Motivation as a function of success frequency

Motivation and Emotion - It is well-established that intermediate challenge is optimally motivating. We tested whether this can be quantified into an inverted-U relationship between motivation and...     

Elevation and reduction of plasma tryptophan and their effects on aggression and perceptual sensitivity in normal males

Data from experimental animals suggest that 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT) may have an inhibitory effect on aggression, while clinical studies have found a correlation between pathological aggression and low brain 5HT. To investigate this relationship further we used amino acid mixtures designed to raise or lower the levels of the 5HT precursor, tryptophan. Normal male subjects were given tryptophan-depleted, balanced, or tryptophan-supplemented ammo acid mixtures and tested for aggression 5 hours later. The balanced amino acid mixture served as a control for the tryptophan depletion and supplementation. Testing for aggression was done using the Buss paradigm in which subjects deliver electric shocks to a (nonexistent) partner in response to stimulus tones. Duration and intensity of shock delivered were the measures of aggression, while responsivity to the stimulus tones was the measure of perceptual sensitivity. Neither tryptophan supplementation nor tryptophan depletion had any effect on these measures of aggression or perceptual sensitivity. We conclude that raising or lowering the synthesis of brain 5HT through alterations in tryptophan availability does not influence aggression in normal males as measured by the Buss task.     

Privacy and the encryption debate

Conclusion Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land as well as countless other science fiction stories, once claimed that "The sole thing achieved by any privacy law is to make the bugs smaller." Heinlein may be correct, but that travesties will happen does not sanction them—and maybe we will invent bugs to root out and foil other bugs. I have argued for individual privacy rights or rights to control sensitive personal information. The explosion of digital technology has made possible severe violations of individual privacy by corporations, news agencies, and the government. If I am correct about all of this, one commonly used "public interest" argument given for limiting privacy rights has been undermined. It is also far from true to claim that the prevalence of strong encryption technology will lead to disaster. While I do not adhere to the view that "rights hold, though the heavens may fall," in this article I have maintained that the security arguments of law enforcement do not come close to meeting the threshold for violating privacy rights. The heavens are far from falling. He is the author of, "Employee Monitoring and Computer Technology" (forthcoming in Business Ethics Quarterly), "Intangible Property: Privacy, Power, and Information Control," American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (October 1998) and is the editor of Intellectual Property: Moral, Legal, and International Dilemmas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), in which he contributes "Introduction to Intellectual Property" and "Toward A Lockean Theory of Intellectual Property."     

Differential effects of seating arrangements on disruptive behavior of fifth grade students during independent seatwork

We investigated teacher versus student seat selection in the context of group and individual seating arrangements. Disruptive behavior during group seating occurred at twice the rate when students chose their seats than when the teacher chose. During individual seating, disruptive behavior occurred more than three times as often when the students chose their seats. The results are discussed in relation to choice and the matching law.     

Mediating role of coping in the dispositional optimism-posttraumatic growth relation in breast cancer patients

The aim of the present study was to examine if coping strategies mediate dispositional optimism-posttraumatic growth relation in postoperative breast cancer patients. The data were collected from 90 patients in two hospitals. Regression analyses revealed that problem-focused coping fully mediated dispositional optimism-posttraumatic growth relation, but emotion-focused coping did not. That is, postoperative breast cancer patients who were optimistic were more likely to use problem-focused coping strategies that, in turn, led to the development of posttraumatic growth. The findings were congruent with the literature in which problem-focused coping was mostly highlighted as compared to emotion-focused coping, and in which optimism and problem-focused coping relationship was emphasized in the path of posttraumatic growth.     

A neurally plausible parallel distributed processing model of event-related potential word reading data

The Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) framework has significant potential for producing models of cognitive tasks that approximate how the brain performs the same tasks. To date, however, there has been relatively little contact between PDP modeling and data from cognitive neuroscience. In an attempt to advance the relationship between explicit, computational models and physiological data collected during the performance of cognitive tasks, we developed a PDP model of visual word recognition which simulates key results from the ERP reading literature, while simultaneously being able to successfully perform lexical decision—a benchmark task for reading models. Simulations reveal that the model’s success depends on the implementation of several neurally plausible features in its architecture which are sufficiently domain-general to be relevant to cognitive modeling more generally.