Culture, context, and behavior

In this article I propose a model that posits three major sources of influence on behavior-basic human nature (via universal psychological processes), culture (via social roles), and personality (via individual role identities) and argue that individual behaviors are the products of the interaction between the three. I discuss how culture emerges from the interaction of basic human nature and the ecological contexts in which groups exist, and how social roles are determined by culture-specific psychological meanings attributed to situational contexts. The model further suggests that situational context moderates the relative contributions of the three sources in influencing behavior. I provide examples of apparent contradictory findings in the study of emotion that can be explained by the model proposed.     

Renewed behavior produced by context change and its implications for treatment maintenance: A review

Behavioral treatment gains established in one setting do not always maintain in other settings. The present review examines the relevance of basic and translational research to understanding failures to maintain treatment gains across settings. Specifically, studies of the renewal effect examine how transitioning away from a treatment setting could evoke a return of undesirable behavior, rather than newly trained appropriate behavior. Studies of renewal typically arrange three phases, with a response trained and reinforced under a particular set of contextual stimuli in the first phase. Next, that response is extinguished, often under a different set of contextual stimuli. Finally, that response returns despite extinction remaining in effect upon returning to the original training context or transitioning to a novel context. Thus, removing the extinction context is sufficient to produce a recurrence of the response. The findings suggest treatment effects can become specific to the context in which the treatment was delivered. This literature offers promising methods for systematically assessing the factors contributing to treatment maintenance and improving generalization of treatment gains across contexts. Therefore, the present review suggests basic and translational research on renewal provides an empirical literature to bring greater conceptual systematization to understanding generalization and maintenance of behavioral treatment.     

The relationship context of human behavior and development

The influence of social relationships on human development and behavior is receiving increased attention from psychologists, who are central contributors to the rapidly developing multidisciplinary field of relationship science. In this article, the authors selectively review some of the significant strides that have been made toward understanding the effects of relationships on development and behavior and the processes by which relationships exert their influence on these, with the purpose of highlighting important questions that remain to be answered, controversial issues that need to be resolved, and potentially profitable paths for future inquiry. The authors' thesis is that important advances in psychological knowledge will be achieved from concerted investigation of the relationship context in which most important human behaviors are developed and displayed.     

Emotional context, maternal behavior and emotion regulation

This study investigated the importance of emotion-eliciting context (positive and negative) and mother's behaviors (constrained and involved) on toddlers’ emotion regulation behavioral strategies, emotional expressiveness and intensity, during three episodes eliciting fear, frustration/anger and positive affect. Fifty-five children between 18 and 26 months of age and their mothers participated in the study. Toddlers’ regulatory strategies varied as function of emotion-eliciting context (children exhibited behavioral strategies more frequently during positive affect and frustration/anger episodes and less frequently during fear episodes) and maternal involvement. Toddlers’ expression of emotion varied as function of emotion-eliciting context (children exhibited more emotional expressions, both negative and positive during fear and frustration/anger episodes compared to positive affect episodes). Toddlers’ expression of emotion was not strongly related to maternal involvement, however, the intensity of emotional expression was related to the interaction of context and maternal involvement.     

Working with Distressed Adolescent Females

No abstract available for this article.     

The analysis of human behavior in context

Does the name of the special interest group, “The Experimental Analysis of Human Behavior,” imply that those who analyze the behavior of human animals must organize themselves apart from those who analyze the behavior of nonhuman animals? Is the use of nonhumans in experiments really not relevant to the analysis of the behavior of humans? If so, then something must have changed. Many differences exist, of course, between the behavior of humans and nonhumans—humans, for example, cannot fly under their own power—but have we really isolated differences in principle, differences that require separate organizations for the study of each? I will try to indicate why I believe this is a serious concern, where the concern comes from, and what, perhaps, might be done to maintain what was once a flourishing bidirectional relation between research with humans and nonhumans, in both basic and applied research.     

A dynamic context model of interactive behavior

A dynamic context model of interactive behavior was developed to explain results from two experiments that tested the effects of interaction costs on encoding strategies, cognitive representations, and response selection processes in a decision-making and a judgment task. The model assumes that the dynamic context defined by the mixes of internal and external representations and processes are sensitive to the interaction cost imposed by the task environment. The model predicts that changes in the dynamic context may lead to systematic biases in cognitive representations and processes that eventually influence decision-making and judgment outcomes. Consistent with the predictions by the model, results from the experiments showed that as interaction costs increased, encoding strategies and cognitive representations shifted from perception-based to memory-based. Memory-based comparisons of the stimuli enhanced the similarity and dominance effects, and led to stronger systematic biases in response outcomes in a choice task. However, in a judgment task, memory-based representations enhanced only the dominance effects. Results suggested that systematic response biases in the dominance context were caused by biases in the cognitive representations of the stimuli, but response biases in the similarity context were caused by biases in the comparison process induced by the choice task. Results suggest that changes in interaction costs not only change whether information was assessed from the external world or from memory but also introduce systematic biases in the cognitive representation of the information, which act as biased inputs to the subsequent decision-making and judgment processes. Results are consistent with the idea of interactive cognition, which proposes that representations and processes are contingent on the dynamic context defined by the information flow between the external task environment and internal cognition.     

Scaling behavior in the temporal context model

The Temporal Context Model (TCM) postulates a distributed representation of temporal context that provides the cue for episodic recall tasks. TCM, coupled with the Luce Choice Rule for determining probability of recall, a conjunction referred to as TCMFR, is able to explain the existence of the long-term recency effect, as well as predicting the persistence of associative effects even with the inclusion of a delay between items. Here, quantitative predictions of TCMFR such as the magnitude of the delay interval is increased in continuous-distractor free recall are developed. The magnitude of the recency effect is operationally defined as the ratio of the probability of first recall (PFR) of the last list item to the PFR of the next-to-last item. Properties of associative effects are operationalized by using analogous measures derived from conditional response probability (CRP) curves. TCMFR predicts a decrease in recency with increasing delay. The rate of this decay and the qualitative pattern of change with increasing delay depend on the rate of contextual drift. For a range of values of the rate of contextual drift, TCMFR also predicts a transient increase in the recency effect as the length of the delay increases from zero. The model predicts that contiguity effects in free recall should follow a similar pattern, but that associative asymmetry, ubiquitously observed in free recall, should decay monotonically with increases in the delay interval.     

Partner Discrepancies in Distressed Marriages

ABSTRACT

Spousal discrepancy theory posits that partners with wide personality differences are at risk for marital distress. In this study, we assessed links between partner personality and interpersonal characteristics and marital distress in 244 couples who sought marital therapy. The sample was divided into three subgroups according to marital duration. Longer-married couples reflected significantly less impulsive, exploitive, and insensitive characteristics than couples in either shorter or intermediate marriages. Couples' marital distress was linked to larger discrepancies in personal distress, impulsivity, interpersonal insensitivity, and self-centered characteristics. While husbands' marital distress was linked to partner differences in personal distress and to impulsive, narcissistic, and competitive characteristics, wives' marital distress was primarily linked to partner discrepancies in self-centeredness.     

The social context of undermining behavior at work

We developed a fairness theory perspective to explain the experience of being “singled out” for social undermining from supervisors and coworkers, and tested our predictions across four distinct social contexts. We argued and predicted that attitudinal and behavioral reactions to undermining (from supervisors and coworkers) would be strongest when a correspondingly low level of undermining was found in the social context. The hypothesized cross-level interaction was supported for supervisor and coworker undermining among a sample of officers from the national police force in the Republic of Slovenia (Study 1), replicated for supervisor undermining among soldiers in the US National Guard (Study 2), and further replicated with group-member undermining among a sample of individuals working in student teams (Study 3). We then predicted that justice perceptions would mediate the singled out interaction and tested the mediated-moderation model in a coworker-network context among employees of a restaurant chain (Study 4). The results substantially supported the mediation prediction. These findings from diverse settings demonstrate that considering the social context is important when trying to understand the effects of social undermining behaviors at work.     

Reproductive behavior in the context of global population

In 1900, the world's population was estimated at about 1.6 billion. With improved health and a youthful population, the world's total population more than tripled to 6 billion by 1999. There is consensus that the world's population will reach about 8.9 billion by 2050. Despite the persistent growth of population, the reproductive behavior of individuals and couples has changed significantly over the past 50 years with smaller families and lower fertility becoming the norm in many countries. Psychology not only may provide the theoretical frameworks and empirical insights into reproductive behavior but also can foster ways in which the debate on these highly personal issues can be productive for the welfare of people around the world.     

Altruistic organizational citizenship behavior: context, disposition, and age

The authors proposed employee age as moderating the structural stability of altruistic organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with regard to the influence of context-relevant attitudes and dispositional variables. Analyses of peer ratings of altruistic OCB in a sample of 96 U.S. nurses showed that the contextual variables of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and trust in management were germane for the younger participants. The dispositional variable of moral judgment was a unique predictor of altruistic OCB among the older participants.     

Patterns of interactive behavior in a multicultural school context

This paper is an empirical research based on observational methodology. It is an idiographic research with a mixed observational design of low intervention, of the following type: monitoring/nomothetical/multidimensional. We used a tool created in situ for the systematic multidimensional register of the complex occurrence of several types of behavioural events in real time, which combines the format of field investigation with the system of categories. The reliability of the observation tool is obtained through the researcher-observer's agreement with him- or herself. Our aim is to study the social relationships between first-grade peer students in a multicultural context. We present some structures of seeking social closeness, help and cooperation among children of similar and different cultures, which were discovered through the detection and analysis of temporal patterns of the interactive situation of boys and girls who were observed during their academic and leisure activities in the natural context of their school.     

Prevalence of renewal of problem behavior during context changes

Renewal is defined as the reemergence of a previously eliminated behavior following a context change. Determining the prevalence of this effect in clinical practice would allow clinicians to better anticipate the reemergence of problem behavior, such as when a patient is discharged from a treatment facility to return to their home. The current consecutive, case-series analysis determined the prevalence and magnitude of renewal when implementing behavioral treatments for problem behavior. Across 182 context changes, renewal was observed 77 times (42.3%). In the first session following the context change, problem behavior rates increased by a factor of 3 and then decreased across successive sessions. These results indicated that renewal effects may be common, but are also transient and return to rates observed before context changes.     

Impact of Psychoeducational Interventions on Distressed Family Caregivers

This study compared the effectiveness of two active interventions to a waiting-list control condition to reduce depression and burden and increase use of adaptive coping strategies in family caregivers (N = 161) of physically and/or cognitively impaired older adults. Chi-square analysis of change in depression status from pre- to postintervention showed a higher percentage of improvement among participants in the increasing life satisfaction psychoeducational condition compared to the improvement rate in either the problem-solving psychoeducational class or the wait-list condition. Change in coping strategies and subjective level of burden also differed by group, with participants in the class conditions reporting more frequent use of cognitive or behavioral coping strategies, and less subjective burden, from pre- to postintervention. There was no change in either avoidant coping or perceived stress over time. Results show that intervention programs targeted to improve specific coping skills and psychological symptoms can have a significant impact on caregivers' distress.