John P. McLaughlin

The question of stimulus content and pupil size

Evidence indicated that dilation can be produced, even in the presence of increased luminance, provided the stimulus is sufficiently arousing or novel. The results from a second study failed to support the hypothesis that pupil size is systematically related to rated affect of visually presented words. Possible artifacts of measurement are discussed.

The roles of handedness and stimulus asymmetry in aesthetic preference.

When some pictures are mirror reversed, aesthetic evaluations of them change dramatically. Stimulus features that may be important in contributing to this effect are: (a) location of areas of principal interest or weight in the picture space, (b) cues that suggest a direction of motion within the picture. Dextrals and inverted sinistrals preferred paintings with cues suggesting motion proceeding from left to right over their mirror-reversed versions and also preferred those with weight concentrated in the left portions of the picture space. The explanation that best fits these data is that preference is promoted when the picture content encourages attention to its rightmost portions, thus placing a majority of the picture in the left visual field where it is directly processed by the right hemisphere.

Aesthetic preference in dextrals and sinistrals

Abstract In one study, dextrals preferred pictures with a rightward-balance and sinistrals preferred leftward-balance (LB) pictures. In a second study, sinistrals again preferred LB pictures and were different from dextrals who showed no preference. Aesthetic preferences for asymmetric pictures seem determined by the direction of cerebral asymmetry.

Family Dynamics and Homosexuality

This study represents an extension of the psychoanalytic research on homosexuality by Bieber, et al. (1962) because the present investigators, the methods and Ss were all drawn from outside of the circle of psychoanalytic practice. Content from the Bieber interview schedule was converted into a self-administering inventory of developmental experiences. Ss were 46 males being evaluated for separation from military service because of homosexual behavior. The test discriminated this group of Ss from two control samples at the .01 level. The results appear to offer objective support for the significance of a close-binding, controlling mother and a rejecting, detached father in the etiology of male homosexuality.

Preference for Profile Orientation in Portraits

Artists who have painted portraits overwhelmingly represented the sitter in some degree of profile, emphasizing one cheek. When the sitter was female, the left cheek was shown with much greater frequency than the right. However, in forced-choice judgments between original and mirror-reversed portraits, versions emphasizing the right cheek were preferred by male and female, dextral and sinistral subjects, irrespective of the sitters sex. This may result from a left visual-field perceptual bias attributable to hemispheric specialization or from changing cultural biases.

Aesthetic preference and lateral preferences

Subjects expressed preference for original or mirror-reversed versions of paintings. Hand preference predicted a significant proportion of the choice variance, but eye, foot and ear preference did not, nor did family sinistrality.

Salience of Compositional Cues and the Order of Presentation in the Picture Reversal Effect

Paintings containing cues suggesting left-to-right (LTR) motion are preferred by dextrals over their mirror-reversed versions (RTL) in forced-choices between the simultaneously-presented alternatives. To eliminate a simultaneous-contrast interpretation of the effect and to determine whether motion cues influence choice when paintings are seen alone, a successive-presentation procedure was used. When an LTR version preceded the RTL version, the LTR version was preferred within the pair by dextrals and also was preferred more frequently than RTL versions shown first Thus, these compositional features of single versions were noticed and affected judgment. An order-of-presentation effect was also found, in that the first member of a pair was preferred. Possible explanations for this are considered.

The motive for sensory pleasure: enjoyment of nature and its representation in painting, music, and literature.

Eight studies assessed the motive for sensory pleasure (MSP) involving a general disposition to enjoy and pursue pleasant nature-related experiences and avoid unpleasant nature-related experiences. The stated enjoyment of pleasant sights, smells, sounds, and tactile sensations formed a unitary construct that was distinct from sensation seeking, novelty preference, and need for cognition. MSP was found to be related to (a) enjoyment of pleasant nature scenes and music of high but not low clarity; (b) enjoyment of writings that portrayed highly detailed nature scenes; (c) enjoyment of pleasantly themed paintings and dislike of unpleasant paintings, as distinct from findings with Openness to Experience; (d) choice of pleasant nature scenes over exciting or intellectually stimulating scenes; (e) view duration and memory of artistically rendered quilts; (f) interest in detailed information about nature scenes; and (g) frequency of sensory-type suggestions for improvement of a museum exhibit.

Visual and semantic factors in recognition from long-term memory

In recognition tests, physical and semantic relationships between targets and distractors have been shown, in separate manipulations, to affect the latency of subject’s decision. Recognition was tested for distractors which were visually similar or dissimilar to targets and which belonged to the target categories or to nontarget categories in order to examine the interaction of these dimensions. Rejection latency was longer for target category than for nontarget category distractors. Latency was also longer for visually similar than visually dissimilar distractors, but only when combined with target category probes. This interaction can be explained by the hypothesis that word recognition depends on the analysis of several dimensions of the probe stimulus, and rejection can occur before all such analyses have been completed.

Language habits and detection in very short-term memory

Target letters in briefly presented word displays are known to be better detected than when they are presented in anagram arrangements of the words’ letters. Target detection may have been higher for word displays either because Ss identified the words and then determined if a word possessed the target or because, in word displays, Ss could anticipate letters from the transitional probabilities (TRP) of letters in the language (TRP hypothesis). Detection in Experiment I was identical for words and for pseudowords, stimuli which were meaningless rearrangements of the words’ letters but which presented the words’ level of interletter TRP. Randomly rearranged displays, with lower TRP values, yielded lower detection rates. Experiment II showed that detection increased with TRP levels in nonword displays. The results support the TRP hypothesis and thus are consistent with a serial-scanning process in very short-term memory, but are also consistent with a special variant of a parallel process.