Reduction of anxiety in genetically timid dogs

In behavior studies of genetically timid and normal dogs it was possible to focus on nervous non-performing animals in a search for agents which might attenuate the overriding anxiety which causes these animals to become rigid, aversive-avoiding or bizarre in the presence of humans. Of the drugs tested, chlordiazepoxide (Librium, Roche), 75 to 200 mg per dog per day, was most effective in alleviating the anxious condition. Sometimes the drug had the effect of getting the animal over a “threshold” so that he continued to perform (bar-pressing) indefinitely after once started through the aid of chlordiazepoxide. This is considered an example of both schizokinesis and autokinesis which Gantt first described and associated with drug action utilizing conditional response techniques.     

Limits on the applicability of signal detection theories

Two auditory signals were presented in random sequences in which the more intense signal came on.2, .5, or.8a/the trials. Each trial began with an intermediate tone which was identified in the instructions as either the standard for comparison or simply as a warning tone. Half the Os were instructed to discriminate whether the signal was “louder” or “softer” than the standard, the other half to recognize which signal had been presented. For both discrimination and recognition tasks, the total proportion of ldlouder” judgments was independent of the presentation probabilities, accuracy for each signal varying inversely with its probability of presentation. These results suggest strict limitations on the response optimization posited by theories of signal detection.     

Schematic concept formation: Feature measures and constraint redundancy as predictors

Constraint redundancy (R_c) was varied in order to manipulate the statistical structure of sets of patterns. Measures of pattern features and R_c were related to the categorization by Ss who had experienced different types of preexposure to sets of patterns from the same stimulus domain. Both R_c and pattern measures were related to the categories produced by Ss in a schematic-concept-formation (SCF) task.     

A Systems Dilemma

The current shift of interest, reflected in public policy, from the production of goods to the provision of services, has caused a major re-examination of the nature of the services the individual can expect from his society. This re-examination is producing a number of insights, some of them shocking. In particular, we are learning that many of the systems we have created to deliver services are, in the name of “progress” and “civilization,” contributing to the conditions of human distress they were designed to alleviate. Much has been written lately about how service systems of one kind or another subvert their announced goals—how a welfare system perpetuates poverty, or how the medical profession creates iatrogenic illness. There has not been very much written, however, about how several systems inadvertently combine in their day to day operations in such a way as to frustrate each others' activities, and how, in so doing, they destroy in varying degrees the lives of people, or render it difficult for them to improve their lives. We have all been much too tightly locked in our own niches by training, experience, and various types of private interest to see this kind of interlock. It comes into sharp perspective only when one studies the problems of a single person in terms of his total life space, his “ecology.” This paper represents an effort to describe one such situation in a family as viewed from a community health services program designed to approach human crises as ecological phenomena, and to explore and respond to them within this framework. We have found that the best way to organize our view of the environmental field people move in is according to the diverse systems which make it up, so we have labeled our theoretical base “ecological systems theory.” ( 1 ) What is of particular interest to the behavioral scientist in the situation described is that neither individual nor family diagnosis, nor the contributions of the larger systems (in this case a housing system and a system of medical care) will, if viewed separately, explain the state of the man in question. Only when the contributions of all of these systems are made clear, and their interrelationships explored, do the origins of the phenomena described begin to emerge.