Reducing excessive questions in adults at adult-day training centers using differential-reinforcement-of-low rates

Differential-reinforcement-of-low rate (DRL) schedules are often used to reduce, not eliminate, behavior. We systematically replicated Austin and Bevan (2011) to determine whether the number of questions asked by two adults with intellectual disabilities working at adult-day-training centers could be reduced using a full-session DRL. The full-session DRL involved delivery of a reinforcer at the end of the day if the number of questions asked was less than a specified number during the entire session. Questions, up to a specified number, were also reinforced within-session. The full-session DRL reduced the number of questions asked by both participants and increased duration of task engagement for one participant.     

Judging Yourself as You Judge Others: Moral Development and Exculpation

This study investigated two main issues: Whether people's judgments about real-life moral transgressions are affected by the role they play in them and whether self-serving biases in such judgments vary with level of moral development. One-hundred twenty university students took Colby and Kohlberg's (1987) test of moral judgment and made open-ended and rating-scale judgments about three real-life transgressions they considered moral in nature. As expected, participants made more exculpatory judgments about transgressions they committed than they did about transgressions others committed, but participants did not judge transgressions committed against them more harshly than they judged transgressions committed against others. The higher participants scored on Kohlberg's test the less they externalized and excused their moral transgressions. Contrary to expectation, this relation also applied to moral judgments about transgressions committed by others against others. These findings have important implications for models of moral development and social cognition.     

Morality: An Evolutionary Account

ABSTRACT— Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic "social instincts," or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is.     

Explanatory limitations of cognitive-developmental approaches to morality

In response to Gibbs' defense of neo-Kohlbergian models of morality, the authors question whether revisions in Kohlberg's model constitute a coherent refinement of the cognitive-developmental approach. The authors argue that neo-Kohlbergian measures of moral development assess an aspect of morality (the most sophisticated forms of moral reasoning available to people) that plays a relatively minor role in determining the moral judgments and behavioral decisions people make in their everyday lives. Attempts to conceptualize stages as schema and to redefine moral decision-making in terms of automaticity will not solve these problems. Flexibility is an important aspect of moral maturity. Observed relations between stages of moral development and various forms of social conduct do not establish that the structures of moral reasoning that define stages of moral development exert a significant causal impact on moral behavior. Although cognitive-developmental approaches are equipped to account for some aspects of morality, a more general framework that organizes the insights from other theoretical approaches is needed.     

The enhancing effects of hippocampal infusions of glucose are not restricted to spatial working memory

Extensive evidence shows that hippocampal infusions of glucose enhance spontaneous alternation (SA) performance or reverse deficits in this task. The current experiments determined whether the enhancing effects of hippocampal infusions of glucose are restricted to spatial working memory. Specifically we tested whether hippocampal infusions of glucose would reverse deficits in an emotional reference memory task (continuous multiple trial inhibitory avoidance [CMIA]) produced by septal infusions of the gamma-aminobutyric acid agonist muscimol. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were given septal infusions of vehicle or muscimol (0.15 nmol: SA; 5 nmol: CMIA) combined with hippocampal infusions of vehicle or glucose (50 nmol) 15 min prior to assessing SA or CMIA training. CMIA retention was tested 48 h later. Muscimol infusions decreased percent alternation scores and avoidance retention latencies. Importantly, hippocampal infusions of glucose reversed the deficits produced by the septal muscimol infusions on both tasks. These findings show for the first time that hippocampal glucose infusions also influence emotional memory, indicating that the enhancing effects of glucose generalize to memory tasks that vary in motivational and cognitive demand.