When Manipulation Backfires: The Effects of Time Delay and Requester on the Foot-in-the-Door Technique

We examined the effects of 2 variables on compliance rates within the foot-in-the-door procedure. Participants who agreed to a small request were presented with a larger request either immediately after the first request or 2 days later. The second request was presented either by the same person or by a different requester. Compared to a control group receiving only the large request, participants were more likely to agree to the second request in all experimental conditions except one. When the same requester presented the second request without delay, participants were less likely than the control group to agree to the target request. This latter condition represents a situation in which typical foot-in-the-door procedures can backfire on the requester.     

The Reinvention of Behavioral Health Services in the VA System

The Veterans Health Administration under the direction of Kenneth Kizer, M.D., has faced the challenge of providing high-quality health care while controlling costs. Under Dr. Kizer's direction, VA hospitals are moving toward managed patient centered primary care. Hospital organization, funding, and clinical practices have been changed. Reorganization has meant a variety of possibilities for psychologists employed in the VA system.     

A review of functional assessment use in data-based intervention studies

We reviewed the extent and variety of functional assessment procedures used in behavioral intervention studies. The contents of six research journals dating from 1986 to 1992 were searched for articles describing single-subject intervention studies that targeted problematic social behaviors. Articles meeting this initial criteria were examined to determine if a functional assessment was conducted. If so, the various procedures comprising the functional assessment, types of interventions conducted, and demographic characteristics of study participants were recorded for each study. Results are compared to similar reviews of research dating from 1980–1985. Potential reasons for the paucity of studies incorporating functional assessment procedures are discussed. Finally, directions for future research and applied practice are provided.     

Relationship between the Millon Behavioral Health Inventory and the minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI) in low-back pain patients

The Millon Behavioral Health Inventory (MBHI) is being used with increasing frequency for the assessment of chronic pain, although there is a relative lack of evidence as to its utility, and prior studies have not examined low back pain. This investigation compared the MBHI to the MMPI in a sample of low-back pain patients and analyzed subgroups of pain patients based upon their MBHI responses. Subjects were 60 patients who had been admitted to outpatient multidisciplinary pain clinics of two Chicago-area hospitals. Patients completed both the MMPI and the MBHI and provided demographic information. Results of correlational analyses indicated strong relationships between the MBHI psychogenic attitude, psychosomatic correlate, and prognostic index scales and the validity scales of the MMPI. The MBHI Pain Treatment Responsivity scale (PP) correlated with 16 of the other 19 MBHI scales. PP did not demonstrate specificity with low back pain patients. The results of both the scale comparisons and the exploratory two-group cluster subgroup analysis support the notion that responses to the MBHI are largely affected by the respondent's tendency to deny psychopathology or to admit emotional distress.     

Communicating Price-Quality Relationships

Despite myriad studies concerning the effects of price on perceived-quality, the results are inconsistent. These inconsistencies have prompted the call for greater theory development to help provide a more comprehensive understanding of the process through which consumers develop perceived-quality. A theory the Elaboration Likelihood Model, could be applied to suggest that it is essential to identify the level of involvement when predicting the effects of variables on perceived-quality. Yet, previously reported perceived-quality research has not examined whether a change in price also changes the level of involvement. The impact of price savings on the level of involvement was examined in the experiment reported in this paper. Results of this research suggest that communicating price savings can affect the level of involvement. Experimental results also suggest that consumers with high involvement develop their attitudes and perceptions of technical quality from a careful evaluation of the arguments presented in the message. Conversely, consumers with low involvement lack motivation to evaluate those arguments and they have little effect on attitudes or perception of technical quality. Consequently, the experimental results support the Elaboration Likelihood Model.     

Racism in the Hands of an Angry God: How Image of God Impacts Cultural Racism in Relation to Police Treatment of African Americans

Previous research suggests an angry God image is a narrative schema predicting support for more punitive forms of criminal justice. However, this research has not explored the possibility that racialization may impact one's God image. We perform logistic regression on Wave V of the Baylor Religion Survey to examine the correlation between an angry God image and the belief that police shoot Blacks more often because Blacks are more violent than Whites (a context-specific form of cultural racism). Engaging critical insights from intersectionality theory, we also interact angry God image with both racialized identity and racialized religious tradition. Results suggest that the angry God schema is associated with this form of cultural racism for White people generally as well as White Evangelicals, yet for Black Protestants, belief in an angry God is associated with resistance against this type of cultural racism.     

Risk it? Direct and collateral impacts of peers' verbal expressions about hazard likelihoods*

When people encounter potential hazards, their expectations and behaviours can be shaped by a variety of factors including other people's expressions of verbal likelihood (e.g., unlikely to harm). What is the impact of such expressions when a person also has numeric likelihood estimates from the same source(s)? Two studies used a new task involving an abstract virtual environment in which people learned about and reacted to novel hazards. Verbal expressions attributed to peers influenced participants’ behaviour toward hazards even when numeric estimates were also available. Namely, verbal expressions suggesting that the likelihood of harm from a hazard is low (vs. higher) yielded more risk taking with respect to said hazard. There were also inverse collateral effects, whereby participants’ behaviour and estimates regarding another hazard in the same context were affected in the opposite direction. These effects may be based on directionality and relativity cues inferred from verbal likelihood expressions.     

Task-irrelevant distractors in the delay period interfere selectively with visual short-term memory for spatial locations

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) enables the representation of information in a readily accessible state. VSTM is typically conceptualized as a form of “active” storage that is resistant to interference or disruption, yet several recent studies have shown that under some circumstances task-irrelevant distractors may indeed disrupt performance. Here, we investigated how task-irrelevant visual distractors affected VSTM by asking whether distractors induce a general loss of remembered information or selectively interfere with memory representations. In a VSTM task, participants recalled the spatial location of a target visual stimulus after a delay in which distractors were presented on 75% of trials. Notably, the distractor’s eccentricity always matched the eccentricity of the target, while in the critical conditions the distractor’s angular position was shifted either clockwise or counterclockwise relative to the target. We then computed estimates of recall error for both eccentricity and polar angle. A general interference model would predict an effect of distractors on both polar angle and eccentricity errors, while a selective interference model would predict effects of distractors on angle but not on eccentricity errors. Results showed that for stimulus angle there was an increase in the magnitude and variability of recall errors. However, distractors had no effect on estimates of stimulus eccentricity. Our results suggest that distractors selectively interfere with VSTM for spatial locations.     

DHPG activation of group 1 mGluRs in BLA enhances fear conditioning

Group 1 metabotropic glutamate receptors are known to play an important role in both synaptic plasticity and memory. We show that activating these receptors prior to fear conditioning by infusing the group 1 mGluR agonist, (R.S.)-3,5-dihydroxyphenylglycine (DHPG), into the basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA) of adult Sprague–Dawley rats enhances freezing normally supported by a weak footshock. This effect of DHPG was blocked when it was co-infused with either the general group 1 mGluR1 antagonist, (R,S)-1-aminoindan-1,5 dicarboxylic acid (AIDA), or with the selective mGluR5 antagonist, 2-methyl-6-(phenylethynyl)-pyridine (MPEP). These results support previous findings by Rodrigues and colleagues that mGluR5s in the lateral region of the amygdala make an import contribution to fear conditioning. More importantly, they support the general ideas embedded in the concept of metaplasticity, as per Abraham, and the synaptic-tagging hypothesis per Frey and Morris—that the processes that specify the content of experience can be experimentally separated from those needed to acquire the memory.The last decade has seen an increased appreciation of the view that the plasticity state of neurons—their ability to be modified by experience—is not fixed. Instead, the effect of experience depends on the physiological or biochemical state of the neurons or synapses that receive and store information contained in the experience, and this state is variable. This perspective is captured by the concept called “metaplasticity” (Abraham and Bear 1996; Abraham and Tate 1997; Abraham 2008), which recognizes that prior events can change the general plasticity or modifiability of neurons and synapses that will potentially store information contained in a subsequent target experience. This idea is also embedded in the synaptic-tagging hypothesis (Frey and Morris 1997, 1998) that will be described in some detail in the Discussion section. This view is important because it recognizes that the processes that specify the content of experience can be experimentally separated from those that are needed to store the memory for the experience.As reviewed by Abraham (2008), the range of prior events that can potentially determine a neuron''s state of plasticity is quite large and can be mediated by their effects on many components of the machinery that supports changes in synaptic strength. They include modification in NMDA-receptor function, AMPA-receptor trafficking, neuronal excitability, and epigenetic modifications.One way that the potential for plasticity can be altered is by activation of group 1 metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR1s and mGlur5s) (Abraham 2008). A number of reports based on the in vitro long-term potentiation (LTP) methodology suggest that activating this class of receptors prior to the delivery of a relatively weak inducing stimulus can transform a normally short-lasting form of LTP into a more persistent form (Cohen and Abraham 1996; Cohen et al. 1998; Raymond et al. 2000). For example, an infusion of (R.S.)-3,5-dihydroxyphenylglycine (DHPG), a group 1 mGluR agonist, into the bathing medium 30 min prior to the delivery of a weak inducing stimulus can significantly enhance the persistence of the resulting LTP, while having no effect on the baseline response (Cohen et al. 1998; Raymond et al. 2000). This effect of DHPG, however, is blocked (Raymond et al. 2000) when its administration is accompanied by an infusion of the group 1 mGluR antagonist, (R,S)-1-aminoindan-1,5 dicarboxylic acid (AIDA).Group 1 mGluRs also have been implicated in fear conditioning. For example, Rodrigues et al. (2002) reported that one subtype, mGluR5, is localized in dendrites and spines in neurons in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala, and fear conditioning can be significantly impaired if the mGluR5 antagonist, 2-methyl-6-(phenylethynyl)-pyridine (MPEP), is infused into the lateral nucleus prior to conditioning.These findings, from the studies of synaptic plasticity and fear conditioning, provide the empirical basis for the hypothesis that motivates the experiments reported here—that the plasticity potential of neurons in the amygdala that support fear conditioning can be increased by activating group 1 mGluRs prior to the conditioning experience.To evaluate this idea, we followed a strategy similar to that used to study the role of mGluRs in LTP (Cohen and Abraham 1996; Cohen et al. 1998; Raymond et al. 2000). In these in vitro LTP experiments, a relatively weak inducing stimulus was used to generate a short-lasting LTP. Infusing the group 1 agonist DHPG prior to the delivery of the inducing stimulus transformed this short-lasting LTP into a more persistent form. Their results suggest that the activation of group 1 mGluR1 receptors independently initiates processes that make an important contribution to long-lasting LTP. To apply this strategy to fear conditioning, we used a very low level of shock—one that by itself produced an almost undetectable level of conditioned fear (as measured by freezing, the innate defensive response of rodents). We then determined if the activation of group 1 mGluRs prior to the conditioning experience would transform this outcome and produce a stronger level of freezing. DPHG was infused into the basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA) to activate the mGluRs.     

The linkages of cognitive processes, stress propensity, affect, and strain: experimental test of a cognitive model of the stress response

This research examined a model of the stress response that includes cognitive-affective stress propensity, cognitive-affective processes, experienced affective reactions, subjective stress, and strain constructs. Using partial least squares analysis, this model was found to provide a good fit with the data. Moderated multiple regression analyses found support for the hypothesized moderating effects of individual stress propensity on the relationships of stressors with cognitive-affective processes. The research and practical implications of these findings are discussed.