Evidence that resident male albino rats are not immune to attacks by conspecific intruders

Offensive behaviors were exhibited by adult intact- and castrated-male Sprague-Dawley rats introduced into established home-cages of male conspecifics. Implications of this result for Adams' [1976] model of intraspecific fighting are presented.     

The developmental cognitive neuroscience of functional connectivity

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is a rapidly growing field that examines the relationships between biological development and cognitive ability. In the past decade, there has been ongoing refinement of concepts and methodology related to the study of ‘functional connectivity’ among distributed brain regions believed to underlie cognition and behavioral control. Due to the recent availability of relatively easy-to-use tools for functional connectivity analysis, there has been a sharp upsurge of studies that seek to characterize normal and psychopathologically abnormal brain functional integration. However, relatively few studies have applied functional and effective connectivity analysis techniques to developmental cognitive neuroscience. Functional and effective connectivity analysis methods are ideally suited to advance our understanding of the neural substrates of cognitive development, particularly in understanding how and why changes in the functional ‘wiring’ of neural networks promotes optimal cognitive control throughout development. The purpose of this review is to summarize the central concepts, methods, and findings of functional integration neuroimaging research to discuss key questions in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. These ideas will be presented within a context that merges relevant concepts and proposals from different developmental theorists. The review will outline a few general predictions about likely relationships between typical ‘executive’ cognitive maturation and changes in brain network functional integration during adolescence. Although not exhaustive, this conceptual review also will showcase some of recent findings that have emerged to support these predictions.     

Normality and impairment following profound early institutional deprivation: a longitudinal follow-up into early adolescence

Longitudinal analyses on normal versus impaired functioning across 7 domains were conducted in children who had experienced profound institutional deprivation up to the age of 42 months and were adopted from Romania into U.K. families. Comparisons were made with noninstitutionalized children adopted from Romania and with nondeprived within-U.K. adoptees placed before the age of 6 months. Specifically, the validity of the assessment, the degree of continuity and change in levels of functioning from 6 to 11 years, and the factors in the pre- and postadoption environment accounting for heterogeneity in outcome were examined. Pervasive impairment was significantly raised in children experiencing institutional deprivation for > or =6 months of life, with a minority within this group showing no impairment. There was no additional significant effect of duration of deprivation beyond the 6-month cutoff, and few other predictors explained outcome. The pattern of normality/impairment was mainly established by 6 years of age, with considerable continuity at the individual level between 6 and 11 years. The findings are discussed in terms of the possibility of a sensitive period for development.     

Self‐reference and group membership: evidence for a group‐reference effect

Two experiments were designed to explore whether encoding information in reference to a group would facilitate the later recall of that information to the same extent as encoding with reference to the self. In both experiments, participants encoded adjectives with reference to the self, semantic properties, or a group and were subsequently given a surprise‐free recall test. In Experiment 1 (N = 37), the participants' university served as the reference group. In Experiment 2 (N=41), the participants' family served as the reference group. In both experiments, self‐reference resulted in better recall than semantic processing, replicating the typical self‐reference effect (SRE). More importantly, strong evidence for a group‐reference effect (GRE) was found in that group‐reference resulted in better recall than semantic processing and in fact facilitated recall to the same extent as self‐referencing. The existing explanations (schemas, organization, elaboration, mental cueing, and evaluation) for the SRE were compared with regard to their viability in accounting for the GRE patterns. We discuss additional features that may be important in the explanation of the SRE and suggest future directions for research on group‐referencing. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feel good now or regret it later? The respective roles of affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions for explaining health‐promoting and health risk behavioral intentions

Evidence supporting the incorporation of affective constructs, such as affective attitudes and anticipated regret, into theoretical models of health behavior has been mounting in recent years; however, the role of positive anticipated affective reactions (e.g., pride) has been largely unexplored. The purpose of the present investigation was to assess how affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions (both pride and regret for performing a behavior or not) may provide distinct utility for understanding intentions to perform health‐promoting and health risk behaviors over and above cognitive attitudes and other established theoretical constructs from the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Participants (N = 210) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complete a one‐time online battery assessing TPB and affective constructs. Self‐reported intentions served as the main outcome measure, and hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the effects of TPB and affective constructs across behaviors. Controlling for TPB constructs, more positive affective attitudes and greater anticipated regret, but not anticipated pride, predicted intentions to engage in future health behaviors. Anticipated affective reactions contributed explanatory variance for intentions to perform health risk behaviors, but anticipated pride and regret were not associated with intentions to perform health risk behaviors. Contributions made via the inclusion of both positively and negatively valence anticipated affective reactions for both action and inaction (performing a behavior or not) across a range of health promoting and health risk behaviors are discussed, as well as implications for future intervention work.     

Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness

Communities have the potential to function effectively and adapt successfully in the aftermath of disasters. Drawing upon literatures in several disciplines, we present a theory of resilience that encompasses contemporary understandings of stress, adaptation, wellness, and resource dynamics. Community resilience is a process linking a network of adaptive capacities (resources with dynamic attributes) to adaptation after a disturbance or adversity. Community adaptation is manifest in population wellness, defined as high and non-disparate levels of mental and behavioral health, functioning, and quality of life. Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities--Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence--that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns.     

Structural and moral commitment among same-sex couples: relationship duration, religiosity, and parental status.

This study examined ecological predictors of structural and moral commitment among cohabiting same-sex couples. Structural commitment was operationalized as the execution of legal documents, and moral commitment was operationalized as having a commitment ceremony. The authors tested 2 logistic regression models using a subsample of Rainbow Illinois survey respondents. First, the execution of legal documents was examined using the entire subsample (n=190). Because antigay victimization may sensitize individuals to the importance of legal protection, actual and feared victimization were hypothesized to predict legalization. These hypotheses were not supported. However, relationship duration, a control variable, did predict legalization. The authors then used data only from those individuals who had executed a legal document (n=150) to determine those who also reported a commitment ceremony (Model 2). Parental status, religiosity, involvement with a supportive congregation, and an interaction between gender and parental status were hypothesized to predict ritualization. Only religiosity and parental status emerged as significant. Results from this study demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between legalization and ritualization. Further, they extend knowledge about how same-sex couple commitment is shaped by noncouple factors, such as time, individual religiosity, and parental status.     

Mechanisms underlying heightened risk taking in adolescents as compared with adults

Self-report surveys and behavioral tasks indicate greater risk-taking behavior in adolescents as compared with adults. However, the underlying causes of these behavioral differences remain unclear. The present study examined the possibility that adolescents may be more susceptible to immediate positive and negative outcomes than adults. We compared the behavior of adolescents and adults on a modified version of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002). The task required that participants press a button to "inflate" a series of balloons on a computer screen. Balloons inflated until either the participant released the button ("saved" balloons) or the balloon "burst." Accumulated points increased as the duration of the buttonpress increased; however, simultaneously, the likelihood that the balloon would burst also increased. Adolescents inflated balloons to a larger size prior to saving them than adults did, suggesting relatively higher levels of risk taking, although the adolescents' behavior was not uniformly risk prone. Further, in comparison with adults, behavior in adolescents was more influenced by whether a balloon was saved or had burst on the preceding trial, suggesting that sensitivity to immediate consequences is one mechanism that underlies the observed difference in risk taking.