Conditioned suppression was found in groups of albino rats which had received different truly random control procedures. The degree of conditioning did not covary with the number of CSs, the number of USs, or the number of chance pairings. Conditioning was determined by the location of pairings. If pairings occurred before nonpairings, then excitatory conditioning was found. If nonpairings occurred before pairings, then excitatory conditioning was not found. a Requests for reprints should be sent to James 0

Truly random sequences of tone, conditioned stimuli (CSs), and shock, unconditioned stimuli (USs), were given to groups of rats; then conditioning to the OS was measured using a conditioned suppression procedure. In Experiment 1, eliminating chance CS-US pairings by systematically removing CSs that overlapped USs weakened conditioning monotonically as a function of the number of paired CSs removed. In Experiment 2, systematically delaying early chance pairings, while holding constant the number of CSs, USs, and pairings, produced a nonsignificant weakening of conditioning. In Experiment 3, delaying pairings again produced a nonsignificant weakening of conditioning when the early nonpaired events were CSs, but significantly weakened conditioning when the early nonpairings were USs. The data suggest that each chance pairing in the truly random control produces an increment in conditioning unless "blocked" by prior USs alone.The truly random control is a procedure frequently used to control for nonassociative factors in Pavlovian conditioning (e.g., Ayres & Quinsey, 1970;Bull & Overmier, 1968;Rescorla, 1968). It is characterized by the presentation of conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) randomly and independently of each other so that CS onsets provide no information about the occurrence of US onsets. Because there is no contingency between the CS and US in such a procedure, it was originally thought that the procedure should produce little or no conditioning (Rescorla, 1967). However, in several recent experiments the truly random control has apparently produced very powerful conditioned effects (Benedict & Ayres, 1972;Kremer, 1971;Kremer & Kamin, 1971;Quinsey, 1971). The most recent of these studies, moreover, showed that an important determinant of the conditioned 'This research was supported by Grant BG-36982 from the National Science Foundation and by a grant from the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts. We wish to thank William Matthews, who collected the data in Experiment 3, and Dan Anderson for his valuable comments on the manuscript. We also wish to thank Western Washington State College, Bellingham, Washington, for its support during the preparation of the manuscript.a Requests for reprints should be sent to John J.

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The level of workspace architectural privacy has previously been found to relate to overall job satisfaction. It was hypothesized that because privacy may serve particular functions, only particular facets of job satisfaction will be related to it, both in the short term (less than 1 year) and in the long term (more than 1 year). One hundred thirty professional secretaries assessed their level of privacy and their level of job satisfaction as measured by the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. The results supported the hypotheses and showed that the environment in which one works affects some but not all facets of job satisfaction.

CS-alone trials or US-alone trials were interpolated between Pavlovian defense conditioning and later measurement of the Pavlovian CR (conditioned suppression of dipper licking). Although both procedures equally degraded the CS-US contingency, only the CS-alone procedure significantly weakened the previously established CR. The US-alone procedure appeared to have no effect.

A discriminated Sidman avoidance procedure used by Forgione (1970) was replicated using a head-poke response instead of a leverpress as the avoidance operant. The resultant data were described in terms of the five dependent measures reported by Forgione. Head-poke avoidance was found to be more efficient than its leverpress counterpart and compared very favorably with the lever-disabling (or shock-timer-on) procedure used by Forgione to break up inefficient leverpress behavior patterns.The purpose of the present study was to explore the feasibility of using a head-poke response (Bolles & Seelbach, 1964) in investigations of discriminated free operant (Sidman) avoidance with rats. In this study, a head poke was defined as the entry of a rat's head into a small hole far enough to disrupt a photocell beam. Like the leverpress, the head poke is objectively measured and is capable of being emitted over a long period of time. But more important for present purposes, the topography of the head poke (in contrast to the topography of the leverpress) would seem to make it ideally suited for free operant avoidance.Leverpress avoidance appears to involve a set of response topographies and operant contingencies that interact to retard the development of efficient avoidance behavior (Forgione, 1970). Specifically, rats tend to hover in the vicinity of the lever or to lean on it throughout the response-shock interval (R-S interval). When the R-B interval terminates and shock occurs, the animal often hits the lever and thus recycles the R-S interval. If the R-S interval exceeds the shock-shock interval (S-S interval), this behavior is reinforced by reduction in shock frequency. The behavior is inefficient, however, to the extent that it comes under the control of shocks terminating the R-S interval. Presumably, more efficient behavior could be shaped by reinforcing only those responses emitted in the absence of shock. In support of this notion, Forgione (1970) found that disabling

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