Reexamination of contextual conditioning with massed versus distributed unconditioned stimuli

Sprague-Dawley rats were placed in the black compartment of a 2 compartment choice apparatus and received a series of unsignaled footshocks at fixed intertrial intervals (ITIs), with ITI duration varied across groups. Contextual conditioning was assessed using place preference and freezing tests. In Experiments 1 and 3, time spent in the unshocked, white compartment in a preference test decreased monotonically with increasing ITI. In Experiment 2, less freezing occurred in the 3-s than in the 60-s groups. An inverted U-shaped relationship between ITI and freezing emerged when a full range of ITIs was used in Experiment 3. The results have implications for the learning-performance distinction and suggest that short ITIs may promote contextual conditioning.     

Completeness in Hybrid Type Theory

We show that basic hybridization (adding nominals and @ operators) makes it possible to give straightforward Henkin-style completeness proofs even when the modal logic being hybridized is higher-order. The key ideas are to add nominals as expressions of type t, and to extend to arbitrary types the way we interpret \(@_i\) in propositional and first-order hybrid logic. This means: interpret \(@_i\alpha _a\) , where \(\alpha _a\) is an expression of any type \(a\) , as an expression of type \(a\) that rigidly returns the value that \(\alpha_a\) receives at the i-world. The axiomatization and completeness proofs are generalizations of those found in propositional and first-order hybrid logic, and (as is usual inhybrid logic) we automatically obtain a wide range of completeness results for stronger logics and languages. Our approach is deliberately low-tech. We don’t, for example, make use of Montague’s intensional type s, or Fitting-style intensional models; we build, as simply as we can, hybrid logicover Henkin’s logic.     

Dorsomedial pallium lesions impair taste aversion learning in goldfish

The present work shows that the dorsomedial telencephalic pallium of teleost fish, proposed as homologous to the amygdala of mammals, is involved in taste aversion learning (TAL). To analyze the behavioral properties of TAL in goldfish, in Experiment 1, we used a delayed procedure similar to that employed with mammals, which consists of the presentation of two flavors on different days, one followed by lithium chloride and the other by saline, both after a 10-min delay. The results showed that goldfish developed a strong aversion to the gustatory stimulus followed by visceral discomfort and that, as in mammals, this learning was rapidly acquired, highly flexible and maintained for a long time. Experiment 2 showed that dorsomedial pallium lesions and the ablation of the telencephalic lobes impaired the acquisition of taste aversion in goldfish, whereas damage to the dorsolateral pallium (hippocampus homologue) or cerebellar corpus did not produce significant changes in this learning. Experiment 3 showed that these TAL deficits were not due to a lesion-related disruption of taste discrimination; goldfish with telencephalon ablation were able to learn to distinguish between the two tested flavors in a differential conditioning procedure. These functional data demonstrate that the dorsomedial pallium in teleosts is, like the amygdala, an essential component of the telencephalon-dependent taste aversion memory system and provide further support concerning the homology between both structures.     

Consuming Male Identities: Masculinities,Gender Relations and Alcohol Consumption in Aotearoa New Zealand

The excessive and public consumption of alcohol with other men has been a traditional indication of manliness in Western cultures for many years. However, over the last two decades, this association has been eroded, in part through increased consumption by women. Within the gender‐relational context of this increase, we empirically explore ways in which particular (friendship) groups of young men and women (re)construct masculine identities. The male participants demonstrated greater discursive flexibility in enacting their gender identities through alcohol consumption compared with earlier NZ research although also greater constraints on change compared with more recent UK research. A minority of men constructed themselves as atypical in that they did not like rugby, beer or consuming vast quantities of alcohol. These men were all in professional occupations, and we speculate that their social class and financial status may enable them to negotiate alternative demonstrations of masculinity. We conclude that these findings could be explicated through an examination of national gendered identities that arose out of a pioneer culture, and the commodification of gender identities through alcohol consumption. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender and work-family conflict: testing the rational model and the gender role expectations model in the Spanish cultural context

Gutek, Searle, and Klepa (1991) proposed two models to explain the gender differences in work-family conflict: the rational model and the gender role expectations model. Both models have mostly been tested on American and Canadian samples, and have obtained partial support. Given the cultural differences between North American countries and Spain, we should question whether the two models are equally applicable to Spanish society or whether one of them captures Spanish men and women's experience of work-family conflict better than the other. So, the aim of this study is to test which of the models better explains the gender differences in work-family conflict in the Spanish cultural context (or if, indeed, the two models apply equally well). Given the typical cultural dimensions of Spanish society, we expected to find greater support for the gender role expectations model than for the rational model. However, the results obtained in this study indicated that, while the rational model can explain the gender differences that were found, the gender role expectations model cannot capture Spanish people's work-family conflict experiences. The results are interpreted in terms of cultural dimensions characteristic of the Spanish context.     

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/.     

Satisfaction profile (SAT-P) in 732 patients: Focus on subjectivity in hrqol assessment

Abstract

A 32-item questionnaire aimed at assessing patient's satisfaction about every day life is presented. In the Satisfaction Profile (SAT-P) patients are asked to evaluate their own satisfaction level on 32 daily life aspects concerning the last month. 732 participants were enrolled into the study: 490 in-patients suffering from different types of chronic diseases (e.g., chronic heart failure, severe respiratory failure, coronary heart disease) and 242 healthy persons of working age. SAT-P validity was confirmed by comparing its scores with the NHP, EPQ and STAI-X2 scores. The factor analysis extracted 5 factors which corresponded to the hypothesised areas (54% of variance explained). Test-retest reliability and internal consistency were confirmed: Pearson's coefficients were ranging from 0.45 to 0.93 and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.92. SAT-P responsiveness, evaluated by comparing baseline and 6 months follow up scores from 45 chronic heart failure patients, resulted to be satisfatory, although further studies are needed. These results, together with the “user-friendly” structure, the brief administration and scoring time, the simple graphic representation, suggest to consider the SAT-P a useful complementary tool in HRQoL assessment. The Italian, English and French versions are available.     

The bad taste of social ostracism: The effects of exclusion on the eating behaviors of African-American women

African-American women experience disproportionately higher rates of obesity than do Caucasian women. The stress African-American women encounter from experiences of discrimination may influence their eating behaviours, which could contribute to weight gain. Emotional eating theory suggests some people increase their intake of high-calorie foods to cope with stressful experiences. We investigated the effects of social exclusion by other African-American women or by Caucasian women for African-American women’s distress and food consumption using a laboratory paradigm. As hypothesised, there were main effects of ostracism and interactions between ostracism and race, although not all of the interactions took the expected form. As hypothesised, African-American women ate more potato crisps after being excluded by Caucasians than by African-Americans. Unexpectedly, African-American women who were excluded by other African-American women self-reported more emotional distress than did African-American women excluded by Caucasian women. These findings suggest that ostracism by both in-group and out-group members are disturbing, although people may respond to in-group and out-group exclusion in different ways. Directions for future research are suggested that could elucidate the circumstances under which different emotional and behavioural coping responses are employed.