Postnatal development of heart rate patterns elicited by an aversive CS and US in cats

Heart rate and motor responses were recorded in cats of different ages during classical conditioning. A deceleratory-acceleratory heart rate pattern observed during the CS-US interval in one and four-week-old kittens is an alpha conditioned response, a potentiated original response to the CS. At eight weeks of age two new distinct patterns of pure acceleration or pure deceleration are acquired during conditioning and in the absence of motor learning. At 12 weeks of age and in adult subjects, heart rate patterns during the CS-US interval become more complex and conditioned motor responses can be observed. A covariance of HR acceleration and motor responses during the CS-US interval is absent in eight-week-old subjects, but quite high in 12-week-old subjects and adult cats. The data are interpreted as suggesting separate elicitatory mechanisms of HR and motor responses which may show synchrony later in ontogeny.     

Asymptotic reinforced responding as a function of the operant level of the instrumental response

The relationship between operant level (base rate) and asymptotic reinforced instrumental responding was investigated in several contingencies in which licking was contingent upon running, under different FR schedules. For Group I the relationship was examined by selecting rats who naturally differed in their running base rates and for which the licking base rates were equivalent. For Group II the relationship was examined by selecting rats with equivalent running and licking base rates, but whose running rates were eventually made to differ by manipulating wheel-torque requirements. Asymptotic reinforced instrumental responding was found to be linearly related to pre-contingent running base rates, for all FR schedules, and independent of the procedures used to obtain differing running base rates. The results support Premack's contention that asymptotic reinforced instrumental responding is a joint function of the reinforcing response and the operant level of the instrumental response.     

The effects of natural category size on memory for episodic encodings

Previous findings indicate that natural category size affects cued recall but not recognition performance. Words that define or belong to larger categories are not as likely to be recalled in the presence of an extralist cue. However, category size has no effect on recognition in the presence of the target as the cue. Theoretically, this difference could be due to inherent differences between these tasks, to the use of different types of test cues, or to differences in the nature of the required responses (naming compared with “yes/no”decisions). Three experiments indicated that none of these factors is a sole determinant. Natural category size effects were found in cued-recall and recognition tasks, with extralist and target cues and regardless of the required response. The critical factor is whether the testing conditions require or encourage subjects to search the category defined by the cue. With the initiation of such a search, information represented in semantic memory is likely to influence memory for episodic information.     

FOCAL,FORTRAN, and BASIC programs for reformatting and analyzing data collected by the SKED program

Several programs have been written in the FOCAL, FORTRAN, and BASIC languages for reformatting and analyzing SKED data. These programs include selection and explicit labeling of sets of recording counters representing distributions and/or total counts of events, several general manipulations of distributional data, and standard statistical treatment of distributions.     

Work-Related Flow Dimensions differentially Predict Anxiety,Life Satisfaction,and Work Longevity among Filipino Counselors

Flow at work was associated with optimal psychological outcomes in the organizational setting. However, previous studies have concentrated on work-related flow as an outcome rather than a catalyst of positive psychological functioning. Further, the differential impact of work-related flow domains on key outcomes was still uncharted. To address this empirical gap, the current investigation examined work-related flow dimensions as differential predictors of anxiety, life satisfaction, and work longevity among 133 Filipino guidance counselors. The results of hierarchical regression analyses have shown that work enjoyment served as a robust predictor of anxiety, life satisfaction and work longevity even after controlling for the influence of relevant demographic variables. Absorption positively predicted work longevity. However, intrinsic work motivation did not predict any outcome. Discussion points revolved around the unique theoretical contributions of the current study to the foregoing work-related flow theory and concrete practical implications to emphasize the psychological benefits of work-flow especially in the field of counseling.     

On the misuse of group membership

Group membership is analyzed from the perspective of developmental theory. Maladaptive or nontransitional uses of the groups of everyday life, such as work and social groups as well as therapy groups, are discussed and illustrated with clinical examples. It is recommended that therapists pay attention to the nature and meaning of their patients' involvements in these sorts of groups, keeping in mind that the meanings of such affiliations are particularly influenced by developmental factors.     

A Study on Late Closure in Spanish: Principle-grounded vs. Frequency-based Accounts of Attachment Preferences

A much-debated issue in current research on sentence parsing concerns the resolution of attachment ambiguities. Parsing theories differ on the procedures used to guide on-line attachment decisions: principle-grounded theories (e.g. garden-path/ construal) propose universal principles that minimize processing load; frequency-based accounts (such as linguistic tuning) claim that attachment decisions are shaped by readers' previous experience with their particular language; lexically based models, in turn, assert that attachment choices are determined by the properties of individual lexical items in the sentence. This paper reports six studies on late closure in the resolution of attachment ambiguities in Spanish: a questionnaire study on attachment preferences and three self-paced reading experiments where ambiguous PPs could be attached as arguments of two VP-hosts in NP-VP1-NPVP2-PP structures. The results show a clear preference towards low attachment (late closure), thus supporting principle-grounded theories. In addition, two corpus studies were carried out to obtain records of relative frequencies of the attachment choices involved in the experiments. A coarse-grained measure revealed that, in accordance with linguistic tuning, low-attachment structures are more common in Spanish NP-VP1-NP-VP2-PP sentences. However, a fine-grained count showed that low-attachment preferences cannot be explained by arguing that the specific verbs positioned lower on the tree (VP2) are more likely to take an extra argument than those located at a higher position (VP1), as lexical models would assume.