Alive and well: the state of behavioral gerontology in 2011

In this paper, the authors present a brief personal account of the senior author's 30 years of exploration in behavioral gerontology. The main thesis of the paper is that behavioral methods and interventions have found a home both in mainstream gerontology and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are three sections: (a) a personal vignette discussing the problems inherent in using operant terminology in a nonoperant world; (b) a discussion, with examples from NIH sources, of the Institutes' views on behavior change; and (c) using Burgio and Burgio (1986) as a reference point, the authors show evidence of progress and vitality of behavioral gerontology in 2011.     

Needs and subjective well-being around the world

Across a sample of 123 countries, we examined the association between the fulfillment of needs and subjective well-being (SWB), including life evaluation, positive feelings, and negative feelings. Need fulfillment was consistently associated with SWB across world regions. Life evaluation was most associated with fulfilling basic needs; positive feelings were most associated with social and respect needs; and negative feelings were most associated with basic, respect, and autonomy needs. Societal need fulfillment predicted SWB, particularly for life evaluation, beyond individuals' fulfillment of their own needs, indicating the desirability of living in a flourishing society. In addition, the associations of SWB with the fulfillment of specific needs were largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled. These trends persisted when household income was taken into account. The emergent ordering of need fulfillment for psychosocial needs were fairly consistent across country conditions, but the fulfillment of basic and safety needs were contingent on country membership.     

Brightness of different hues is a single psychophysical ratio scale of intensity

Recent studies based on testable behavioral axioms have concluded that psychological scales of subjective intensive attributes involving the ears and eyes form ratio scales. These studies have shown that a certain commutativity of proportion property must hold under either successive increases or successive decreases, with all other independent dimensions fixed. However, until recently limited attention has been paid to whether such subjective intensity scales differ when a dimension independent of intensity, such as frequency or wavelength (e.g., pitch in audition, hue in vision) is varied. Using a simple and favorably tested theoretical model for global psychophysics, Luce, Steingrimsson, and Narens (2010) arrived at a necessary and sufficient cross-frequency, commutativity condition for there to exist a common intensity ratio scale. Here we show that brightness--already established to be a ratio-scalable dimension--and hue satisfy the same conditions.     

Previous mental health service utilization and change in clients' depressive symptoms

Although a potentially important factor in case conceptualization and treatment planning, the impact of previous treatment on subsequent counseling response has received little empirical attention. Using archival data, this study aimed to (a) report the prevalence of previous treatment utilization in a counseling population, (b) examine potential differences in symptom severity by treatment history, and (c) test whether the rate of change in symptoms over a course of counseling is moderated by previous treatment utilization, when also accounting for initial severity. A sample of 1,262 college students presenting for treatment in university/college counseling centers across the United States provided information on previous treatment history and completed the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms, administered at intake and up to 4 additional time points, with an average of 3-5 weeks between assessments. Data from the 13-item Depression subscale were used for the present study. Half the clients reported previous counseling, one third psychotropic medication, and one tenth psychiatric hospitalization. Previous treatment was associated with increased baseline depressive symptom severity. Results from latent growth curve models showed that previous counseling and medication correlated with a slower rate of symptom response, and previous counseling reduced the probability of being labeled a treatment responder. Previous counseling remained a significant predictor of counseling response when controlling for baseline severity. Hypothesized mechanisms through which previous treatment experience impacts subsequent treatment response remain largely theoretical and should be the focus of future research.     

Relating Engagement to Outcomes in Prevention: The Case of a Parenting Program for Couples

Analyses of program engagement can provide critical insight into how program involvement leads to outcomes. This study examines the relation between participant engagement and program outcomes in Family Foundations (FF), a universal preventive intervention designed to help couples manage the transition to parenthood by improving coparenting relationship quality. Previous intent-to-treat outcome analyses from a randomized trial indicate FF improves parental adjustment, interparental relationships, and parenting. Analyses for the current study use the same sample, and yield statistically reliable relations between participant engagement and interparental relationships but not parental adjustment or parenting. Discussion considers implications for FF and the difficulties researchers face when examining the relation between engagement and outcomes in preventive interventions.     

Early information processing biases in social anxiety

Considerable controversy persists regarding the nature of threat-related attention biases in social anxiety. Previous studies have not considered how variations in the temporal and energetic dimensions of affective stimulus delivery interact with anxiety-related individual differences to predict biased attention. We administered a visual dot-probe task, using faces that varied in affective intensity (mild, moderate, strong) and presentation rate (100, 500, 1,250 ms) to a selected sample. The high, compared to the low, socially anxious group showed vigilance towards angry faces and emotionally ambiguous faces more generally during rapid (100 ms) presentations. By 1,250 ms, there was only a non-specific motor slowing associated with angry faces in the high socially anxious group. Findings suggest the importance of considering both chronometric and energetic dimensions of affective stimuli when examining anxiety-related attention biases. Future studies should consider using designs that more closely replicate aspects of real-world interaction to study processing biases in socially anxious populations.     

On the intellectual sources of modern atheism

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Prenatal auditory experience and its sequelae

Towards the end of the second trimester of gestation, a human fetus is able to register environmental sounds. This in utero auditory experience is characterized by comprising strongly low-pass-filtered versions of sounds from the external world. Here, we present computational tests of the hypothesis that this early exposure to severely degraded auditory inputs serves an adaptive purpose—it may induce the neural development of extended temporal integration. Such integration can facilitate the detection of information carried by low-frequency variations in the auditory signal, including emotional or other prosodic content. To test this prediction, we characterized the impact of several training regimens, biomimetic and otherwise, on a computational model system trained and tested on the task of emotion recognition. We find that training with an auditory trajectory recapitulating that of a neurotypical infant in the pre-to-postnatal period results in temporally extended receptive field structures and yields the best subsequent accuracy and generalization performance on the task of emotion recognition. This strongly suggests that the progression from low-pass-filtered to full-frequency inputs is likely to be an adaptive feature of our development, conferring significant benefits to later auditory processing abilities relying on temporally extended analyses. Additionally, this finding can help explain some of the auditory impairments associated with preterm births, suggests guidelines for the design of auditory environments in neonatal care units, and points to enhanced training procedures for computational models.