Objective self-awareness,standards of evaluation,and moral behavior

In a performance setting, subjects were given an opportunity to cheat without fear of detection on puzzle problems. Subjects were led to believe that successful performance was due to ability in some conditions, but to luck in other conditions. In fact, most of the problems were insolvable, so that success was impossible without cheating. Self-awareness was induced in half the subjects by having them sit in front of a mirror and listen to a tape recording of their own voice as they worked on the puzzle problems; the remaining subjects were not exposed to a mirror and listened to a tape of someone else's voice as they worked on the problems. It was predicted that cheating frequency would be higher under ability attribution conditions than under luck attribution conditions, and that this effect of performance attribution would be greater among self-aware subjects than among non-self-aware subjects. Results confirmed these hypotheses. Discussion centered on the differential use of morality and competence standards for behavior when in a state of self-awareness.     

And deplete us not into temptation: Automatic attitudes, dietary restraint, and self-regulatory resources as determinants of eating behavior

Linking contemporary models of self-regulation to recent research on automatic attitudes, the present study investigated the impact of automatic candy attitudes, dietary restraint standards, and self-regulation resources on eating behavior. Participants were assigned to either an emotion suppression task (low self-regulation resources) or an emotion flow task (high self-regulation resources), and were then given an opportunity to taste candies. When self-regulation resources were high, candy consumption was uniquely related to dietary restraint standards (but not automatic candy attitudes). In contrast, when self-regulation resources were low, candy consumption was primarily predicted by automatic candy attitudes, with dietary restraint standards showing a tendency for counterintentional effects. These results indicate that the behavioral impact of automatic attitudes and personal standards depends on available control resources. Implications for research on automatic attitudes and self-regulation are discussed.     

A conditioning technique applicable to elementary school classrooms

A procedure was developed for use in a public school classroom where only one of the children needed treatment, sophisticated apparatus was not feasible, personnel were untrained in conditioning techniques, and where disruption had to be minimized. Candy reinforcers were contingent upon working behavior. The total candy earned in the session was divided equally among the class. Portable radio control apparatus was adopted to give feedback to the child when he was displaying the desired working behavior. An increase in working behavior and a decrease in talking aloud and out-of-seat behavior was observed for each of the four subjects. When the feedback apparatus was removed, the desired behavior was maintained through candy reinforcement alone in all four subjects.     

REDUCING AGGRESSIVE AND SELF-INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RETARDED CHILDREN THROUGH REINFORCEMENT OF OTHER BEHAVIORS1

Aggressive and self-injurious behaviors of four retarded children were reduced by combining various techniques with the differential reinforcement of other behaviors (DRO). In one study, aggressive responses of a severely retarded child were reduced when DRO was combined with a 30-sec timeout. In a second study, various aggressive classroom behaviors were reduced when the child was told “no” for an inappropriate response but earned puzzle pieces for periods of time when inappropriate responses did not occur. Exchangeable tokens were given to a third subject for every 15 min in which aggressive responding did not occur, while each inappropriate response resulted in the loss of all tokens accrued. Responding was decreased to a level far below baseline. For a fourth child, self-injurious responses were followed by “no”, and intervals of time in which no self-injurious responding occurred earned candy. The rate of this behavior reduced significantly. In each case, the DRO procedure combined with the other techniques proved to be manageable for the teacher and successful in reducing the inappropriate behavior.     

Density,perceived choice,and response to controllable and uncontrollable outcomes

Two experiments were designed to consider the effects of chronic high residential density on responses to choice and controllable and uncontrollable outcomes. In the first study, children responded to obtain candy as reinforcement and, during certain phases of the procedure, were able to select a schedule, if they chose, which allowed them to pick their own candy rather than having the experimenter select candy for them. Children who lived in high residential density were significantly less likely than children from less dense homes to try to control the administration of available outcomes. In the second study, children were preexposed to a solvable or unsolvable cognitive learning task and tested for how well they subsequently learned a solvable problem. Children from high density homes did significantly more poorly than less crowded children when the first problem was unsolvable. It was suggested that chronic density limits prediction and control in the home environment and consequently leads to the development of decreased expectancies for contingency between response and outcome in other control-relevant situations.     

The role of potential loss in the influence of affect on risk-taking behavior

In three experiments the influence of positive affect on risk-taking behavior was examined. In Experiment 1 subjects who received a free gift of candy, compared to those in a control group, were willing to pay increasingly more for lottery tickets as the prize rose from $10 to $90 and as the probability of winning rose from .10 to .90. In Experiment 2 subjects who received a free gift of candy, compared to those in a control group, were willing to pay more to buy insurance against loss, and were particularly more likely to do so when the potential loss was large. A third study, which found that subjects who received a free gift of candy were not willing to pay more for an item than were control subjects, led us to conclude that the results of the first two experiments are not best interpreted as merely due to a general increase in the willingness to spend as a consequence of having received a gift. Instead it was concluded that positive feelings can foster both risk-prone behavior (Experiment 1) and risk-averse behavior (Experiment 2). When a positive-affect subject faces a risk situation in which the potential loss is emphasized, the subject demonstrates risk aversion; when the potential loss is minimized, then risk proneness is observed.     

Effects of candy and social reinforcement, instructions, and reinforcement schedule leaning on the modification and maintenance of smiling

Two retarded boys exhibited abnormally low rates of smiling. In Exp. I, the frequency of a boy's smiling was first increased with candy reinforcement, but the frequency of the response did not decrease when candy reinforcement was terminated. When the subject wore a sign designed to make social interactions contingent on not-smiling, the frequency of smiling decreased. The sign was then changed to make social interactions contingent on smiling and the rate of smiling increased. In Exp. II, a second boy initially never smiled. Establishment of a contingency for candy reinforcement did not increase this zero response rate. Instructing the child to smile initially increased smiling, but the instructions then became progressively more ineffective. Candy reinforcement increased the rate of smiling to a normal range, but the rate of the response promptly decreased when this reinforcement was discontinued. Continuous candy reinforcement was again employed to increase the response rate and then progressively leaner schedules of variable-ratio candy reinforcement were employed. Consequently, the rate of smiling did not decrease when candy reinforcement was again eliminated. Subsequently, signs were employed to regulate social interactions and the rate of smiling was shown to be controlled by these interactions serving as reinforcers.     

Object and size awareness in preschool-age children

Self-awareness is a skill developed during the first few years of life. Although some research demonstrates that this ability may be incomplete in toddlers, there is little to no literature relating to preschoolers. This study tested 44 preschool-age children on 8 tasks to assess their awareness of the structural characteristics of their own size and weight as well as the size and weight of external objects. The most frequently observed behavior was for children to make an attempt at something that was inappropriate for their size and weight, but overall participants showed a better understanding of their own bodies than other objects. Both the number of attempts required to solve the problems and accuracy of their solutions demonstrated these task differences. These results indicate that the development of body awareness skills is far from complete for 3- and 4-year-olds.     

“We will work for you” – Social influence may suppress individual food preferences in a communicative situation in dogs

The level of motivation (i.e. incentive power) is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting performance and learning in various tasks. We investigated whether reward quality has an effect on the performance of family dogs in a two-way object choice test in which they can find the hidden food by relying on distal momentary human pointing cues. In three experiments we varied (1) the type of food reward according to the subjects’ own preference; (2) the quality of the reward offered at the same time in the indicated and not-indicated locations; and (3) the order of the high or low quality rewards in consecutive sessions. In Experiment 1, we first tested whether dogs prefer one kind of reward over another. Then one group was tested with the ‘preferred’ food as reward in the indicated bowl, while dogs in the other group received the ‘non-preferred’ food as reward. We did not find any difference between the performance and choice latencies of the two groups. In Experiment 2 for the first group, the indicated bowl contained a piece of carrot and the not-indicated bowl was empty. In the second group the indicated bowl contained carrot, but the not-indicated bowl contained sausage. According to a preliminary preference test, most dogs prefer sausage over carrot invariably. After 20 trials, the two groups performed surprisingly similarly. There was no difference found between groups in the number of correct choices, incorrect choices and non-choices. However, the comparison between the first and last five trials revealed that subjects who found sausage when they chose the not-indicated bowl (did not follow the pointing) chose the non-indicated bowl significantly more often toward the end of their test session. In Experiment 3, each dog received two sessions with 12 pointing trials in each. For the first session, one group was rewarded with sausage and the other with carrot upon choosing the indicated bowl. In the second session, the indicated bowl contained dry dog food for both groups. We found that correct choices and response latencies did not change over two sessions in the ‘sausage’ group. In the ‘carrot’ group, the dogs chose faster in the second session, but their performance did not improve; in fact, they chose the not-indicated bowl more often than the indicated bowl. As a conclusion, we can say that reward quality had some effect on dogs’ choice behavior in these experiments. The drop in their performance was not drastic, taking into account the general refusal to eat one of the ‘rewards’ (carrot) during the preference tests and also during the test trials. It seems that incentive contrast may play a relatively minor role in dog-human social interactions. Appropriate reward quality can be very important in asocial problem solving tasks, but, when interacting with humans, following human signals may override the effect of changed incentive power.     

Self-awareness: behavior analysis and neuroscience

Self-awareness is a specific type of autoclitic discriminative behavior and inferential generalization to similar performances exhibited by other people. Brain imaging findings take on special importance within behavior analysis when they indicate that dysfunctions in these areas are related to differential effects of our interventions, with some acquiring substantially typical self-awareness skills and others failing to do so. It appears that those individuals whose brain dysfunctions are limited to these areas, and are not part of more generalized brain abnormalities, are amenable to substantial acquisition of those most basic of human skills called self-awareness, whereas individuals with more generalized brain dysfunction are not so disposed. Through a combination of less or more effective teaching contingencies during childhood, and degrees of dysfunction of those brain structures, some children grow up lacking self-reflective abilities and self-insight, whereas others are extraordinarily astute at those capacities. Among children with autism spectrum disorders who lack those skills due to abnormal brain development, approximately half of them can acquire those skills, at least to some degree through the use of effective, intensive, early behavior therapy methods.     

Objective self-awareness as a nonaversive state: Effect of anticipating discrepancy reduction

The possibility that self-aware subjects in previous objective sell-awareness studies displayed heightened negative affect and avoidance reactions because they were made to focus on permanent negative discrepancies was investigated in the present research. Subjects were first induced to regard a negative real-ideal discrepancy as either permanent or reducible in size, and then were either made or not made objectively self-aware. As expected, those self-aware subjects who anticipated no reduction in discrepancy size were found to be more negative in mood and quicker to exit from the experimental room than were their counterparts in the other three conditions. It was concluded that self-focused attention only generates aversive reactions when it brings to awareness a negative real-ideal discrepancy which the individual feels cannot be altered.     

“Scatter Analysis” Techniques Applied to Anxiety Neurotics from a Restricted Culturo-Educational Environment

Hearing-impaired children were individually administered a task in which possession of accumulating candy rewards was made contingent upon the child's decision to stop any further accumulation of the candy. Hearing-impaired children, who under instruction periodically made American Sign Language (ASL) statements about the goodness of the reward, waited significantly longer before terminating the waiting period than did hearing-impaired children instructed to sign statements about the act of waiting and somewhat longer than did hearing-impaired children instructed to sign a neutral statement. Since the pattern of delay was unlike that reported in earlier investigations when nonhandicapped children verbalized similar statements and since variation in mode of communication did not influence delay in nonhandicapped children in the present investigation, the results were interpreted in terms of differences in cognitive controlling mechanisms between nonhandicapped and hearing-impaired children.     

Adult Education is the Psychologist's Business

One hundred eighty-seven kindergarten through sixth grade Caucasian boys and girls ranked seven types of candy according to preference, then were given the opportunity to share candy with children described as similar to them, with children described as dissimilar and needy, or with both. Charitable behavior, defined as sharing significantly more with needy recipients, was shown to emerge at about age 7 and to increase significantly to age 10. Results are discussed in relation to age changes in perceptual discrimination, ability to abstract, and internalization of social norms.     

Retracted:Staff,miter, book,share: how attributes of Saint Nicholas induce normative behavior

In three studies the hypothesis was tested that for young Dutch children, who associate Saint Nicholas with the norm to share one's wealth with others, attributes of Saint Nicholas (miter, book, and staff) would spontaneously activate the “sharing norm” and subsequent sharing behavior. The results confirmed our expectations. In two studies, young Dutch children share more candy with others after being primed with attributes of Saint Nicholas compared to being primed with a dwarf in the control condition. In a third study, children evaluate sharing more positively after being primed with attributes of Saint Nicholas, and more negatively after being primed with the Toys R Us logo, compared to being primed with a dwarf. This is the first empirical evidence that attributes of normative symbols can induce normative behavior and change norm judgments. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reactions to objective self-awareness

In order to determine reactions to objective self-awareness, 96 female undergraduates received either positive or negative feedback on a “creativity” task prior to being given an opportunity to write a response to a visual cue. Half of the subjects were made objectively self-aware, via a mirror, during the visual cue task; half were not. In addition, half of the subjects were led to believe that the visual cue task was highly related to creativity, while half learned that the task was low in relevance. A “longer the response, the better” standard of correctness was established for all subjects. As predicted, the results indicated that when made objectively self-aware, subjects who received negative feedback wrote more in response to the visual cue than did those who received positive feedback, a difference which was not obtained for the subjectively self-aware subjects. The task relevance manipulation also produced a significant main effect. A similar pattern of results was obtained on a measure of the time spent on the task. The implications of the results for objective self-awareness theory are considered.     

The salience of the self in responses to inequity

Previous research has shown that people strive to conform with the standards of significant others in distributive justice. The present research was concerned with the role of attention to the self in the same paradigm. If people are motivated to personally evaluate their own behavior as fair, then self-focus should result in heightened attempts to redress an overpayment inequity. After the subject's criterion of a fair wage was assessed, they were paid either that amount or double it. Orthogonal to this manipulation, subjects were either made objectively self-aware (OSA) or not, by the presence or absence of a mirror. Consistent with the hypothesis, overpaid OSA subjects did more work, but of a poorer quality, than overpaid not-OSA subjects. This was taken as evidence of more zealous attempts to restore a sense of equity, implicating a greater personal need to eliminate the injustice when the discrepancy between pay level and a personal standard of fairness was made more prominent to the self.     

THE EFFECTS OF CONTINGENT AND NONCONTINGENT REWARDS ON THE I.Q. SCORES OF CHILDREN OF ABOVE-AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE1

This study investigated the effects of candy reinforcement on I.Q. test scores in first and second graders of above-average intelligence. Thirty-six subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups and either given candy contingent on correct responses, noncontingently, or not given candy. After measuring all subjects on Form L of the revised Stanford Binet, each subject in the contingent group was given an M & M immediately following each correct answer on Form M, while a yoked-comparison subject received the same number of M & M's before responding to a question and therefore without regard to correctness of answers. It was expected that both types of candy administration would produce higher I.Q. change scores than the no-candy control group, but there were no statistically significant differences among the three treatments. The differences between the first and second test scores were 4.17 (contingent), 4.67 (noncontingent), and 1.00 (no reinforcement). Reasons for this failure to replicate previous findings were discussed.     

Modification of verbal behavior in speech deficient children

Operant conditioning techniques were applied to the verbal behavior of three speech deficient children. Subjects A and B having no intelligible speech and Subject C having very little. Using candy and a puppet with a 13-yr-old boy (A), it was possible to condition vocalization rate. Using social reinforcement with a 6-yr-old boy (B), it was possible to extinguish animal-like sounds, to condition vocalization rate, and to shape a small vocabulary of syllables, but not to gain discriminative control over word emission. Using varied reinforcers, e.g., candy, praise, repetitions other own responses, and hand clapping with a 13-yr-old girl (C), it was possible to condition rate of verbalization, to establish appropriate mimicking, and to establish naming of five pictures. The results were consistent with the findings of Salzinger et al. (1965) and with those of Kerr et al. (1965).     

Decision making and visibility in cats (Felis catus) in a progressive elimination task

When making decisions animals can rely on information stored in memory and/or on information available through perceptual processes. Under some circumstances, perceptual access to a relevant piece of information can be lost as when a prey hides under a cover. If this piece of information is critical, the animal must be able to keep it active in the working memory until the final decision is made. Species endowed with object permanence can to a certain extent overcome such a lack of perceptual access. Numerous studies have investigated object permanence in animals, but no study systematically examined the interaction when making a decision between an information directly available through perception and an information that can no longer be perceived. In the present study, domestic cats (Felis catus) were administered a progressive elimination task in which they had to visit and deplete either two visible and one hidden target (e.g., Experiments 1 and 2) or one visible and two hidden targets (e.g., Experiments 3 and 4). The cats were brought back to the starting point after each visit to any target whether that target had been previously visited or not. The results revealed that the cats searched at the visible target(s) first and at the hidden target(s) last, which was referred to as the visibility rule. The results also revealed that the position of the bowl that was distinct (e.g., the visible bowl when the two other ones were hidden and the opposite) influenced the way this cognitive rule was implemented. More specifically, when the intermediate bowl was distinct the visibility rule was readily implemented but when either the right of the left bowl was distinct the visibility was violated. That is the cats did no longer choose the visible target(s) first. The visibility rule was interpreted in terms of optimization principles, the external distinct target effect was interpreted in terms of divided attention and lateralization.     

Facilitation of physical aggression through objective self-awareness

Based on a theory of self-awareness it was hypothesized that induced attention to the self would facilitate aggression if the salient standard of behavior was one in which high aggression was positively valued. Female subjects were given an opportunity to shock a male confederate of the experimenter in a presumed learning experiment. Self-awareness was induced in half the subjects by the presence of a mirror. The Mirror group delivered significantly higher shocks to the confederate than did the No-Mirror control group.