Web-based, psychosocial treatment for substance use disorders in community treatment settings

The purpose of this multisite clinical trial was to evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based version of the Community Reinforcement Approach, plus motivational incentives, within community-based, outpatient substance abuse treatment. This ongoing study is being conducted within the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Midway through the enrollment of 500 participants, the study is being implemented in 10 treatment programs across the United States. Information is provided on design, sample, intervention and technology, and preliminary lessons learned.     

Stressor controllability and learned helplessness research in the United States: Sensitization and fatigue processes

Recent work in the learned helplessness paradigm suggests that neuronal sensitization and fatigue processes are critical to producing the behavioral impairment that follows prolonged exposure to an unsignaled inescapable stressor such as a series of electric tail shocks. Here we discuss how an interaction between serotonin (5-HT) and corticosterone (CORT) sensitizes GABA neurons early in the pretreatment session with inescapable shock. We propose that this process eventually depletes GABA, thus removing an important form of inhibition on excitatory glutamate transmission in the amygdala, hippocampus, and frontal cortex. When rats are re-exposed to shock during shuttle-escape testing 24 hrs later, the loss of inhibition (as well as other excitatory effects) results in unregulated excitation of glutamate neurons. This state of neuronal over-excitation rapidly compromises metabolic homeostasis. Metabolic fatigue results in compensatory inhibition by the nucleoside adenosine, which regulates neuronal excitation with respect to energy availability. The exceptionally potent form of inhibition associated with adenosine receptor activation yields important neuroprotective benefits under conditions of metabolic failure, but also precludes the processing of information in fatigued neurons. The substrates of adaptive behavior are removed; performance deficits ensue.     

Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes,Subjective Norms,and Other Behavioral Determinants1

By comparing exercise and health domains, the current experiment extends recent findings that within‐participant analyses of attitudes and subjective norms predict behavioral intentions well (Finlay, Trafimow, & Moroi, 1999). Within‐participant analyses show that health behaviors are particularly likely to be influenced by subjective norms, and those that are relatively normatively influenced are intended to be performed more than those that are not. However, neither was true of exercise behaviors. Additionally, other potential predictors for exercise (e.g., indirect attitudinal measures and goal‐oriented attitudes and intentions) correlated more strongly with exercise behavioral intentions than did general health attitudes and intentions.     

Articulatory constraints on interpersonal postural coordination

Cooperative conversation has been shown to foster interpersonal postural coordination. The authors investigated whether such coordination is mediated by the influence of articulation on postural sway. In Experiment 1, talkers produced words in synchrony or in alternation, as the authors varied speaking rate and word similarity. Greater shared postural activity was found for the faster speaking rate. In Experiment 2, the authors demonstrated that shared postural activity also increases when individuals speak the same words or speak words that have similar stress patterns. However, this increase in shared postural activity is present only when participants' data are compared with those of their partner, who was present during the task, but not when compared with the data of a member of a different pair speaking the same word sequences as those of the original partner. The authors' findings suggest that interpersonal postural coordination observed during conversation is mediated by convergent speaking patterns.     

Emotion Regulation of Preschool Children in Foster Care: The Influence of Maternal Depression and Parenting

Emotion regulation is a core developmental process that is related to children’s academic success and mental health. A small body of research has documented that maltreated children show deficits in this developmental arena. The current study was designed to add to the limited literature on emotion regulation in maltreated children in foster care. Emotion regulation tasks were administered to preschool foster children, videotaped, and later coded. Parenting was assessed via coded observations of mother-child interactions. Mothers reported on their experience of depressive symptomatology. We examined the relation of foster parenting and foster mother depression, as well as child characteristics and child welfare experiences, to emotion regulation, specifically in the joy and anger domains. Findings revealed that maternal depression and parental structuring significantly contributed to children’s anger regulation, but not to their regulation of joy. These findings are considered in the context of future research with respect to young maltreated children in foster care.     

Consumption Effort: The Mental Cost of Generating Utility and the Role of Consumer Energy Level in Ambitious Consumption

We propose that the essence of consumption is the mental process of generating utility from products, that this process expends consumption effort, and that consumers take consumption effort into account in their decision making. In 2 studies, we tested the hypothesis that consumption preferences become more ambitious—individuals become more inclined to choose challenging‐to‐consume products—when consumer energy levels are elevated. In Study 1, energy induced by ingesting caffeine increased participants’ tendency to choose subtitled foreign movies rather than domestic remakes of those same movies. Study 2 demonstrated the same effect with naturally occurring energy levels and with consumption experiences whose effortfulness and quality were varied independently. In choosing among sets of poems to read, participants with higher levels of energy exhibited less effort aversion but neither more nor less quality seeking. A reanalysis of Study 1 showed that the energy effect is not simply a case of consumers using more energy when they have more energy, because the energy effect disappeared when participants were made aware of the energy source, suggesting that a preference‐correction process occurred. The energy dependence of consumer preferences affords tactical opportunities for marketers, but the welfare implications for consumers are intriguingly unclear, because in both studies we found that energy increased participants’ choice of challenging consumption experiences without increasing their liking of those experiences.     

Critiquing the Reasons for Making Artificial Moral Agents

Science and Engineering Ethics - Many industry leaders and academics from the field of machine ethics would have us believe that the inevitability of robots coming to have a larger role in our...