Implicit learning of first-, second-, and third-order transition probabilities

Most sequence-learning studies have confounded different types of information, making it difficult to know precisely what is learned. Addressing many of the confounds, the current study shows that people can learn 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-order transition probabilities. Measures directly assessing awareness of the probabilities show that the knowledge is implicit early in training and becomes explicit with extended training.     

An experimental investigation of the role of safety-seeking behaviours in the maintenance of panic disorder with agoraphobia.

This study evaluates the hypothesis that safety-seeking behaviours play an important role in maintaining anxiety because they prevent patients from benefiting from disconfirmatory experience. Patients suffering from panic disorder with agoraphobia carried out a behaviour test, closely followed by an experimental session, which included a brief (15 min) period of exposure during which participants either stopped or maintained within-situation safety-seeking behaviours. When the behaviour test was repeated within two days, patients who had stopped their safety-seeking behaviours during the experimental session showed a significantly greater decrease in catastrophic beliefs and anxiety than those who had maintained safety-seeking behaviour. This difference was also reflected in questionnaires measuring clinical anxiety. These results are consistent with the cognitive hypothesis.     

Further Support for a Hierarchical Model of Affect: Reply to Green and Salovey

Green and Salovey agree with us that happiness and sadness are strongly bipolar, and that Positive and Negative Activation are not. However, Green and Salovey subscribe to the two-dimensional circumplex, a model we find wanting. Actually, the problems they discuss arise from the limitations of the circumplex rather than from issues fundamental to affective structure. And they do not consider the evidence, reported in our target article, that supports an alternative to the circumplex: a three-level hierarchical model. In this reply, we take a closer look at the empirical findings supporting this model, and we emphasize its heuristic promise.     

Dissociation between the effects of damage to perirhinal cortex and area TE

Perirhinal cortex and area TE are immediately adjacent to each other in the temporal lobe and reciprocally interconnected. These areas are thought to lie at the interface between visual perception and visual memory, but it has been unclear what their separate contributions might be. In three experiments, monkeys with bilateral lesions of the perirhinal cortex exhibited a different pattern of impairment than monkeys with bilateral lesions of area TE. In experiment 1, lesions of the perirhinal cortex produced a multimodal deficit in recognition memory (delayed nonmatching to sample), whereas lesions of area TE impaired performance only in the visual modality. In experiment 2, on a test of visual recognition memory (the visual paired comparison task) lesions of the perirhinal cortex impaired performance at long delays but spared performance at a very short delay. In contrast, lesions of area TE impaired performance even at the short delay. In experiment 3, lesions of the perirhinal cortex and lesions of area TE produced an opposite pattern of impairment on two visual discrimination tasks, simple object discrimination learning (impaired only by perirhinal lesions), and concurrent discrimination learning (impaired only by TE lesions). Taken together, the findings suggest that the perirhinal cortex, like other medial temporal lobe structures, is important for the formation of memory, whereas area TE is important for visual perceptual processing.     

Racism as a stressor for African Americans. A biopsychosocial model.

Various authors have noted that interethnic group and intraethnic group racism are significant stressors for many African Americans. As such, intergroup and intragroup racism may play a role in the high rates of morbidity and mortality in this population. Yet, although scientific examinations of the effects of stress have proliferated, few researchers have explored the psychological, social, and physiological effects of perceived racism among African Americans. The purpose of this article was to outline a biopsychosocial model for perceived racism as a guide for future research. The first section of this article provides a brief overview of how racism has been conceptualized in the scientific literature. The second section reviews research exploring the existence of intergroup and intragroup racism. A contextual model for systematic studies of the biopsychosocial effects of perceived racism is then presented, along with recommendations for future research.     

Moral Incapacity and Deliberation

Was Luther avowing a genuine moral incapacity when he claimed that he could do no other? Bernard Williams has distinguished moral from psychological incapacity in terms of deliberation. There are three particular difficulties for the notion: in addition to (1) scepticism about whether the agent is genuinely incapable, there are (2) the possibility of conflicting moral incapacities, and (3) apparent cases where there is no actual or possible deliberation. If (1) can be countered, (2) can be met by ceteris paribus clauses, and it is shown that these do not remove the element of necessity. And (3) can be met by showing how possible deliberation is involved in putative counter-examples. Williams' account needs to be augmented to deal with cases of the morally unthinkable, and refined to allow for incipient attempts to do the morally impossible     

The Iowa Personality Disorder Screen: development and preliminary validation of a brief screening interview

The length and expense of comprehensive personality disorder interviews makes them unwieldy for routine use. A brief but sensitive screen could eliminate administration of longer instruments in many instances. We describe the development of the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen (IPDS)--a mini-structured interview which can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Retrospective analyses using 1,203 SIDP-R interviews suggested that the IPDS items should provide good sensitivity and specificity. We present results from a prospective validation study, using a mixed group of 52 nonpsychotic inpatients and outpatients who were diagnosed using the SIDP-IV. Blind administration of the IPDS yielded excellent sensitivity (92%) and good specificity (79%), using a subset of five screening items. Addition of two more items leads to an estimated sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 86%. The IPDS shows promise as a quick personality disorder screen for use in research settings or standard clinical interviews.     

Effects of concreteness and semantic relatedness on composite imagery ratings and cued recall

Day and Bellezza (1983) rejected a dual coding imagery explanation for the superior recall of concrete words because unrelated concrete pairs were rated lower in composite imagery but were still remembered better than related abstract pairs. We show that dual coding theory explains their results and our new findings using the same paradigm. In Experiment 1, 120 subjects rated imagery or relatedness for 108 pairs that varied in concreteness, pair relatedness, and associative strength. Incidental cued recall followed. Relatedness and strength affected imagery ratings, as did concreteness, and very low relatedness partly accounted for the low composite imagery ratings for unrelated concrete pairs. Concreteness and relatedness also affected recall, and suporior recall for unrelated concrete pairs occurred consistently under imagery but not under relatedness instructions. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects rated imagery value and recalled 24 pairs. Subsequent questioning indicated that composite images were retrieved better given stimuli from unrelated concrete than from related abstract pairs. These findings and Day and Bellezza’s original results are explained in terms of (1) imaginal and verbal associative processes, which jointly influence composite imagery ratings and recall, and (2) the critical role of stimulus concreteness during image retrieval and recall (i.e., the conceptual peg hypothesis).     

Striatal sensitivity to personal responsibility in a regret-based decision-making task

Regret and relief are complex emotional states associated with the counterfactual processing of nonobtained outcomes in a decision-making situation. In the “actor effect,” a sense of agency and personal responsibility is thought to heighten these emotions. Using fMRI, we scanned volunteers (n = 22) as they played a task involving choices between two wheel-of-fortune gambles. We examined how neural responses to counterfactual outcomes were modulated by giving subjects the opportunity to change their minds, as a manipulation of personal responsibility. Satisfaction ratings to the outcomes were highly sensitive to the difference between the obtained and nonobtained outcome, and ratings following losses were lower on trials with the opportunity to change one’s mind. Outcome-related activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex was positively related to the satisfaction ratings. The striatal response was modulated by the agency manipulation: Following losses, the striatal signal was significantly lower when the subject had the opportunity to change his/her mind. These results support the involvement of frontostriatal mechanisms in counterfactual thinking and highlight the sensitivity of the striatum to the effects of personal responsibility.     

Contributing to Discourse

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.