Perceptions of conventional war: late adolescents' views

Late adolescents' views concerning conventional war were assessed in order to better understand the thinking of today's youth and to compare their views with those of early adolescents previously reported in the literature. Three hundred ninety-nine college undergraduates from two universities were surveyed regarding conventional warfare in general and United States military involvement in Latin America specifically. Results suggest that attitudes toward war were related to sex, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation. Although two-thirds of the respondents believed wars were sometimes needed, there was little support for United States military involvement in Latin America and much skepticism of President Reagan's honesty on the issue. Overall, late adolescents' views were less positive and less extreme than were those of early adolescents.     

Rapid solving of a problem apparatus by juvenile black-throated monitor lizards (Varanus albigularis albigularis)

It is widely accepted that providing stimulus enrichment is an important part of the development and maintenance of behavior and well-being in mammals. However, extending this idea to non-avian reptiles has barely been explored, certainly as an aid to cognitive development. Monitor lizards have a reputation for being highly curious and intelligent lizards, but quantitative experiments are necessary to evaluate such impressions as well as the value of providing enrichment to captive squamate reptiles. In this study eight juvenile black-throated monitors, Varanus albigularis, were tested in their home enclosures with three presentations, at weekly intervals, of a novel task apparatus: a transparent food tube containing several prey. The food tube allowed the monitors to obtain prey by using hinged doors at either end of the tube to access food. All eight lizards learned to open the tube, insert head, and capture the prey within 10 min in the first trial. By the second trial, both mean latencies to access the tube and capture the first prey item decreased significantly, as did the use of ineffective responses such as shaking the tube. A further slight decrease occurred in the third trial. Due to the results of this and similar studies, serious consideration should be given to further testing of cognitive abilities in squamate reptiles. Incorporating problem solving tasks may also be useful to increase the activity level and captive well-being of squamate reptiles, especially monitor lizards.     

Children as Victims of War and Terrorism

Summary

War and terrorism victimize all people in a country, group, or area, but disputes in recent decades are especially likely to impact children and families. Children can experience wars by being in the war zone, by being in countries that deploy military personnel to a war zone, by suffering from the consequences of military expenses and economic warfare, by experiencing war and terrorism from a distance through media, or by suffering fromindoctrination and the building of enemy images. This paper reviews what researchers havediscovered about the unique risks associated with each of those categories and recommendspromising solutions.     

Effects of poisoning on predatory and ingestive behavior toward artificial prey in rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Ingestion of novel prey by vertebrate predators that is followed by illness typically decreases the predators' eating the prey more readily than their pursuing or killing it. We used artificial prey-food items (rolling ball bearings that predicted food pellets) to model and extend this finding in laboratory rats. During daily experimental sessions presentations of a novel bearing-food combination were intermixed with presentations of a familiar bearing-food combination. The poisoned animals received lithium chloride injections after each session. Experiment 1a showed that: (a) Poisoning markedly decreased ingestion of the novel food without decreasing the frequency of contact (nose, seize, carry, or chew) with the novel bearing predicting that food. (b) However, poisoning did significantly decrease the average duration of contact with the novel bearing. (c) Poisoning did not decrease behavior toward the familiar food and bearing. Experiment 1b showed that after moderate exposure to pairings of the novel food and bearing, poisoning decreased behavior toward both novel and familiar food and bearings. The results indicate that important aspects of predation can be simulated and examined in the laboratory by using artificial prey-food items. These results also support the conclusions that predatory behavior and ingestion reflect separable modes of behavior and that the presence of novel prey interferes with the generalization of poisoning effects to familiar prey.     

Aposematic colouration and avoidance learning in chicks

Two groups of male chicks (Gallus gallus) were allowed to peck at distasteful food (chick crumbs flavoured with quinine and mustard) that either matched or contrasted with the background on which the food was presented. The experiment consisted of a series of trials, each of which was terminated when a fixed amount of food (four crumbs) had been ingested. Within-trial pecking rate was initially higher in the group given constrasting food, confirming that degree of contrast between a prey item and its background increases the likelihood of detection by a naive predator. However, during the series of training trials pecking rate declined faster, and reached a lower level, in the group given contrasting food than in the group given matching food. Thus, rate and strength of avoidance learning are affected by the degree to which distasteful food contrasts with its background. This may explain why many distasteful prey species are brightly coloured, despite the fact that bright colouration increases the likelihood of initial detection by a predator.     

Time horizons in rats foraging for food in temporally separated patches

An important tenet of optimal foraging theory is that foragers compare prey densities in alternative patches to determine an optimal distribution of foraging behavior over time. A critical question is over what time period (time horizon) this integration of information and behavior occurs. Recent research has indicated that rats do not compare food density in a depleting patch with that in a rich patch delayed by an hour or more (Timberlake, 1984). In the present research we attempted to specify over what time period a future rich patch would affect current foraging. The effect of future food was measured by early entry into the rich patch (anticipation) and by a decrease in food obtained in the depleting patch (suppression). The rats showed anticipation of a rich patch up to an hour distant, but suppressed current feeding only if the rich patch was 16 min distant or less. The suppression effect appeared mediated by competition for expression between anticipatory entries into the rich patch and continued foraging in the depleting patch. These results suggest that optimal foraging is based on a variety of specific mechanisms rather than a general optimizing algorithm with a single time horizon.     

Sexual differences in memory in shiny cowbirds

Avian brood parasites depend on other species, the hosts, to raise their offspring. During the breeding season, parasitic cowbirds (Molothrus sp.) search for potential host nests to which they return for laying a few days after first locating them. Parasitic cowbirds have a larger hippocampus/telencephalon volume than non-parasitic species; this volume is larger in the sex involved in nest searching (females) and it is also larger in the breeding than in the non-breeding season. In nature, female shiny cowbirds Molothrus bonariensis search for nests without the male’s assistance. Here we test whether, in association with these neuroanatomical and behavioural differences, shiny cowbirds display sexual differences in a memory task in the laboratory. We used a task consisting of finding food whose location was indicated either by the appearance or the location of a covering disk. Females learnt to retrieve food faster than males when food was associated with appearance cues, but we found no sexual differences when food was associated with a specific location. Our results are consistent with the view that parasitism and its neuroanatomical correlates affect performance in memory tasks, but the effects we found were not in the expected direction, emphasising that the nature of avian hippocampal function and its sexual differences are not yet understood. Received: 30 April 1998 / Accepted after revision: 5 September 1998     

Margaret Mead and behavioral scientists in World War II: problems in responsibility, truth, and effectiveness

In World War II, Margaret Mead and her behavioral science colleagues actively applied their science to the American war effort on issues such as morale, food habits, psychological warfare, and the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Mead's participation or lack of participation in these activities, and her varying enthusiasms and misgivings about them, raise fundamental issues about the responsibility of behavioral scientists to warn the public against dangerous policies, as well as the ethics of behavioral scientists participating in deceitful psychological warfare and the extent of their effectiveness in contributing to public policymaking.     

Leaving patches: effects of economy, deprivation, and session duration

Three pigeons pecked keys for food reinforcers in a laboratory analogue of foraging in patches. Half the patches contained food (were prey patches). In prey patches, pecks to one key occasionally produced a reinforcer, followed by a fixed travel time and then the start of a new patch. Pecks to another key were exit responses, and immediately produced travel time and then a new patch. Travel time was varied from 0.25 to 16 s at each of three session durations: 1, 4, and 23.5 hr. This part of the experiment arranged a closed economy, in that the only source of food was reinforcers obtained in prey patches. In another part, food deprivation was manipulated by varying postsession feeding so as to maintain the subjects' body weights at percentages ranging from 85% to 95% of their ad lib weights, in 1-hr sessions with a travel time of 12 s. This was an open economy. Patch residence time, defined as the time between the start of a patch and an exit response, increased with increasing travel time, and consistently exceeded times predicted by an optimal foraging model, supporting previously published results. However, residence times also increased with increasing session duration and, in longer sessions, consistently exceeded previously reported residence times in comparable open-economy conditions. Residence times were not systematically affected by deprivation levels. In sum, the results show that the long residence times obtained in long closed-economy sessions should probably be attributed to session duration rather than to economy or deprivation. This conclusion is hard to reconcile with previous interpretations of longer-than-optimal residence times but is consistent with, in economic terms, a predicted shift in consumption towards a preferred commodity when income is increased.     

Motor control by vision and the evolution of cerebral lateralization

Chicks (4 or 5 days old), which are able to use either eye freely, use the right eye (RE) preferentially in approach to a food dish when a lid, which has to be removed, is visible during approach. They use the left eye (LE) instead when no manipulation is required, but the same dish is similarly visible. The RE is also used preferentially in selecting food grains scattered over the floor; RE use in these two contexts is thus associated with visual control which brings the bill in planned contact with a visible target rather than with approach to a site where it is anticipated that feeding will occur. Zebrafish also use the RE preferentially when preparing to bite a target; during purely visual examination of the same target, this preference disappears. This evidence is used together with evolutionary evidence to support a new hypothesis for the origin of cerebral lateralization: paired anterior eyes evolved in filter-feeding ancestors of the vertebrates as part of the acquisition of prey catching. A key use for early vision was to predict likely contact with prey so as to inhibit reflexes of rejection and avoidance normally elicitated by tactile input to the mouth and so to allow ingestion. Innervation of mouth structures by the left side of the CNS caused control of mouth reflexes to become predominantly a left CNS affair. As visual abilities developed this starting condition meant that control of manipulation (which is by the mouth for most vertebrates) remained predominantly with the left side of the CNS.     

Are ants sensitive to the geometry of tunnel bifurcation?

The ability to orient and navigate in space is essential for all animals whose home range is organized around a central point. Because of their small home range compared to vertebrates, central place foraging insects such as ants have for a long time provided a choice model for the study of orientation mechanisms. In many ant species, the movement of individuals on their colony home range is achieved essentially collectively, on the chemical trails laid down by their nest mates. In the initial stage of food recruitment, these trails can cross each other and thus form a network of interconnected paths in which ants have to orient. Previous simulation studies have shown that ants can find the shortest path between their nest and a food source in such a network only if there is a bias in the branch they choose when they reach an asymmetrical bifurcation. In this paper, we studied the choice of ants when facing either a symmetrical or an asymmetrical bifurcation between two tunnels. Ants were tested either on their way to a food source or when coming back to their nest, and either in the presence or in the absence of a chemical trail. Overall, our results show that the choice of an ant at a tunnel bifurcation depends more on the presence/absence of a trail pheromone than on the geometry of the bifurcation itself.     

国内外关于心理战研究的现状和问题

心理战作为一种战争和社会的实践活动,有着悠久的历史,但作为一门独立学科,发端于上世纪初。该文概述了心理战作为一个独立研究领域以来国内外关于心理战研究的现状。在此基础上,提出了心理战研究存在的问题和不足,最后对我国心理战研究的发展方向提出了看法。     

The role of learning in risk-avoidance strategies during spider–ant interactions

Cognitive abilities used by arthropods, particularly predators, when interacting in a natural context have been poorly studied. Two neotropical sympatric predators, the golden silk spider Nephila clavipes and the ectatommine ant Ectatomma tuberculatum, were observed in field conditions where their interactions occurred regularly due to the exploitation of the same patches of vegetation. Repeated presentations of E. tuberculatum workers ensnared in their web triggered a progressive decrease in the capture response of N. clavipes. All the spiders that stopped trying to catch the ant on the second and/or third trial were individuals that had been bitten during a previous trial. Behavioural tests in natural field conditions showed that after a single confrontation with ant biting, spiders were able to discriminate this kind of prey more quickly from a defenceless prey (fruit flies) and to selectively and completely suppress their catching response. This one-trial aversive learning was still effective after 24 h. Likewise, E. tuberculatum workers entangled once on a N. clavipes web and having succeeded in escaping, learned to escape more quickly, breaking through the web by preferentially cutting spiral threads (sticky traps) rather than radial threads (stronger structural unsticky components) or pursuing the cutting of radials but doing it more quickly. Both strategies, based on a one-trial learning capability, obviously minimize the number of physical encounters between the two powerful opponents and may enhance their fitness by diminishing the risk of potential injuries resulting from predatory interactions.     

我军心理战理论研究热点问题概要

我军心理战研究兴起于20世纪80年代,虽然历时短,但发展迅速。特别是在心理战理论与实践中的一些热点问题上,已经形成了一些较为成熟的理论框架和思想观点。对心理战内涵和外延的界定上虽然有一定的争议,但已形成了较普遍地被认可的观点;对心理战效应和心理战运行机理,也已经形成比较明确的认识;对心理战地位作用普遍持肯定态度;对外军心理战理论与实践研究的剖析和学习借鉴,成为我军心理战发展的基础     

Defensive Wars and the Reprisal Dilemma

I address a foundational problem with accounts of the morality of war that are derived from the Just War Tradition (JWT). Such accounts problematically focus on ‘the moment of crisis’: i.e. when a state is considering a resort to war. This is problematic because sometimes the state considering the resort to war is partly responsible for wrongly creating the conditions in which the resort to war becomes necessary. By ignoring this possibility, JWT effectively ignores, in its moral evaluation of wars, certain types of past wrongdoing. I argue that we can address this problem by incorporating an account of compensatory liability into an account of the morality of war. Doing so yields the view that, if we have culpably failed to compensate victims for past wrongs, we might be morally required to weigh the well-being of those victims more heavily in our calculation of proportionality when determining the permissibility of a defensive act that harms the victim as a side-effect. This, in turn, makes satisfying the proportionality constraint more difficult. The upshot is that sometimes, in order to wage a defensive war permissibly, we first have to discharge compensatory duties. This has implications for how we evaluate ‘cycles of reprisals’ that plague warfare.     

Attending to detail by communal spider-eating spiders

Communal predators may often need to make especially intricate foraging decisions, as a predator's success may depend on the actions of its neighbours. Here,we consider the decisions made by Portia africana, a jumping spider (Salticidae) that preys on other spiders, including Oecobius amboseli (Oecobiidae), a small prey spider that lives under small sheets of silk (nests) on the walls of buildings. P. africana juveniles settle near oecobiid nests and then ambush oecobiids as they leave or enter the nest. Two or more P. africana juveniles sometimes settle at the same nest and, when an oecobiid is captured, the P. africana juveniles may share the meal. We investigated the joining decisions made by na?ve P. africana juveniles. Experiments were based on using lures (dead spiders positioned in lifelike posture) arranged in a series of 17 different scenes defined by the presence/absence of a nest, the lure types present and the configuration of the lures and the nest. Our findings imply that P. africana juveniles make remarkably precise predatory decisions, with the variables that matter including whether a nest is present, the identity of spiders inside and outside a nest and how spiders are positioned relative to each other and the nest.     

Early puberty in African-American girls: nutrition past and present

This study focused on nutrition and the changes in food intake over time to explain the onset of early pubertal signs in African-American girls. The daily nutritional intake of two diametrically opposite generations of African-American females was compared. The first group included 20 girls between the ages of 5 and 7 and the second group included 28 women between the ages of 70 and 85. The older African-American women were asked to remember the meals they had when they were young. Results revealed significant differences in terms of both quantity and quality of food consumed. Specifically, the women reported eating two meals a day when they were young while the girls reported eating at least three meals. Also, for breakfast, the girls consumed significantly more milk and fruits than did the women. For lunch, the girls consumed significantly more bread and grains, vegetables, meat, and milk than did the women. For dinner, the women consumed significantly more bread and grains. Thus, significant differences between the nutrition of African-American girls about 60 to 70 years ago and those of today were revealed. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez on Religious Authority and Cause for Justified War: The Centrality of Religious War in the Christian Just War Tradition

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.     

PERTURBATIONS OF THE SOUL AND PAINS OF THE BODY: Augustine on Evil Suffered and Done in War

Many contemporary scholars debate whether war should be conceived as a relative evil or a morally neutral act. The works of Augustine may offer new ways of thinking through the categories of this debate. In an early period, Augustine develops the distinction between evil done and evil suffered. Augustine's early treatments of war locate the saint as detached sage doing only good, and immune from evil suffered. In a middle period, he develops a richer picture of the evil suffered on the occasion of the loss of historical goods but fails to develop the implications of this picture as concerns war. Finally, without abandoning emphasis on the avoidance of doing evil, Augustine comes to highlight how evil suffered in war prevents us from speaking simply of good wars. Augustine's ability to hold together senses of evil and their moral significance provides a useful avenue for new thought on this issue.