Context blocking in rat autoshaping: Sign-tracking versus goal-tracking

Prior experience of unsignaled food can interfere with subsequent acquisition by birds of autoshaped key-pecking at a signal light. This has been understood to indicate that unsignaled food results in context conditioning, which blocks subsequent learning about the keylight-food relationship. In the present experiment with rats lever insertion as the conditioned stimulus (CS) preceded sucrose delivery as the unconditioned stimulus (US). Half the rats initially received unsignaled USs in the conditioning context, while the remainder did not. Both lever-presses (sign-tracking) and magazine-entries (goal-tracking) were recorded. Under immediate reinforcement conditions, prior unsignaled US interfered with sign-tracking, but had no effect on goal-tracking. In two further groups, a trace condition prevented development of sign-tracking. In this case, prior context conditioning interfered with goal-tracking. These results suggest that interference with sign-tracking may reflect response competition, while interference with goal-tracking under trace conditions may reflect failure to acquire a CS-US association.     

The Distractor Picture Paradox in Speech Production: Evidence from the Word Translation Task

Several naming studies show that distractor pictures, even when intentionally ignored by the speaker, are still capable of activating their respective phonological representations. However results from word translation studies suggest that distractor pictures are only conceptually activated. Here we tested the reliability of the word translation results. In four experiments, bilingual participants translated words from one language to the other one while ignoring the presentation of pictures. In Experiment 1a phonological related pictures sped up translation latencies. However, the effect disappeared when the percentage of related trials was reduced (Experiment 1b). In Experiment 2a translation latencies were faster when the words were accompanied by semantically related pictures than by unrelated pictures. Importantly, the effect was still reliable when the proportion of related trials was reduced and the total number of semantic categories was increased (Experiment 2b). Theoretical implications of the influence of distractor pictures during speech production are discussed.     

Children’s Feedback Preferences in Response to an Experimentally Manipulated Peer Evaluation Outcome: The Role of Depressive Symptoms

The present study examined the linkage between pre-adolescent children's depressive symptoms and their preferences for receiving positive vs. negative feedback subsequent to being faced with an experimentally manipulated peer evaluation outcome in real time. Participants (n = 142) ages 10 to 13, played a computer contest based on the television show Survivor and were randomized to either a peer rejection (i.e., receiving the lowest total 'likeability' score from a group of peer-judges), a peer success (i.e., receiving the highest score), or a control peer evaluation condition. Children's self-reported feedback preferences were then assessed. Results revealed that participants assigned to the negative evaluation outcome, relative to either the success or the control outcome, showed a significantly higher subsequent preference for negatively tuned feedback. Contrary to previous work and predictions derived from self-verification theory, children higher in depressive symptoms were only more likely to prefer negative feedback in response to the negative peer evaluation outcome. These effects for depression were not accounted for by either state mood at baseline or mood change in response to the feedback manipulation.     

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the New Millenium: A Cross-Cultural Approach

This paper reviews and discusses the results of five cross-cultural studies in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Spain, and USA, using 2 (college students vs. their parents) × 2 (males vs. females) MANOVA match group designs with the Attitudes and Beliefs Inventory subscales as dependent variables, two multicultural studies investigating the relationship between some demographic variables (Pan American Health Organization's Index of Violence, and Acculturation) and people's Irrationality, and two multidisciplinary studies on the relationship between some medical conditions (skin diseases, and severity of symptoms during menopause) and Irrational Beliefs.     

Rational-emotive therapy applied to relationship therapy

RET is a comprehensive mode of relationship therapy that takes a double-barreled psychotherapeutic approach of helping all the partners in a relationship to accept responsibility for their own disturbances and failings and to work at correcting these-while, at the same time, helping them to understand and work actively at changing the marital or family system in which they are relating and the conditions in this system that are contributing to their practical and emotional problems. Rational-emotive relationship therapy is a form of cognitive behavior therapy that includes the following features: (1) It importantly stresses the cognitive or philosophic causes of emotional disturbance and of family disruption. (2) It teaches partners that they largely disturb themselves and that they can effectively refuse to continue to do so. (3) It almost always employs a number of cognitive, emotive, and behavioral techniques but employs them not merely to achieve symptomatic change but to help couples achieve a profound philosophic reconstruction that will, hopefully, lead to elegant and permanent change. It clearly acknowledges the biological as well as the sociological bases of disturbance, and therefore stresses vigorous and forceful, active-directive methods that will impinge upon and help alter the strongly held disturbances that partners frequently experience. (5) It holds to a rigorously scientific and yet highly humanistic outlook in both its theory and its practice. (6) It stresses a phenomenological, intraindividual, and depth-centered approach to understanding and tackling human disturbance, but at the same time uses practical problem-solving and skill-straining methods of changing family situations and interactions.     

Gender-role orientations in older child-free and expectant couples

Psychosocial aspects of variant fertility decisions were investigated to determine factors that differentiate individuals who chose to become parents for the first time after age 30 and their peers who chose to remain child free. Forty women, aged 30 to 38, half of whom were child free and half expecting their first child, and 34 of their husbands were interviewed and completed the Role Questionnaire. The pattern of data suggests that the relatively traditional gender-role orientations of the expectant individuals may be an important factor that discriminates the two groups. The Rapoports' concept of “identity tension line” is used to integrate the results of the study and to explore findings that indicate different degrees of traditionalism in regard to work and family roles.