Summation of pain produced in different anatomical regions*

Unescapable shock was administered to rats in a spatial preference task through pairs of electrodes implanted subcutaneously near the neck and tail. The animals were permitted to choose between shock through both pairs of electrodes or through one pair by crossing from one side of a cage to the other. Rats preferred shock in two locations to an equal amount in one location. The results indicate that summation of pain is greater when stimuli are added in the same rather than in different places.     

Conditioned orienting and defensive responses in the developing rat

Infant rats (16, 21, and 26 days old) received 3 days of classical conditioning training to Tone/Shock pairings using heart rate as the index of conditioning. The youngest group (16 days old) showed no evidence of conditioning at any stage of acquisition. In the 21- and 26-day-olds, response to the conditioned stimulus (CS) was a deceleration in heart rate during the first day of training. By day 3, the conditioned response (CR) shifted to cardioacceleration. The data were interpreted as offering strong support for a two-stage model of information processing in the infant rat, comprised of a conditioned orienting response in the first stage and a conditioned defensive response in the second.     

Comparison among four psychophysical procedures used in lateralization

Psychometrie functions were obtained from two listeners in four psychophysical tasks. The tasks were lateralization procedures in which Os were asked to make discriminations of interaural temporal differences of a 250-Hz tone. The four tasks were: a single-interval yes-no task, a single-interval left-right task, a two-alternative forced-choice task, and a two-interval same-different task. The theory of signal detection provides predictions relating the performances obtained in these four procedures. These predictions could not be verified in this experiment when it was assumed that the Os were listening to changes in lateral position produced by the interaural temporal difference. The data were, however, consistent with the assumption that Os use lateral motion as a cue for detection in two-interval tasks and lateral position as a cue in single-interval tasks.     

Short-term memory models for choice behavior

In this paper we consider the effect of imposing memory restrictions on the accumulator and random-walk models of choice behavior outlined by Audley (Psychological Review, 1960, 67, 1–15). Specifically, it is assumed that subjects apply criteria to the numbers of impulses received, and that if the criteria are not satisfied by the time w impulses have been received, then thereafter the criteria are only applied to w impulses, which could, for example, be the last w impulses received. Exact and approximate mathematical approaches and simulation techniques are presented in detail. The results obtained demonstrate that both the restricted accumulator and the restricted random-walk models can make qualitative predictions in line with much recent data.     

A thousand pleasures are not worth a single pain: The compensation argument for Schopenhauer's pessimism

Pessimism is, roughly, the view that life is not worth living. In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer provides an oft‐neglected argument for this view. The argument is that a life is worth living only if it does not contain any uncompensated evils; but since all our lives happen to contain such evils, none of them are worth living. The now standard interpretation of this argument (endorsed by Kuno Fischer and Christopher Janaway) proceeds from the claim that the value—or rather valuelessness—of life's goods makes compensation impossible. But this interpretation is neither philosophically attractive nor faithful to the text. In this article, I develop and defend an alternative interpretation (suggested by Wilhelm Windelband and Mark Migotti) according to which it is instead the actual temporal arrangement of life's goods and evils that makes compensation impossible.     

“Four Gods” in Maximum Security Prison: Images of God,Religiousness, and Worldviews Among Inmates

This paper extends research on images of God, which prior researchers based mostly on national survey data, to a study of offenders in prison. We first explore whether the distribution of Froese and Bader’s (America’s four gods: What we say about god–& what that says about us, Oxford University Press, New York 2010) four images of God among prison inmates is similar to that in the general population. We then examine whether an inmate’s image of God is associated with the inmate’s worldviews: beliefs and attitudes toward the law, other inmates, moral responsibility, and ultimate meaning and purpose in life. Finally, we test whether an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness explain the association. We analyzed data from a survey of 2249 inmates at America’s largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. We found the distribution of God-images among inmates was the same as that in national samples in terms of rank order. As hypothesized, we also found inmates with an image of an engaged God tended to report lower levels of legal cynicism and sense of illegitimacy of punishment and higher levels of collective efficacy, existential belief, and moral responsibility than those with images of a disengaged God or no God. Finally, we found an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness to mediate partly relationships between images of God and the inmate’s worldviews.     

Testing Berry's model of acculturation: a confirmatory latent class approach

The authors examined the extent to which Berry's (1997) acculturation orientation categories--assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization--would emerge from a latent class analysis of continuous acculturation indices. Hispanic college students (N = 436) from Miami participated in the study. The authors used measures of heritage and American cultural orientations to create the latent classes. The authors utilized a number of external variables, including ethnic identity, value-based indices of cultural identity, familial ethnic socialization, acculturative stress, and perceived ethnic discrimination to validate the cluster solution. Overall, our findings provided mixed support for Berry's model. Six latent classes emerged from analysis. Two of these appeared to represent variants of biculturalism, two resembled a combination of assimilation and biculturalism, one resembled a combination of separation and biculturalism, and one was not clearly associated with any of Berry's categories. The two bicultural classes differed markedly in American and heritage cultural orientations, ethnic identity, and nearly all of the value-based indices of cultural identity. Some of the differences among the six classes supported Berry's model, and others did not. The authors discuss the implications of these results for acculturation theory and research.     

An investigation of the matrix training approach to teach social play skills

Matrix training is a conceptual model inspired by the generative learning approach to program development. This investigation used matrix training to facilitate a generative repertoire of two‐component solitary and social play skills in a child diagnosed with autism and cerebral palsy. Play‐related actions and corresponding toys were aligned on perpendicular axes of a standard matrix. The learner was trained on the skills that intersected along the diagonal of the matrix. The learner acquired both appropriate solitary and social play skills. The participant also began requesting items from a peer despite not having been directly trained to do so. The untrained combinations accounted for 86% of the matrix responses acquired.