he golden section is 8 proportion the aesthetic properties of which have been extolled since antiquity. The data from five experiments in which subjects made dichotomous judgements of acquaintances on bipolar dimensions (e.g. p h a n t -2 m p l ) were reported. These data indicated that the mean proportion of positive adjectives used in making interpersonal judgements is an excellent approximation of the golden aection. An explanation of this finding was offered in terms of Berlyne's 'strikingneaa hypothesis'. It waa suggested that Boucher & Osgood's 'Pollyt~na hypothesis' should be extended to include the possibility that, by tending to organize his judgements i n the golden section ratio, the person is able to pay specid attention to negative events.* Data supporting the golden section hypothesis may also be found in the Osgood & Riohacda experiment itself. "hey gave subjects 200 sentences of the form X is (adjective) -(adjective), such aa X ia dangerow,empty. The subject's task wm to decide whether and or but should be used to 6ll the blank.From the viewpoint of the golden seotion hypothesis, the subject is being asked to divide the sentences into two classes: those which take and, and those which take but. Since and is positive and but negative (Osgood & Riohards, 1973, p. 397), subjects should use and 02 per cent of the time, and but 38 per cent of the time. Osgood and Richards (1973, pp. 401,409) report that and is used, on the average, 82.6 per cent of the time and but 37.6 per cent of the timeimpressively close to the golden section ratio.

A model of the organization of interpersonal judgements, based on the hypothesis that people tend to organize their judgements in Golden Section ratios, was presented. A theory of the process of interpersonal judgement, based on the notion that people judge acquaintances using a Fibonacci-like decision rule, was then developed. A computer simulation of the theory yielded results consistent with the model. An experiment in which subjects judged a variety of sets of acquaintances also yielded results consistent with the model.The golden section ratio (#) is the proportion obtaining between two quantities a and b when a/b = b/(a+b). In order for this ratio to occur, a must be approximately 0-618 of 6. Many investigators have claimed that objects which display this ratio have a greater aesthetic value than those which do not (e

The Oxford English Dictionary is the standard reference work for determining the earliest known instance of the occurrence of a word (its date of entry). Partly in order to facilitate research on the relation between the date of entry and other psychological variables, we gathered normative data on 1,046 words sampled from the Oxford English Dictionary. We present data for scales that measure the imagery, concreteness, goodness, and familiarity values for words. These norms may also be of use to researchers who are not explicitly concerned with words' date of entry, but who wish to sample words from a set that contains a large number of unfamiliar as well as familiar words.

How do particular words come to be part of the vocabulary of Anglophone psychology? The present study sampled 600 words with psychological senses from the Oxford English Dictionary, which not only gives the number of senses for each word but also the date and author for the earliest known occurrence of each sense. Analogous information for the same words was taken from PsycINFO. One can distinguish between words for which their psychological sense is the first to occur in the history of the written language (primary psychological words) and words for which their psychological sense only emerges after one or more other senses have become established in the written language (secondary psychological words). To use a distinction made famous by Ebbinghaus, secondary psychological words have both a past and a history in psychology, while primary psychological words only have a history. Secondary psychological words have more connections to other words and occur more frequently in PsycINFO than do primary psychological words. For secondary psychological words, it is possible to trace a process of metaphoric polysemy that provides a basis for the eventual occurrence of the psychological sense of a word. Some primary psychological words are now developing secondary, nonpsychological senses, showing that they are subject to the same metaphoric process as are any other words.

Evidence supporting five hypotheses concerning the psycholinguistic properties of constructs is presented: (1) The negative poles of overtly marked constructs have lower imagery values than their positive poles; (2) Overtly marked constructs are introduced later in the history of language than are constructs which are not overtly marked; (3) Overtly marked constructs are used less frequently than are constructs which are not overtly marked; (4) The more recently the positive pole of a construct has entered the language, the smaller the difference between its date of entry and that of its negative opposite; and (5) Constructs used primarily to describe psychological events enter the language later than those used primarily to refer to physical events. These findings are discussed in relation to Kelly's (1955) personal construct theory.Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 73&755.Monograph, 9 (2, Part 2, 1-28).