The right tool for the job: what strategies do wild New Caledonian crows use?

New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides (NC crows) display sophisticated tool manufacture in the wild, but the cognitive strategy underlying these skills is poorly understood. Here, we investigate what strategy two free-living NC crows used in response to a tool-length task. The crows manufactured tools to extract food from vertical holes of different depths. The first tools they made in visits were of a similar length regardless of the hole depth. The typical length was usually too short to extract food from the deep holes, which ruled out a strategy of immediate causal inference on the first attempt in a trial. When the first tool failed, the crows made second tools significantly longer than the unsuccessful first tools. There was no evidence that the crows made the lengths of first tools to directly match hole depth. We argue that NC crows may generally use a two-stage heuristic strategy to solve tool problems and that performance on the first attempt in a trial is not necessarily the ‘gold standard’ for assessing folk physics.This contribution is part of the special issue ‘Animal Logics’ (Watanabe and Huber 2006).     

Personal reflections: barriers and strategies in increasing diversity in psychology

In this article, six faculty and students of color who participated in a panel discussion at a symposium during the National Multicultural Conference and Summit of 2003 talk about the barriers they encountered and continue to encounter in their graduate training and places of employment. They also discuss strategies they found to be effective, enhancing, and positive and suggest other possibilities. The contributors describe their relationships with dominant-group and minority peers and talk about how issues of social class, disability, and sexual orientation as well as color have been part of their experience.     

When the heat is on: romantic partner responses influence distress in socially anxious women

This study provided a preliminary test of whether socially anxious women and their partners would show more negative social support behavior, especially among those with low relationship satisfaction, and whether this would increase the distress of the socially anxious women. Women with (n=22) and without (n=23) heightened social anxiety were observed interacting with their partners under a social-evaluative threat and support behaviors were coded. Unexpectedly, no differences were found between socially and non-socially anxious women and their partners. Although relationship satisfaction influenced this process, it was the more satisfied women who showed more negative behavior. Additionally, the more positive behaviors the partner exhibited, the greater was the distress reported by socially anxious women, particularly among women whose partners reported high relationship satisfaction. Implications for how these findings might expand theories on interpersonal processes in social anxiety are discussed.     

Using source cues and familiarity cues to resist imagination inflation

To investigate whether people can resist imagination inflation--the imagination-induced increased confidence that fictitious childhood events really happened--we gave them different types of cues. In a three-stage procedure, participants: (1) rated their confidence that a list of childhood events had happened to them, (2) imagined some of these events, and (3) made confidence ratings a second time. Subjects received either no cues about the source of the imagined event, an additional source cue (perspective), an additional familiarity cue (a plausibility questionnaire), or both cues. Only subjects who had both types of cues resisted imagination inflation. These results suggest that additional cues can sometimes safeguard people from becoming more confident that fictitious events were genuine experiences.     

Scientific Meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis-Horney Applied: Alienation from the Self and the Quality of the Analyst's Responsiveness in Trauma Treatment

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Attack produced by intermittent reinforcement of a concurrent operant response

Squirrel monkeys pressed a lever to produce food on several fixed-ratio schedules; they could also bite a rubber hose. Biting attack occurred during the postreinforcement pause and in early portions of the ratio response run. Also, biting attacks increased after transitions to higher values of the fixed-ratio requirement and in extinction. The results show that extinction-induced aggression effects occur in primates.     

Storytelling and Coping With Stressful Events1

Three studies explored the coping benefits and limitations of stories people hear about others undergoing similar stressful events. In Study One, cancer patients reported that positive stories about other patients were preferable to and more helpful than negative stories, yet negative stories were more commonly told. Study Two manipulated the valence and source of stories told to college students facing midterm exams. Stories with positive endings and those relayed by expert sources were regarded more positively than negative stories and those told by nonexperts. Study Three manipulated the valence and informativeness of stories in a similar college sample. Positive and informative stories were rated more favorably, although these effects were independent of each other. Implications for social comparison and social support are discussed.     

Aversive stimulus properties of morphine: evaluation using the drug preexposure conditioned taste aversion paradigm

Interpretation of the finding that positive-reinforcing drugs such as morphine also possess possible aversive properties, as revealed by their ability to induce a conditioned taste aversion (CTA), remains problematic. This issue was addressed in the present study using the drug preexposure CTA paradigm. Water-deprived rats were given noncontingent preexposure to one of three doses of morphine (2.5, 5.0, or 15.0 mg/kg) or drug vehicle. Subsequently, animals in each of these preexposure groups were presented with a novel 0.1% saccharin-flavored solution followed immediately by injection with one of the same three morphine doses or drug vehicle. This procedure was repeated at 5-day intervals until six saccharin presentations had been performed. Results indicated that while the three morphine doses were differentially potent as taste aversion-conditioning agents, they were equipotent as preexposure agents serving to disrupt CTA. These data suggest that preexposure to morphine's predominantly positive-reinforcing (and non-CTA-inducing) properties is sufficient for preexposure disruption of subsequent morphine CTA. A second experiment indicated that the minimal effective preexposure dose is between 0.3 and 1.25 mg/kg of morphine. It is suggested that an important commonality may exist between the discriminative stimulus properties of morphine as a CTA-inducing agent and as a positive reinforcer.