Comparing positive and negative patterning in human learning

In human causal learning, positive patterning (PP) and negative patterning (NP) discriminations are often acquired at roughly the same rate, whereas PP is learned faster than NP in most experiments with nonhuman animals. One likely reason for this discrepancy is that most causal learning scenarios encourage participants to treat the presentation and omission of the relevant outcome as two events of comparable significance and likelihood. To investigate this, the current experiments compared PP and NP using a predictive learning paradigm based on a mock gambling task. In Experiment 1, one outcome (winning) was made more salient by being less frequent than the alternative outcome (losing). Under these circumstances, PP was learned faster than NP. In Experiment 2, subjects learned two PP and two NP discriminations, one involved win versus no change outcomes, the other involved lose versus no change outcomes. The subjects learned PP faster than NP, but only when discriminating win from no change. We argue that a difference in difficulty between PP and NP relies on a difference in the salience of the outcomes, consistent with the predictions of a relatively simple model of associative learning.     

The relational tradition: landscape and canon

This essay charts the origins, influences, and evolution of the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. Considering the theoretical and philosophical influences from nineteenth-century Americans like William James and C. S Pierce, and noting the seminal modern work of Steven Mitchell and Jay Greenberg in opening a critique of one-person focused drive theory, the essay follows developments over a quarter century. Hallmarks of the relational approach-social construction, two-person psychologies, multiple self-states, social regulation and construction of identities like gender and sexual orientation, and an evolving theory of clinical practice-are reviewed. New developments in clinical theory, in the study of identity categories, in the work on embodiment and enactment, and in developmental models are also reviewed.     

Lessons from beyond vision (sounds and audition)

Recent work on non-visual modalities aims to translate, extend, revise, or unify claims about perception beyond vision. This paper presents central lessons drawn from attention to hearing, sounds, and multimodality. It focuses on auditory awareness and its objects, and it advances more general lessons for perceptual theorizing that emerge from thinking about sounds and audition. The paper argues that sounds and audition no better support the privacy of perception’s objects than does vision; that perceptual objects are more diverse than an exclusively visual perspective suggests; and that multimodality is rampant. In doing so, it presents an account according to which audition affords awareness as of not just sounds, but also environmental happenings beyond sounds.     

Candidate Voice Pitch Influences Election Outcomes

A growing literature in psychology shows that human voice pitch—perceived “highness” or “lowness” as determined by the physiology of the throat—influences how speakers are perceived. This leads to the prediction that candidate voice pitch influences voters. Here this question is addressed with two studies. The first is an experiment conducted with a large national sample of U.S. adults. The results show that men and women prefer to vote for male and female candidates with lower pitched voices. The second study examines the outcomes of the 2012 U.S. House elections. When facing male opponents, candidates with lower voices won a larger vote share. However, when facing female opponents, candidates with higher voices were more successful and particularly so in the case of male candidates. In synthesizing research on the human voice and voter behavior and triangulating evidence from a controlled experiment and a large observational study of actual elections, this article illustrates that candidate voice pitch influences election outcomes.     

Major memory for microblogs

Online social networking is vastly popular and permits its members to post their thoughts as microblogs, an opportunity that people exploit, on Facebook alone, over 30 million times an hour. Such trivial ephemera, one might think, should vanish quickly from memory; conversely, they may comprise the sort of information that our memories are tuned to recognize, if that which we readily generate, we also readily store. In the first two experiments, participants’ memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books—a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences. Our final experiment, using headlines, sentences, and reader comments from articles, suggested that the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind.     

Validating the Ohio Scales in a Juvenile Justice Sample of Youth with Behavioral Health Issues

Between 65 and 75 % of juvenile-justice involved (JJI) youth present with at least one behavioral health disorder. Many communities have developed diversion programs that provide behavioral health services to JJI youth, often in lieu of detention. A key component of successful diversion programming is accurate screening and assessment. The Ohio Scales, a validated instrument designed to track service effectiveness in clinical samples of youth, are now being used with juvenile justice populations. The purpose of this study is to validate the Ohio Scales in a JJI youth population (N = 2246). The population (ages 12–18) is derived from Ohio’s Behavioral Health Juvenile Justice Initiative, a diversion program for JJI youth with behavioral health issues. We conducted Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) on all forms of the Ohio Scales (parent, youth and worker) to measure fit for one factor, four factor and four factor second order solutions. We also conducted an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on the Problem Severity factor in the youth form to determine the number of appropriate sub-factors. The EFA indicated that the Problem Severity factor should be broken into three hypothesized sub-factors: Externalizing, Internalizing and Delinquency. The CFA confirmed this solution. CFA results indicated the four factor second order solution fits superior to the other two solutions. Using the Ohio Scales Problem Severity measure as a three sub-factor measure may increase clinical applicability by allowing a clinician to specifically measure and target externalizing or internalizing issues during treatment.     

The effect of health value and ethnicity on the relationship between hardiness and health behaviors

Associations among hardiness, health value, and health protective behaviors were examined as a function of ethnicity among 80 African American and 100 European American college students. The role of health value as moderator versus mediator in the hardiness-health behavior link was explored. Racial differences in correlations among hardiness, control, and commitment were found, with stronger relations for African American than European Americans. Moderate positive relations between hardiness, control, commitment, and health value for African American, as contrasted with weak relations between commitment and health value for European Americans, were also shown. A partial mediational effect for health value with personal distress and moderator effects for health value with personal distress and health habits were found for African American only. Race predicted hardiness variables, tobacco and alcohol use, personal distress, and health habits beyond what was accounted for by occupation and income. The ramifications of these data with regard to future studies on hardiness, health value, and health behaviors for African American are discussed.     

A bird in hand: discouraging gambling on a slot machine simulation

Using a slot machine simulation, our laboratory has found that participants, given the opportunity not to gamble and to keep the money they have been staked, almost always choose to play the simulation. In this study, the authors investigated whether increasing the salience of the money for which participants played or increasing the response effort required to gamble the money would decrease gambling. In Experiment 1, participants in different groups were told about, were shown, or held the dollars 10 they were to be staked to play the simulation. Results showed that participants who held the money prior to gambling played fewer trials and bet less money than participants in other groups. In Experiment 2, participants in different groups were staked with dollars 5 in nickels, quarters, or their choice of nickels or quarters. Results showed that the participants staked with nickels ultimately gambled a similar amount of money as did participants staked with quarters. They did so by playing the simulation more times than the other participants. Participants staked with nickels did, however, end the session with the most money. Findings suggest ways that gambling and gambling losses can be lessened.     

Salivary testosterone and self-report aggressive and pro-social personality characteristics in men and women

Measures of salivary testosterone and the personality dimensions of aggression and pro-social behavior were obtained in 306 (155 male and 151 female) university students. Each participant provided two samples of saliva and completed ten self-report personality scales from multiple inventories. A factor analysis of the personality scales produced two factors, an aggression factor and a pro-social behavior factor. Men averaged five times the amount of salivary testosterone as women (99 pg/ml vs. 18.5 pg/ml) and rated themselves as more aggressive and less nurturant. Within each sex, testosterone was positively correlated with aggression and negatively correlated with pro-social personality. Structural equation modelling analyses suggested that a direct effect model best described the relationship between salivary testosterone and the latent personality dimensions of aggression and pro-social behavior. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.