Yuval Wolf

Relevant and irrelevant anxiety in the reaction to pain

&NA; Despite its importance in pain perception, there is a paucity of research investigating the influence of anxiety. This study tested the proposition that anxiety can lead to the exacerbation of pain perception when the source of anxiety is related to the pain experience. When the source is related to something else, anxiety may even reduce the reaction to pain. Sources of anxiety were manipulated in the laboratory — anxiety related to pain and anxiety related to successful learning or the combination of anxiety related to both pain and learning. Verbal, physiological and behavioral differences were obtained showing that focus upon both the pain and the learning task yielded the strongest pain reactions, while focus upon the learning alone yielded the lowest pain reaction, but the largest learning errors. Focus upon pain was in‐between. The theoretical implications of these data were discussed.

Integration of Stimulus Dimensions in Perception and Memory: Composition Rules and Psychophysical Relations

A series of five experiments used the method of magnitude estimation to assess how height and width are integrated in perceptual and in memorial judgments of area. Separate groups of subjects estimated the areas of perceived or remembered rectangles produced by a symmetrical 4 X 4 factorial design of height and width. Additional independent groups of observers made area judgments, based on special mixes of perceptual and memorial information referring to the height and width components of the to-be-judged rectangles. Both perceptual and memory data obeyed the bilinear interaction prediction of the normative multiplicative model. The relation between perceived and actual area as well as the relation between remembered and actual area could both be described by a compressive power function, with the exponent being reliably smaller for remembered than for perceived area. These results seem to imply a principle of integration rule invariance across perceptual and memorial estimates of a given set of stimuli, in conjunction with characteristically different valuation operations.

Subject versus experimenter control in the reaction to pain.

&NA; Although perceived control has been used as a means of reducing the reaction to pain, conceptually, much is still unclear. The purpose of this study was to clarify the effects of control as a mediating variable in the reaction to pain as a function of the predispositional variables of perceived self‐efficacy and trait anxiety. Self‐efficacy refers to the subjects premeasured, perceived ability to control his pain. The type of control provided either to the subject or the experimenter was varied over 5 independent groups. Predictability of occurrence of the pain stimulation was varied on a within‐subject basis. Results mirrored the complexity of the problem. Overall, when subjects were given decisional control alone the largest reactions to pain were obtained. Subjects given decisional plus behavioral control yielded the lowest reactions to pain. Both self‐efficacy and trait anxiety significantly were pedictive of outcomes. Unexpectedly, experimenter control reduced the reaction to pain among those with high self‐efficacy, but increased the reaction among those with low self‐efficacy. Results of trait anxiety appear to indicate the need to keep anxiety within bounds. Adding responsibility such as control to an individual who is already anxious may increase the reaction to pain. In general, it appears that control that is perceived as inadequate may be worse than not having any control. The theoretical and methodological implications of these results were discussed.

Perceptual and Memorial Constructs in Children's Judgments of Quantity: A Law of Across-Representation Invariance

Children at three different ages made judgments of physically presented (perceptual estimation) or symbolically represented (memorial estimation) rectangles. Height and width were integrated according to different, age-dependent algebraic rules. Memorial data obeyed the same integration rules that operated in the original perceptual judgments even when younger children and older children used completely different combination models. Valuation operations were the same in perception and memory for the youngest group (6-year-olds) but became discriminably different at older ages (for the 8- and 10-year olds). Three additional experiments on judgments of volume, liquid quantity, and visual length yielded strong cross-validation support for the general invariance claim (with respect to integration rule theory) but less strong support for the specific invariance claim (with respect to valuation function for the 6-year-old subjects). Results are interpreted as demonstrating lawful and long-enduring ecological constraints on internal representation.

Modularity in everyday life judgments of aggression and violent behavior

This review focuses on one aspect of moral judgment of aggression and violent behavior in the context of the psychodynamics of everyday life: Judgmental modularity. The central hypothesis asserts that, from the victims perspective, the severity of judgments or the relative weight assigned to physical damage, when information on intent and damage is available, will be maximized, whereas inverse trends will typify the judgments of the same person from the assailants perspective. This view resembles the spirit of the functional approach to moral judgment of violent behavior. In this light, related studies that were conducted within the framework of functional measurement are reviewed. Judgmental modularity was documented in the majority of the findings. However, in two studies, the same participants exhibited judgmental consistency in the first phase and judgmental modularity in a second phase, which manipulated other types of judgmental perspectives. Implications for the issue of judgmental modularity, for the issue of modularity in violent behavior and for a proposal to establish a functional definition of aggression are discussed.

Modularity in moral judgment by police officers

Classical theories of moral judgment (e.g., Piaget, 1965; Kohlberg, 1983) were tested against a modularity hypothesis in police officers. Patrol and investigation officers were compared in a series of experiments using functional measurement in which policemen were asked to make judgments, from both objective and subjective perspectives, about the severity of acts involving verbal or physical aggression. Information in the incidents included justification for the act, intent on the part of the harmdoer and harm caused to the victim. Differences were found between patrol and investigation officers in their responses to moral dilemmas, confirming the importance of professional experience in moral judgment. Individual police officers were also found to switch moral codes according to the perspective from which they made their judgments, lending support to the modularity hypothesis. Findings are discussed in terms of both moral relativity and moral modularity.

Language Awareness in Non-Native Writers: Metalinguistic Judgments of Need for Revision.

Ninety‐three subjects participated in a series of experiments investigating how the number of errors from different linguistic sources affects evaluative judgments about the need for revision in a non‐native language. In the first three experiments, groups of non‐native and native writers of English as well as EFL teachers were exposed to bifactorial combinations of syntactic and lexical errors incorporated in passages from an English composition textbook. Subjects were exposed individually to all factorial combinations of errors from both sources and asked to judge how much effort was needed to make the passages well written. Results from all three experiments show lexical errors having a greater effect. Employing the framework of information integration theory and functional measurement, it was found that non‐native writers used an additive rule to integrate information from both sources, while native writers used differential averaging. Non‐native writers participated in two additional experiments, where cohesion errors were combined bifactorially and trifactorially with syntactic and lexical errors. Lexical and cohesion errors showed greater effects than syntactic errors. An additive rule was used to integrate syntax with either lexicon or cohesion, while a differential averaging rule was used for the integration of lexicon with cohesion. The procedure was adapted for a classroom experiment; it included actual error correction along with metalinguistic judgment. The findings conform to those of the previous experiments.

Meaning of Life as Perceived by Drug-Abusing People

Two different methodologies, Crumbaugh & Maholics Purpose in Life Test and Andersons Functional Measurement, were used to compare the way meaning of life is perceived by two groups of substance-abusing people: one group consisted of 10 people who successfully completed a six-month withdrawal program based on Frankls Logotherapy; the other group included 15 people who dropped out at the beginning stages of the program. Most of the comparisons between these groups pointed to a more positive existential orientation (in logotherapeutic terms) among those who accomplished successful withdrawal than among the subjects who failed to complete the program. Therapeutic and methodological implications of this studys approach to the measurement of the perceptions of substance-abusing people are discussed.

Learned resourcefulness and perceived control of pain: A preliminary examination of construct validity☆

Abstract Learned resourcefulness has been conceptualized as a behavioral repertoire by which an individual can regulate internal responses to aversive situations. The Self-Control Schedule (SCS) is the instrument designed to measure the extent to which an individual exhibits learned resourcefulness and utilizes self-regulatory processes. The self-regulatory processes are seen as affecting perceived self-efficacy. SCS was premeasured in a study designed to examine the effects of perceived self-control on pain perception. The data indicated that when given the opportunity, high- compared to low-resourcefulness individuals use self-regulatory processes. SCS was found to be related to the skin resistance response and rated anxiety during the study. No relationship was obtained between SCS and perceived self-efficacy. SCS did appear to differentiate subjects in terms of who is more or less likely to use self-regulatory processes on anxiety-related variables. The theoretical implications of these data were discussed.

Violations of Out-Group and In-Group Regulations in the Eyes of Ordinary and Protected Prisoners: An Instance of Judgmental Modularity:

According to the functional theory of cognition, everyday life blaming for wrongdoing reflects individuals’functional morality. The judgments of normative people were found to be modular, that is, changeable as a function of the social role taken at the moment of the judgment. This article presents several empirical indications that prisoners’functional moral judgments are modular as well. These studies were conducted within the experimental framework of functional measurement, which was chosen due to its ability to bypass prisoners’suspicion and resistance to out-group investigations. The studies focus on delinquents’core moral issues such as eyewitness testimony and informing to out-group authorities. As expected, the judgments of ordinary and protected inmates were modular. It is claimed that these findings are applicable to offender rehabilitation and correction and to offender therapy.