Income maximizing in concurrent interval-ratio schedules

Three mice chose between concurrent variable-ratio variable-interval schedules to produce a warm air stream while they were housed in a cold chamber. Across conditions, the duration of the warm air stream was varied between 10 and 80 s and was equal for both schedules. Preference for the VI schedule covaried with reinforcer duration as predicted by maximizing accounts of choice.     

Inhibiting reactions to emotional versus non‐emotional response cues in schizophrenia: Insights from a motor‐process paradigm

Recent models of schizophrenia suggest deficient use of contextual response cues when confronted with countermanding emotional cues. It is important to clinically validate these models by testing patients diagnosed with schizophrenia on tasks with competing emotional and contextual response determinants. Control and schizophrenia groups completed a novel task that elicited motor responses consistent with, or in opposition to, pre‐potent emotional actions (i.e., approach vs. avoidance). An analogous non‐emotional task was also used to examine cue‐conflict impairment more generally. The groups demonstrated statistically equivalent performance decrements on incongruent versus congruent trials on both tasks. However, within the schizophrenia group, the incongruency effect was significantly greater in the emotional versus non‐emotional task. These data suggest that, while patients with schizophrenia were able to employ contextual response cues to override competing emotional responses, they were slower to resolve emotional versus non‐emotional response conflict. When patients were subdivided according to the presence or absence of disorganized symptoms, this effect was confined to patients with disorganized symptoms.     

The influence of peers on children''s judgments about engaging in behaviors that threaten their safety

Unintentional injuries are the number one cause of death among children beyond one year of age. Many injuries among school-age children happen when they are away from home and in the company of peers. The aim in this study was to examine peer influences on children's judgments about engaging in behaviors that threaten their physical safety. Children were shown pictures depicting play situations which involved different paths of travel, each of which posed different degrees of injury risk. Children were asked to select the path they would take, and to assign a danger rating to reflect their beliefs about the likelihood of injury along this path. A peer-influence session followed, in which a same-sex friend attempted to persuade the child to take another path. Following exposure to the friend's arguments, children made their final decision about a path of travel in each play situation; the peer was not present during this decision and the experimenter present was unaware of the child's initial path choice. A number of other measures were taken in an effort to determine factors that influence children's risk-taking decisions. Results revealed that friends were successful in their persuasion efforts: for two of the three play situations, a significant number of children who initially selected low-risk paths switched to more risky paths. Appraisal of danger related to initial path decisions, but number of hazards identified and injury history did not significantly relate to initial decisions. The implications of these results for our understanding of injury-outcome processes are discussed.     

Use of the Transparent Bipolar Inventory to measure the big-five personality factors in an epidemiological survey of the elderly

Goldberg (1992) developed the Transparent Bipolar Inventory (TBI) as a set of simple factor markers for the big-five personality traits. In the present study, the TBI was completed by 534 elderly persons participating in the second wave of a longitudinal epidemiological study. Confirmatory factor analysis of the TBI items showed that the five-factor model provided an acceptable, but not impressive, fit to the data. In contrast to Goldberg's analyses with university students, the factors in this sample were substantially correlated. The fitting of a model to account for between-factor correlations demonstrated the existence of an important general factor underlying responses to nearly all the TBI items. This general factor may represent an artefact of scale usage. While our results provide some support for Goldberg's five-factor structure, it would be premature to promote the TBI scales as markers of major personality dimensions.     

The therapist's poetry as a therapeutic incident

Poetry can be understood as an intrapsychic record of introspection, and as a means for interpretation in the therapeutic situation. In this installment (the second of a series to be eventually published at book-length) the authors examine from their personal research the uses, as well as dangers, of utilizing poetry in therapy. Poetry should not be used as a gimmick to direct the process of therapy, but as a point of spontaneous interaction, insight, and empathy. Used appropriately, poetry may bring to the client and to the therapist insight and meaning. The therapist may also use his or her own poetry as a creative means for recognizing countertransference in the therapeutic setting.Dr. Moss is an Episcopal Priest and the Executive Director of The Seabury Institute for Pastoral Psychotherapy, Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the co-author ofThe Organization and Administration of Pastoral Counseling Centers and Book Review Editor ofThe Journal of Religion and Health. Dr. Christensen is Senior Consulting Psychiatrist to the Pastoral Psychotherapy Institute, Park Ridge Illinois. In 1981 he was the recipient of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors' Distinguished Contributions Award. This paper was initially presented at the Southeast Regional Conference of The American Association of Pastoral Counselors, Hendersonville, N.C., 1983. Reprint requests should be directed to: The Seabury Institute, 2997 Piedmont Road N.E., Atlanta, 30305.     

Verbal contingent stimulation of stuttering in laboratory and home settings

The effect of verbal contingent stimulation for stuttering behaviors was examined during changes of stimulus delivery mode and experimental setting. In Experiment I, contingent stimuli were delivered in the laboratory setting with the experimenter and subject in a face-to-face arrangement versus presentations by the experimenter from a control room via a headset arrangement. In Experiment II, contingent stimulation of stuttering was examined in the laboratory and home setting. Findings revealed that stuttering frequency was reduced in all conditions of both experiments. However, the only significant reductions occurred under the headset delivery conditions in the laboratory setting.     

Cognitive functioning and neuroticism in an elderly community sample

The relationship between neuroticism and cognitive functioning was investigated using data from a community survey of the elderly. Contrary to Pearson (1993, Personality and Individual Differences, 14, 265–266), neuroticism was related to poorer performance on a number of cognitive measures, but the pattern of correlations differed between men and women. For men there were correlations with a dementia screening test and with tests of episodic memory and fluid intelligence, while for women there were correlations with reaction time measures. It is hypothesized that correlations with neuroticism reflect the effect of chronic stress on cognitive ageing.     

Teaching preschoolers with disabilities to seek adult assistance in response to simulated injuries

Four preschool-aged children with disabilities received training to seek adult assistance in response to simulated injuries. The children first watched while the instructor modeled and verbalized a first-aid procedure for obtaining adult assistance when injured, and then they practiced the skill with instructor praise or correction. Following this practice with feedback, the children demonstrated their skill without instructor feedback. Generalization probes were conducted before and after training on the school playground and at the children's homes. A multiple baseline design across children was used to evaluate the effects of the program. Rapid increases in the children 's performances of this skill was demonstrated. Further, the posttraining generalization data indicated that the children's performance had generalized across the two settings (school playground and children's homes). More importantly, this skill maintained at 100% at a 1-month follow-up generalization probe.     

Explicit and implicit memory in dementia and normal ageing

Summary In two experiments, young subjects, healthy elderly subjects (spouses), and highly intelligent elderly subjects (elite elderly), were compared with dementia patients in a variety of explicit and implicit memory tasks, to investigate two issues: whether priming in Alzheimer-type dementia is contingent upon the presence of pre-existing representations, and whether intelligence modulates performance in explicit memory tasks in healthy ageing. Dementia patients performed as well as spouses in a homophone-spelling task. Moreover, they established new contextual associations when memory was tested by word-stem completion. The hypothesis that priming in dementia is contingent upon pre-existing memory representations was not supported. Spouses, elite elderly, and young subjects did not differ in their ability to recognize correctly recently heard stimuli or to complete word stems. However, recall of lists of words and paired associates was better in both young and elite elderly subjects than in spouses. It is concluded that intellectual capacity rather than chronological age in healthy subjects modulates performance in explicit-memory tasks.Now at The Social Psychiatry Unit, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia     

Effects of solution viscosity on perceived saltiness and sweetness

Subjects used magnitude estimation to judge the perceived saltiness or sweetness of a series of aqueous solutions containing five suprathreshold concentrations of NaCl or sucrose and thickened with sodium carboxymethylcellulose (CMC). In the first experiment, CMC-H (high viscosity form) was used to thicken a series of sucrose and NaCl solutions to six viscosity levels (1–2,025 centistokes). At the highest viscosity levels, significant decreases occurred in the perceived taste intensity of only the lower concentrations of sucrose and NaCl. A second experiment determined that variations in the quantity of solution sampled from cups did not systematically influence judgments of saltiness when the starting volume was 10 ml. In the third experiment, aqueous solutions containing sucrose or NaCl were thickened with the low (L), medium (M), or high (H) viscosity form of CMC (1–1,296 centistokes). CMC-L-thickened solutions produced little or no suppression of perceived taste intensity, whereas viscous CMC-H solutions produced significant reductions in perceived saltiness and sweetness.