Seven subjects judged the differences between electrocutaneous shocks and words from two category rating lists describing those sensations in each of two differences estimation experiments. The electrocutaneous shocks used for the two experiments were 10 suprathreshold shock intensities determined separately for each subject. There were two distinct 7-word category rating lists. Both lists shared 6 common words; however, the seventh word made the rational ordering of the two lists different. Magnitude scales of meaning for the category rating words and sensory scales for the electrocutaneous shock intensities were determined for each of the two experiments for each subject using conjoint measurement analysis. Comparisons of the sensory scales for electrocutaneous shock between the two difference estimation experiments for each subject showed that they judged the electrocutaneous shocks similarly with the two words lists. This allowed for comparisons between the scales of meaning for the words from the category rating lists. The two word lists were not equivalent. There was substantial agreement among the subjects on characteristic spacings of quantitative values for the category rating items. These results suggest that clinical ratings scales used for analgesimetry should not assume homogeneity of spacing of category items. A scale incorporating our subjects' common understanding is presented.

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Test stimuli are rated less "good" following very good context stimuli than when presented either alone or following neutral context stimuli. This diminution in rating is called hedonic contrast. In two experiments, the degree of hedonic contrast depended on how subjects were instructed to categorize context and test stimuli. Contrast was substantially attenuated if context and test stimuli were said to belong to different categories. The effect was demonstrated for beverages (Experiment 1) and birds (Experiment 2). Stimuli's hedonic ratings were far less affected by other stimuli declared to belong to a different category than by stimuli declared to belong to a common category.

Marks (1988) reported that when equal-loudness matches were inferred from magnitude estimates of loudness for tones of two different frequencies, the matches were affected by changes in the stimulus intensity range at both frequencies. Marks interpreted these results as reflecting the operation of response biases in the subjects' estimates; that is, the effect of range was to alter subjects' judgments but not necessarily the perception ofloudness itself. We investigated this effect by having subjects choose which oftwo tone pairs defined the larger loudness interval. By using tones of two frequencies, and varying their respective intensity ranges, we reproduced Marks' result in a procedure devoid of numerical responses. When the tones at one frequency are all soft, but the tones at the other frequency are not all soft, cross-frequency loudness matches are different from those obtained with other intensity range combinations. This suggests that stimulus range affects the perception of loudness in addition to whatever effects it may have on numerical judgments of loudness.

The influence of intensity range in auditory identification and intensity discrimination experiments is well documented and is usually attributed to nonsensory factors. Recent studies, however, have suggested that the stimulus range effect might be sensory in origin. To test this notion, in one set of experiments, we had listeners identify the individual tones in a set. One baseline condition consisted of identifying four 1-kHz, low-intensity tones; the other consisted of identifying four 1-kHz, high-intensity tones. In the experimental conditions, these baseline tone sets were augmented by adding a fifth tone at either 1 or 5 kHz. Added 5-kHz tones had little effect on identification accuracy for the four baseline tones. When an added 1-kHz tone differed substantially in intensity from the four baseline tones, it adversely affected performance, with the addition of a high-intensity tone to a set of low-intensity tones having a more deleterious effect than the addition of a low-intensity tone to a set of high-intensity tones. These and further results, obtained in an exploration of this asymmetrical range effect in a third identification experiment and in two intensity-discriminationexperiments, were consistent with the notion of a nonlinear amplifier under top-down control whose functions include protection against sensory overload from loud sounds. The identification data were well described by a signal-detection model using equal-variance Laplace distributions instead of the usual Gaussian distributions.