Conditioned suppression under positive, negative, and no contingency between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli

Using a conditioned suppression procedure, the effects of three contingent relationships between conditioned (CS) and unconditioned (US) stimuli were investigated. A traditional positive (if CS—then US) contingency suppressed response rate during the CS relative to responding during stimulus-free minutes of the session. A negative (if CS—then no US) contingency resulted in suppressed responding during CS-off minutes, and rate increases during the CS. A no-contingency control procedure, during which CS and US were randomly related, almost totally suppressed responding throughout the session and showed no differential effects of the CS on response rate. An analysis of changes in response rate during the minute after US-offset revealed acceleration under the no-contingency condition and, to a somewhat lesser degree, under the negative contingency. Both conditioned suppression and non-suppression are analyzed in terms of the temporal relationship between CS and US.     

Consumer evaluation in practice

Users of a community child and adolescent mental health service were surveyed, 3–4 weeks after their last contact, to determine their satisfaction with the service they received. High levels of overall satisfaction were obtained by general ratings, which tended to mask more specific critical comments to open-ended questions suggesting ways in which the service could be improved. The resulting changes in service provision are identified, the general value of consumer surveys discussed and the need to include open-ended questions in satisfaction surveys emphasized.     

EFFECTS OF HIGH-PROBABILITY REQUESTS ON THE ACQUISITION AND GENERALIZATION OF RESPONSES TO REQUESTS IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH BEHAVIOR DISORDERS

The failure to respond to requests in young children often is maintained by the reactions of the adults that encounter this behavior. This failure to respond to requests has been identified as a primary reason for the children's exclusion from community, social, and instructional opportunities. Numerous interventions that target the failure to respond have consisted of punishment and reinforcement procedures. More recently, antecedent interventions have focused on changing the context in which a request is delivered. In the current study, high-probability requests were provided as an antecedent to delivering a low-probability request. The requests were delivered by multiple trainers in an attempt to produce generalized appropriate responding to adults who did not use the high-probability sequence. Results showed an immediate increase in appropriate responding in 2 children when the intervention was delivered. In addition, when the intervention was implemented by more than one adult, spontaneous increases in responding also were observed toward adults who had never implemented the request sequence. Improvements in responding to requests were maintained after the intervention was discontinued.     

Emotion work in supervisor-subordinate relations: Gender differences in the perception of angry displays

In two studies, subjects were asked to evaluate an angry incident involving a supervisor and subordinate. Collectively, the samples comprised mostly Caucasion subjects with less than 10% of the participants from African-American, Asian, and Hispanic groups. As predicted, females in the role of supervisor judged the angry display as having greater relationship cost and personal cost than males. Moreover, neither the degree of prior provocation nor sex of the target moderated the influence of gender on the perception of normative costs. Gender differences in judgments of anger intensity, controllability, and upsettingness also emerged. These differences and the problem of “managing” sexuality in the workplace are discussed.     

Efficacy of a brief group psychoeducational intervention for bulimia nervosa

This study compared a brief group treatment that was designed to be purely educational (ED) with a longer course of individual cognitive-behavioural (CB) therapy intended to represent more standard clinical care. Participants were 65 women who sought treatment at Toronto General Hospital, met DSM-III criteria for bulimia nervosa at a normal weight and reported vomiting at least twice weekly. Results indicated that the CB treatment, as expected, was generally more effective than the ED intervention, but on several important outcome indices both treatments appeared to be equally effective for the healthiest 25-45% of the sample. The more intensive individual CB treatment was associated with greater improvement in patients who were more severely symptomatic. However, the ED intervention proved significantly more cost-effective and it was suggested that a sequential treatment program might achieve the superior benefits associated with the longer individual CB treatment at a reduced cost.     

The repressor personality and avoidant information processing: A dichotic listening study

The present research was designed to investigate the proposition that repressors, operationally defined by the conjunction of low anxiety and high defensiveness, are particularly adept at avoiding the processing of information when motivated to do so. Four groups of participants (nondefensive-low anxious, high anxious, repressors, and defensive-high anxious) were administered a dichotic listening task involving neutral or negative affective words presented in the unattended ear. Participants shadowed the material presented to the attended ear and simultaneously responded to a probe task presented on a video monitor. Results revealed that repressors made significantly fewer shadowing errors than high anxious and defensive-high anxious participants and marginally significantly fewer shadowing errors than low anxious participants for both neutral and negative words. High anxious participants, however, were later able to recognize the negative words that had been presented to the unattended ear at well above chance levels, whereas the recognition memory of repressors for such negative unattended words was at chance levels. In addition, repressors' responses to a postexperiment questionnaire indicated a significantly greater number of distracting thoughts during the experiment relative to other participants. Repressors, it seems, are indeed skillful at avoidant information processing and this capacity may well be related to the emotional memory deficits they have displayed in previous research.     

Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty

Cosmetic surgery provides a problematic case for feminist theorizing about femininity and women's relationship with their bodies. Feminist accounts of femininity and beauty are unable to explain cosmetic surgery without undermining the women who opt for it. I argue that cosmetic surgery may have less to do with beauty and more to do with being ordinary, taking one's life into one's own hands, and determining how much suffering is fair.     

Suppressor effects in the relations of psychological variables to resting blood pressure

The role of suppressor effects in obscuring the relation of psychological variables and blood pressure was studied. Forty-five nonmedicated patients in a family practice rated themselves relative to their peers on a series of characteristics. Two of these, trapped and lonely, exhibited marked suppressor effects in their relationship with each other and resting blood pressure. Self-ratings of lonely exhibited a moderately strong positive association with ratings of trapped (r = .63) while only ratings of lonely showed a significant correlation with resting systolic blood pressure (r = .31). Yet when the suppressor effects of the ratings on feeling lonely were removed in the regression analyses, the ratings on feeling trapped showed a significant positive association with resting systolic pressure (r = .42). Similarly, while neither ratings on feeling lonely or on feeling trapped showed separately a significant association with resting diastolic pressure, when suppressor effects were removed in the regression analyses, the ratings of trapped were significantly associated with diastolic pressure in a positive direction (r = .34) and ratings of lonely were significantly associated in a negative direction (r = .33). The significance of this specific suppressor effect and the implications of suppression for psychosomatic research are discussed.