Need-informational interaction of brain structures

The data presented deal with the role of four main brain structures in the development of emotional states and the organization of purposeful behavior. According to these data, the frontal neocortex orients behavior towards signals of highly probable events (reinforcement), whereas the hypothalamus is the basis for satisfaction of the dominant need. Unlike the neocortex, the hippocampus reacts to events of low probability, which is typical of emotionally stressed brain activity. Unlike the hypothalamus, the amygdala creates the balance, the dynamic coexistence, of competing needs (motivations) and emotions generated by such needs, which makes behavior more adequate. Individual characteristics of the interaction among the four brain structures is the basis for the individual types of higher nervous activity.     

Dialogue-Games: Metacommunication structures for natural language interaction

Our studies of naturally occurring human dialogue have led to the recognition of a class of regularities which characterize impoltant aspects of communication. People appear to interact according to established patterns which span several turns in a dialogue and which recur frequently. These patterns appear to be organized around the goals which the dialogue serves for each participant. Many things which are said later in a dialogue can only be interpreted as pursuit of these goals, established by earlier dialogue. These patterns have been represented b) a set of knowledge structures called Dialogue-Games, capturing shared, conventional knowledge that people have about communication and how it can be used to achieve goals. A Dialogue-Game has Parameters, which represent those elements that vary across instances of a particular pattern-the particular dialogue participants and the content topic. The states of the world which must be in effect for a particular Dialogue-Game to be employed successfully are represented by Specifications of these Parameters. Finally, the expected sequence of intermediate states that occur during instances of a particular conventional pattern are represented by the Components of the corresponding Dialogue-Game. Representations for several Dialogue-Games are presented here, based on our analyses of different kinds of naturally occurring dialogue. A process model is discussed, showing Dialogue-Game identification, pursuit, and termination as part of the comprehension of dialogue utterances. This Dialogue-Game model captures some of the important functional aspects of language, especially indirect uses to achieve implicit communication.     

Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality

A perceiver's actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed.     

Behavioral sequelae of exposure to high power microwave fields

Behavioral sequelae of exposure to high peak power microwave pulses, similar to those produced by operational radar systems and experimental, directed energy weapons systems, were studied using rats trained on fixed-ratio, variable-interval, and differential reinforcement-of-low rate schedules. Ten minute exposures to 240, 720, 2160, and 6480 pulses at a 1 Megawatt peak power level caused a rectal temperature rise of 0.7 to 2.5°C in the animals. Regardless of their schedule of reinforcement, animals exposed to the highest dose level failed to respond, on the average, for 13 minutes after the exposure when they were placed in operant conditioning chambers. However, as soon as their rectal temperatures decreased, responding resumed and no further changes in response pattern were exhibited. No long-term effects were observed in exposed animals. Thus, the behavioral effects that were seen were thermal in nature and independent of the pulsed nature of the fields. This research was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command under the contract # DAMD 17-85-C-5083 awarded to ERC BioServices Corporation and was conducted at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Microwave Research. The research was conducted in compliance with the Animal Welfare Act and other Federal statutes and regulations relating to animals and experiments involving animals. This study adheres to the principles stated in theGuide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, NIH publication 85-23. The views of the author do not purport to reflect the position of the Department of Defense of the Department of the Army (Para 4-3, AR 360-5).     

Behavioral sequelae of exposure to high power microwave fields

Behavioral sequelae of exposure to high peak power microwave pulses, similar to those produced by operational radar systems and experimental, directed energy weapons systems, were studied using rats trained on fixed-ratio, variable-interval, and differential reinforcement-of-low rate schedules. Ten minute exposures to 240, 720, 2160, and 6480 pulses at a 1 Megawatt peak power level caused a rectal temperature rise of 0.7 to 2.5°C in the animals. Regardless of their schedule of reinforcement, animals exposed to the highest dose level failed to respond, on the average, for 13 minutes after the exposure when they were placed in operant conditioning chambers. However, as soon as their rectal temperatures decreased, responding resumed and no further changes in response pattern were exhibited. No long-term effects were observed in exposed animals. Thus, the behavioral effects that were seen were thermal in nature and independent of the pulsed nature of the fields. This research was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command under the contract # DAMD 17-85-C-5083 awarded to ERC BioServices Corporation and was conducted at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Microwave Research. The research was conducted in compliance with the Animal Welfare Act and other Federal statutes and regulations relating to animals and experiments involving animals. This study adheres to the principles stated in theGuide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, NIH publication 85-23. The views of the author do not purport to reflect the position of the Department of Defense of the Department of the Army (Para 4-3, AR 360-5).     

Infant crying and parent–infant interaction: Theory and measurement

Infant crying is frequently quantified as a primary dependent variable in studies where the goal is to understand and soothe infant crying within the context of the parent–infant relationship. Through a historical review and an examination of studies and measurement techniques, the utility of quantifying infant crying is discussed. Although duration and timing of infant crying may be a practical concern for families and health professionals, the effectiveness of soothing interventions may not be best examined by attempts to measure unit reductions in infant crying. Rather, developing an understanding of infant crying within the context of parent–infant relationships may have more utility. Understanding infant crying in context may provide direction to the selection of soothing interventions and to more appropriate measures of the effectiveness of such interventions. ©1999 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Classification of concatenation measurement structures according to scale type

A relational structure is said to be of scale type (M,N) iff M is the largest degree of homogeneity and N the least degree of uniqueness (Narens, 1981a, Narens, 1981b) of its automorphism group.Roberts (in Proceedings of the first Hoboken Symposium on graph theory, New York: Wiley, 1984; in Proceedings of the fifth international conference on graph theory and its applications, New York: Wiley, 1984) has shown that such a structure on the reals is either ordinal or M is less than the order of at least one defining relation (Theorem 1.2). A scheme for characterizing N is outlined in Theorem 1.3. The remainder of the paper studies the scale type of concatenation structures 〈X, ?, ° 〉, where ? is a total ordering and ° is a monotonic operation. Section 2 establishes that for concatenation structures with M>0 and N<∞ the only scale types are (1,1), (1,2), and (2,2), and the structures for the last two are always idempotent. Section 3 is concerned with such structures on the real numbers (i.e., candidates for representations), and it uses general results of Narens for real relational structures of scale type (M, M) (Theorem 3.1) and of Alper (Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 1985, 29, 73–81) for scale type (1, 2) (Theorem 3.2). For M>0, concatenation structures are all isomorphic to numerical ones for which the operation can be written $\text{x°y = yf(}\text{x}\text{y}\text{)}$, where f is strictly increasing and $\text{f(x)}\text{x}$ is strictly decreasing (unit structures). The equation f(x^?)=f(x)^? is satisfied for all x as follows: for and only for ? = 1 in the (1,1) case; for and only for ?=kⁿ, k > 0 fixed, and n ranging over the integers, in the (1, 2) case; and for all ?>0 in the (2, 2) case (Theorems 3.9, 3.12, and 3.13). Section 4 examines relations between concatenation catenation and conjoint structures, including the operation induced on one component by the ordering of a conjoint structure and the concept of an operation on one component being distributive in a conjoint structure. The results, which are mainly of interest in proving other results, are mostly formulated in terms of the set of right translations of the induced operation. In Section 5 we consider the existence of representations of concatenation structures. The case of positive ones was dealt with earlier (Narens & Luce (Journal of Pure & Applied Algebra27, 1983, 197–233). For idempotent ones, closure, density, solvability, and Archimedean are shown to be sufficient (Theorem 5.1). The rest of the section is concerned with incomplete results having to do with the representation of cases with M>0. A variety of special conditions, many suggested by the conjoint equivalent of a concatenation structure, are studied in Section 6. The major result (Theorem 6.4) is that most of these concepts are equivalent to bisymmetry for idempotent structures that are closed, dense, solvable, and Dedekind complete. This result is important in Section 7, which is devoted to a general theory of scale type (2, 2) for the utility of gambles. The representation is a generalization of the usual SEU model which embodies a distinctly bounded form of rationality; by the results of Section 6 it reduces to the fully rational SEU model when rationality is extended beyond the simplest equivalences. Theorem 7.3 establishes that under plausible smoothness conditions, the ratio scale case does not introduce anything different from the (2, 2) case. It is shown that this theory is closely related to, but somewhat more general, than Kahneman and Tversky's (Econometrica47, 1979, 263–291) prospect theory.     

Notes on measurement of the magnitude of the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex response in normal preschool children

This study investigated the magnitude of the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex (ATNR) response in forty preschool children, grouped by age (3 years and 5 years) and sex. The ATNR response was measured by electrogoniometers at the head and elbows and recorded graphically on an X-Y plotter. Change scores indicating the difference in degrees of elbow flexion before and after head rotation were analyzed. Repetition of the stimulus (head turning) to the left and to the right occurred under two test postures (supine, quadrupedal) with the effect of a blindfold nested within quadruped trials and the effect of added tension nested within supine, totaling 16 trials per child. The magnitude of the ATNR decreased significantly with age, but sex differences were not significant. The quadrupedal test posture produced significant increases in the supine posture. The blindfold did not produce significant main effects. Electrogoniometric measurement consistently demonstrated the magnitude of the ATNR in normal preschool children, which decreases with age, is dependent upon test posture and can provide numerical guides in clinical tests of central nervous system integration.     

Color measurement and color theory: I. Representation theorem for Grassmann structures

For trichromatic color measurement, the empirically based structure consists of the set of colored lights, with its operations of additive mixture and scalar multiplication, and the binary relation of metameric matching. The representing numerical structure is a vector space. The important axioms are Grassmann's laws. The vector representation is constructed in a canonical or coordinate-free manner, mainly using Grassmann's additivity law. Trichromacy is used only to fix the dimensionality.Color theories attempt to get a more unique homomorphism by enriching the basic empirical structure with new empirical relations, subject to new axioms. Examples of such enriching relations include: discriminability or dissimilarity ordering of color pairs; dichromatic matching relations; and unidimensional matching relations, or codes. Representation theorems for the latter two examples are based on Grassmann-type laws also. The relationship between a Grassmann structure and its unidimensional Grassmann codes is modeled by the relationship between a vector space and its dual space of linear functionals. Dual spaces are used to clarify theorems relating to the three-pigment hypothesis and to reduction dichromacy.     

Procedural justice climate and group power distance: an examination of cross-level interaction effects

In this article, the authors extend research on the cross-level effects of procedural justice climate by theorizing and testing its interaction with group power distance. The results indicated that group power distance moderated the relationships between procedural justice climate and individual-level outcomes (organizational commitment and organization-directed citizenship behavior). More specifically, a larger group power distance was found to attenuate the positive cross-level effects of procedural justice climate. Implications for procedural justice climate research are discussed.     

The measurement of reading comprehension: How not to trade construct validity for predictive power

This paper proposes a way to measure and understand individual differences in reading comprehension. The measure is based on the theory that individual differences in reading skill reflect differences in the processing capacity of working memory. The measure of processing capacity, called the reading span test, requires subjects to read aloud increasingly longer sets of sentences and to recall the final word of each sentence in the set. Reading span, the number of final words recalled, varies from two to five for university students. According to the proposed theory, poor readers devote so much capacity to processing the sentences, that they have less residual capacity for storing and producing the final words. The ability to keep information accessible in working memory is particularly crucial for the processes that integrate each ne word with previously read information. And, indeed, reading span is highly correlated with integration processes such as computing pronominal reference, monitoring and revising comprehension errors, and making inferences. The theoretical and predictive value of the reading span measure can be contrasted with the relatively limited value of existing atheoretical and theoretical measures of reading comprehension.     

Behavioral problems and scholastic adjustment among Bedouin-Arab children from polygamous and monogamous marital family structures: some developmental considerations

Families in the Bedouin-Arab community in Israel are characterized by monogamous and polygamous marriages. Such diversity in family structure occurs in other parts of the world, yet scant empirical evidence exists to refute or to support the claim that polygamous family structure can be a risk factor for children's school maladjustment and negative developmental outcomes. The purpose of the current study was to test this claim. Participants were 255 3rd-grade children from the Negev Bedouin community in Israel. One hundred fifty-three children came from monogamous families that were characterized by 1 wife (i.e., 1-wife families), and 102 children came from polygamous families consisting of 2 wives (i.e., 2-wife families). Teachers completed the Teacher's Report Form of the Child Behavior Checklist (T. M. Achenback, 1991b). A series of logistic regression analyses, after adjusting for maternal education level, revealed that 2-wife children tended to have higher levels of externalizing problems in general and higher levels of attention problems in particular than did their 1-wife counterparts. Also, 2-wife children had higher rates of school absenteeism and lower levels of overall academic achievement than did 1-wife children. Implications for the Bedouin society are discussed.