Positive contrast obtained in reacquisition following interpolation of nonreinforced or partially reinforced trials

Two experiments investigated the effects of shifting from either nonreinforcement or partial reinforcement (PRF) to continuous reinforcement conditions (CRF). In the first experiment, three groups of rats were given food reinforcement under CRF conditions in a runway followed by regular extinction trials (RE), extinction trials where Ss were delayed for 30 sec before entering the empty goal box (DE), or CRF trials where Ss were delayed for 30 sec before entering the baited goal box (DF). Then all Ss were run on the delayed reinforcement condition (DF). In the final delayed reinforcement condition, group DE ran significantly faster than group DF, reflecting positive contrast. In the second experiment, four groups of rats were trained in a runway to receive either 4% or 18% sucrose reinforcers under either PRF or CRF conditions. Then all Ss were transferred to a Skinner box and bar presses were continuously reinforced, with each S continuing to receive the same sucrose concentration as before. The former PRF Ss, regardless of the reinforcer, bar pressed at a significantly higher rate in the Skinner box than the former CRF Ss. The evidence seemed to favor the view that the effectiveness of a reinforcer is not an absolute, unchanging quantity but rather depends on the historical context in which the reinforcer occurs.     

Difficulty and Degrees of Moral Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons‐responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza (1998) requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine‐grained measures of degrees of reasons‐responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty (contrary to the recent attempt by Coates and Swenson (2013) to extend the reasons‐responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility.     

Underdetermination, methodological practices, and realism

In this paper, I argue (i) that there are certain methodological practices that are epistemically significant, and (ii) that we can test for the success of these practices empirically by examining case-studies in the history of science. Analysing a particular episode from the history of medicine, I explain how this can help us resolve specific cases of underdetermination. I conclude that, while the anti-realist is (more or less legitimately) able to construct underdetermination scenarios on a case-by-case basis, he will have to abandon the strategy of using algorithms to do so, thus losing the much needed guarantee that there will always be rival cases of the required kind.     

Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others' mental states

The ability to attribute mental states to others is crucial for social competency. To assess mentalizing abilities, in false-belief tasks participants attempt to identify an actor's belief about an object's location as opposed to the object's actual location. Passing this test on explicit measures is typically achieved by 4 years of age, but recent eye movement studies reveal registration of others' beliefs by 7 to 15 months. Consequently, a 2-path mentalizing system has been proposed, consisting of a late developing, cognitively demanding component and an early developing, implicit/automatic component. To date, investigations on the implicit system have been based on single-trial experiments only or have not examined how it operates across time. In addition, no study has examined the extent to which participants are conscious of the belief states of others during these tasks. Thus, the existence of a distinct implicit mentalizing system is yet to be demonstrated definitively. Here we show that adults engaged in a primary unrelated task display eye movement patterns consistent with mental state attributions across a sustained temporal period. Debriefing supported the hypothesis that this mentalizing was implicit. It appears there indeed exists a distinct implicit mental state attribution system.     

Goals-feedback conditions and episodic memory: Mechanisms for memory gains in older and younger adults

Research has established that challenging memory goals always lead to score increases for younger adults, and can increase older adults' scores under supportive conditions. This study examined beliefs and on-task effort as potential mechanisms for these self-regulatory gains, in particular to learn whether episodic memory gains across multiple trials of shopping list recall are controlled by the same factors for young and old people. Goals with feedback led to higher recall and strategic categorisation than a control condition. Strategy usage was the strongest predictor of gains over trials for both age groups. Age, goal condition, and effort also predicted scores across the entire sample. Older adults' gains, but not younger adults' gains, were affected significantly by the interaction of self-efficacy beliefs and goal condition, and condition interacted with locus of control to predict younger adult gains. These results emphasise the importance of self-regulatory effort and positive beliefs for facilitating goal-related memory gains.     

Nonstranger sexual aggression: A discriminant analysis of the psychological characteristics of undetected offenders

Sex Roles - Rape is an underreported and underconvicted crime. Therefore, many highly sexually aggressive men are missed by research employing judicial identification for sample selection. The...     

Recognizing moving faces: a psychological and neural synthesis

Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.     

Perirhinal cortex lesions impair context aversion learning

Rats with perirhinal cortex lesions were compared with sham controls on a conditional discrimination in which saccharin was paired with LiCl in context 1, but paired with saline in context 2. Perirhinal-lesioned rats were slightly slower to acquire the discrimination but reached control levels by the end of acquisition. Both groups showed transfer to familiar tap water, consuming less in context 1 than in context 2. Unlike sham rats, perirhinal rats failed to show an aversion to context 1 on a place choice test. These data provide neuroanatomical support for the postulated difference between Pavlovian conditioning and conditional learning.     

Motivated or Demotivated to Be Creative: The Role of Self‐Regulatory Focus in Transformational and Transactional Leadership Processes

Numerous studies have recognised the importance of transformational leadership style for encouraging employees’ creativity. Self‐regulation studies have highlighted the influence of a promotion focus on employees’ creative behaviours. Yet both leadership and self‐regulation theories have paid less attention to the role transactional leadership style and situational prevention regulatory focus may play in affecting employees’ creativity. In this article we present a theoretical model which examines transformational and transactional leadership styles and both promotion and prevention situational self‐regulatory focus (SRF). The model suggests that while transformational leadership promotes creativity, at least partially by enhancing follower's situational promotion SRF, transactional leadership style (transactional active) is aligned with followers’ prevention situational SRF, which is associated with leaders’ hindering of followers’ creativity. Findings from two studies, an experimental study (N = 189) and a field study (N = 343 employees and 75 managers), support this model, showing that the relationship between different types of leadership and creativity are more complex than previously regarded. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Using Scaling to Facilitate Ethical Decision-Making in Family Therapy

Ethical decision-making in family therapy is inherently complex, as it requires therapists to balance competing needs of multiple individuals and subsystems. Scaling offers a potential means of helping facilitate such decision-making, by encouraging attendance to the likely impact of various courses of action on individuals and subsystems as related to each of the core ethical principles underlying psychotherapeutic practice. This article explores the potential use of scaling in family therapists’ ethical decision-making through case examples. Benefits and risks of such an approach are reviewed.