's considered unaware in most studies were truly unaware since partially correct hypotheses were often utilized Moreover, Buss, Gerjuoy, & Zusman (1958) and Levin (1961) conclude that verbal conditioning, l e , increased use of first-person pronouns in constructing sentences, occurred only when the S later was able to express awareness of the contingency In a related vein Enksen ' This pap«r is adapted from a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D degree at the Umversity of Rochester The author wishes to express his appreciaticm to Emory L G>wen, chairman of the doctoral committee, and to Arthur W Staats and Carolyn K Staats, whose generous interest was instrumental in directing the onentation of the research • Now at the Rhode Island Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island
Rorschach protocols of both black and white children from 7 to 14 years of age, who had been evaluated at a child guidance clinic, were rescorcd with respect to developmental level of perceptual integration, It was found that black children had higher perceptual-integration scores in comparison to their white counterparts. This finding, however, was accounted for by the higher performance of low-IQ (70-89) black subjects as compared to low-IQ white subjects. No differences were obtained between average-IQ (90-109) black or white children. It is suggested that standard IQ tests may not adequately tap the cognitive capacity of some black children and that use of the Rorschach from a developmental-structural perspective may provide a useful adjunctive measure of intelligence that would more realistically assess children's cognitive competence.This research was undertaken while the second author was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow in child-clinical psychology at the Irving Schwartz Institute for Children and Youth.
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