Rapid reacquisition of fear to a completely extinguished context is replaced by transient impairment with additional extinction training

A series of experiments studied reacquisition of fear reactions to a completely extinguished context. Reacquisition was rapid when reconditioning occurred as soon as the fear reactions were completely extinguished, showing that the original conditioning was intact. However, when reconditioning occurred after massive extinction training, fear reactions were depressed but then recovered across a long retention interval. This recovery was due to reconditioning and was similar to that produced by conditioning a massively preexposed context. These results show that massive extinction converts a potentially dangerous context into one that is merely familiar.     

Did the Market Depress Happiness in the US?

Robert Lane is a seasoned critic of American consumer society. His latest book summarizes many of the arguments brought up earlier and contributes new data about developments in income, companionship and happiness in the USA between 1972 and 1994. Lane notes a considerable rise in incomes over these years and claims that companionship and happiness have declined. He attributes this decline to market forces that emphasize money at the expense of intimate bonds, resulting in a weakened capacity to deal with stress.This review challenges two of the book's hypotheses. First, it shows that happiness did not decline in the USA in these years, but was actually quite stable. Second, it mitigates the assertion that companionship has dwindled and notes that money making and companionship are not necessarily antithetical.Still, Lane could be right. Possibly market forces did depress happiness and possibly that loss was offset by improvements in other fields, like increased freedom or better health care, such as better treatment for mental problems. If so, Lane's message is that Americans could have been happier than they ultimately were.     

Situational consistency in behavioral patterns of aggressive boys: Methodological considerations on observational measures

The issue of situational consistency is of great interest for early intervention with aggressive boys, but efforts to show behavior stability across settings have been unsuccessful to date, due principally to methodological problems. It is argued here that a more appropriate matching of response form, interaction partner, and situations should increase the situation consistency of observed behavior. The results support this proposition in that, more crosssetting behavior consistency was found in the pairing of situations where aggressive boys (age 6–7 years) were interacting with an adult female (mother/child versus baby-sitter/child) than in the pairing of situations where the boys were interacting with an adult male (mother/child versus father/child) or with the teacher in a nondyadic situation (classroom). The implications of using an extreme group are also discussed.This research program was funded by Le Conseil Québécois de la Recherche Sociale, the Quebec Government's FCAR research program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Ministry of Employment and Immigration, and the University of Montreal FDR program.     

Limited Experienced Happiness or Unlimited Expected Utility,What About the Differences?

Happiness and utility are two types of subjective well-being, but measured in different ways. Happiness is measured by asking people questions about their subjective appreciation of their life as a whole. Utility is measured by an assessment of their subjective priorities, as revealed in their actual behaviour. Both methods have specific pros and cons and additional value. These methodological issues are important in an epistemological way: how to obtain knowledge about subjective well-being. There are, however, also three important ontological differences between happiness and utility in the actual nature of these phenomena in reality. (1) Happiness depends on available market and non-market commodities and living-conditions; utility depends only on available market-commodities. (2) Happiness is about experienced well-being, utility is about expected well-being. (3) Happiness is limited because it is related to the fulfilment of a limited number of needs, utility is unlimited because behaviour always reveals preferences in terms of expected well-being. Economists and happiness-researchers tend to neglect the last two differences. Their analysis, the analysis of Carol Graham included, could gain strength if more attention would be paid to these last two differences.     

La valorisation professionnelle des caractéristiques de personnalité masculines,féminines et androgynes

This article examines the professional valorisation of gender-typed traits. In the study, participants should assess masculine, feminine and androgynous profiles in a set of professional contexts obtained by the crossing of social status (high versus low), gender (masculine versus feminine) and sector (production versus maintenance) of occupations. Consistent with a gender- typed trait matching model, the results showed that masculine profiles were the most valued ones in the most masculine occupations, feminine profiles were mostly valued in the most feminine occupations while androgynous profiles were the most valued in gender ambiguous occupations. Of particular interest was the fact that the perception of occupations’ gender was a function of the interaction between the gender and the sector of occupations (i.e.: the most masculine occupations were those that were stereotypically masculine and belonging to the production sector; the most feminine were those that were stereotypically feminine and belonging to the maintenance sector; the stereotypically masculine and maintenance occupations as the stereotypically feminine and production occupations were perceived as less gender typed).     

‘PRINCESSES’ AMONG THE ‘LIONS’: THE MILITANT CAREERS OF SIKH FEMALE FIGHTERS

For the first time in Sikh historiography, this article deals with the definition, institutionalization, canonization and commodification of modern Sikh music (kirtan) since the so-called Singh Sabha reformation. On the whole, it takes Sikh music as a suitable lens through which to examine societal and intellectual change, assuming that it is closely embedded in society and formative to its construction, negotiation and transformation in terms of (moral) consensus and conflict. Specifically, it discusses the influence of Western Orientalism (Max Arthur Macauliffe) and musicology, staff notation, Princely patronage (Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala), Christian missionaries and the introduction of new instruments (the harmonium, brass bands) to the making of modern Sikh music. Moreover, it investigates its relationship with what I have elsewhere labelled the Singh Sabha ‘moral language’ in terms of identity politics, for example in connection to popular culture (Punjabi bhangra), the notion of ‘authenticity’ and the British civilizing mission.     

Time-related processes in time-based prospective memory and in time-interval production

Time-based prospective memory tasks require the retrieval of previously formed plans (e.g., call me on my mobile phone) either at a specified time (e.g., at 3 p.m.) or after a specified period of time has elapsed (e.g., in 3 min). In the present study, we investigated whether the same time-related processes are recruited for a short-duration time-based prospective memory task and for a time-interval production task. In a dual-task paradigm, we required young adult participants to make category-membership decisions, while they were simultaneously engaged either in a time-based prospective memory tasks or in a time-interval production task. Under one set of conditions, participants were instructed to allocate attention equally to the two tasks, whereas in another set of conditions, they allocated attention primarily to the time-relevant task. The findings revealed that time estimates were not affected by the attention allocation manipulation, although it influenced performance on the concurrent category membership decision making task, and as expected time estimates were more accurate on the prospective memory task than on the time-production task. Based on the preponderance of the findings, we suggest that timing is managed by different mechanisms and/or strategies on time-interval production tasks and on short-duration time-based prospective memory tasks.     

Implicit memory for auditorily presented threatening stimuli: a process-dissociation approach

The investigation of unconscious cognition involves especially problems with the methodology of measuring implicit and explicit proportions of different task performances. In this study the process dissociation procedure of Jacoby and its modification within the multinomial modelling framework for an indirect word-nonword-discrimination task is applied to a sample of 45 healthy students. The paradigm includes acoustically presented stimuli. During a learning phase, subjects listened to a series of neutral and threatening words. Performance was tested by letting subjects decide whether a presented stimulus (masked with white noise at signal-noise ratio of -17 dB or unmasked) had been a word or a nonword. Within this paradigm, implicit cognition occurs when (a) a word is more probably correctly recognized as "word" after presentation during the learning phase (typical priming effect) or when (b) a nonword derived from a word is more probably falsely recognized as "word" after its corresponding word had been presented during the learning phase (effect of implicit cognition given perceptual fluency). Frequencies for hits and false alarms were analyzed within the multinomial model which allows estimating parameters for the correct discrimination of words (c), the response bias (b), the classical priming effect (u1), and the parameter for the priming effect of "old" nonwords (u2). Under masked stimuli the multinomial model showed implicit cognition, an effect not equally found for neutral and threatening words. Threatening words exhibited a significantly higher portion of implicit cognition than neutral ones. Given the statistical complexity of multinomial models, the application of this method was explained in detail.     

Attentional load associated with performing and stabilizing a between-persons coordination of rhythmic limb movements

This study addressed the issue of intentional stabilization of between-persons coordination patterns (in-phase/isodirectional and anti-phase/non-isodirectional) and the attentional cost incurred by the nervous system in maintaining and further stabilizing these coordination patterns. Five pairs of participants performed in-phase and anti-phase interpersonal coordination patterns in dual-task conditions (coordination+RT task). Results showed that: (1) isodirectional pattern (in-phase) was more stable than non-isodirectional pattern (anti-phase), (2) both iso- and non-isodirectional pattern were stabilized intentionally, (3) RT was lower for the isodirectional pattern (i.e., the most stable), and (4) attentional manipulation led to a trade-off between pattern stability and RT performance. These results suggest that performing between-persons coordination patterns incurs a central cost that depends on the coupling strength between the limbs. These findings are consistent with the previous studies in intrapersonal coordination.