Mood state changes of women as a function of regular aerobic exercise

The present study examined mood states of aerobic exercisers before and after completing a 15-wk. program. The subjects (ages 18 to 36 yr.) were 86 women enrolled in activity classes at a large state school in the southeast. Subjects were initially classified according to previous exercise habits. Analysis indicated both groups of frequent and infrequent exercisers were similar in mood states. Participation in regular exercise did not significantly change or enhance the mood states from pretreatment measures. Pretest measures of mood states provided poor prediction of posttest measures, indicating extreme variability in subjects' scores.     

A tracking procedure for determining the cat's frequency discrimination

A tracking procedure was used to investigate the time required to train cats to discriminate between a frequency-modulated tone and a steady tone. The animal was reinforced with food on a VR schedule only when the steady tone was present and the animal pressed the correct bar (one of two). After reinforcement, the steady tone usually changed to a frequency-modulated signal; by pressing the other bar, the tone could be changed to its steady state and the reinforcement then obtained as before. A major difficulty was the lack of control by the auditory stimulus on the cat's responses. This problem was solved by introducing interpress time outs which forced the animal to hesitate after every press. The use of light cues to signal the time outs and the correct bar to press accelerated the rate at which the training progressed.

With cats, this conditioning procedure apparently requires a much longer training period before the actual threshold determinations than the more commonly used avoidance conditioning procedures. However, when animals are to be tested repeatedly over a period of several months or longer, the procedure may prove the more desirable one because it reduces experimental neurosis.

     

Cognitive engagement variations among students of different ability level and sex in a computer problem solving game

The study investigated the cognitive engagement processes used by more and less successful learners in a computer problem solving game. These engagement variations were also related to sex and ability differences among students. Performance and engagement were monitored interactively as students learned a computer problem solving game; student comments and notes were also recorded. Results showed the records of more and less successful students to be distinguished by the spontaneous use of self-regulated learning processes — a sophisticated form of cognitive engagement. More successful students also appeared to shift cognitive engagement levels in response to computer game feedback. Success on the computer task and cognitive engagement variations were correlated with student differences in both ability and sex in this sample.This study was funded by the National Institute of Education, Grant No. 400-83-0017. Opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this study do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Education. The authors wish to thank Marcia Linn and Charles Fisher for their helpful advice, and Susanne Lajoie who served as second rater. Mary Rohrkemper and the Education and Child Development doctoral students at Bryn Mawr College also provided critical suggestions.     

Taking on semantic commitments, II: Collective versus distributive readings

In earlier work, Frazier and Rayner (1990) provided evidence for a processing principle termed the Minimal Semantic Commitment (MSC)hypothesis. In the present study, we used the MSC hypothesis as a starting point in addressing the issue of when to treat mental representations as vague versus determinate and ambiguous. Given ambiguous representations, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will commit to one interpretation (the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis). On the other hand, given a single underspecified representation, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will await disambiguating information before fully committing to an interpretation (the vagueness hypothesis). In an experiment designed to evaluate these hypotheses with respect to the representation of distributivity, participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing distributive or collective predicates that were either disambiguated by a preceding adverb or left locally ambiguous by delaying the disambiguating adverb until the end of the predicate. The results suggested that a semantic commitment is made in locally indeterminate cases as evidenced by a significant interaction of ambiguity and distributivity in first pass times, total times, and regressions. If the difficulty of distributives simply reflected the difficulty of postulating a distributive operator when evidence warranting it is encountered, then no interaction would be expected. Hence we argue that the distributive/collective distinction is treated as a matter of ambiguity rather than as one of vagueness. In the absence of evidence for a distributive reading, the processor commits itself to a collective reading sometime during the processing of the predicate (before the disambiguation in our late disambiguation examples). The findings are discussed in relation to recent linguistic work on the representation of distributivity.     

The effect of tangible reinforcement on the learning and retention of programmed material in academically retarded children

The effect of three reinforcement conditions was determined with respect to the learning and retention of a commercially available program purporting to teach simple nouns. The addition of candy reward to a novel method of presenting knowledge of results produced no change in performance when given on a continuous schedule, but reduced rate of responding when given on a partial schedule, i.e., only terninal frames.     

The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) Model of Vulnerability to Bipolar Disorder: Evidence of a Continuum in BAS Sensitivity across Adolescence

Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity has been implicated in the development of a variety of different psychiatric disorders. Prominent among these in the empirical literature are bipolar spectrum disorders (BSDs). Given that adolescence represents a critical developmental stage of risk for the onset of BSDs, it is important to clarify the latent structure of BAS sensitivity in this period of development. A statistical approach especially well-suited for delineating the latent structure of BAS sensitivity is taxometric analysis, which is designed to evaluate whether the latent structure of a construct is taxonic (i.e., categorical) or dimensional (i.e., continuous) in nature. The current study applied three mathematically non-redundant taxometric procedures (i.e., MAMBAC, MAXEIG, and L-Mode) to a large community sample of adolescents (n = 12,494) who completed two separate measures of BAS sensitivity: the BIS/BAS Scales Carver and White (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 319–333. 1994) and the Sensitivity to Reward and Sensitivity to Punishment Questionnaire (Torrubia et al. Personality and Individual Differences, 31, 837–862. 2001). Given the significant developmental changes in reward sensitivity that occur across adolescence, the current investigation aimed to provide a fine-grained evaluation of the data by performing taxometric analyses at an age-by-age level (14–19 years; n for each age ≥ 883). Results derived from taxometric procedures, across all ages tested, were highly consistent, providing strong evidence that BAS sensitivity is best conceptualized as dimensional in nature. Thus, the findings suggest that BAS-related vulnerability to BSDs exists along a continuum of severity, with no natural cut-point qualitatively differentiating high- and low-risk adolescents. Clinical and research implications for the assessment of BSD-related vulnerability are discussed.     

Virtual reality goes to war: a brief review of the future of military behavioral healthcare

Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning OEF/OIF military personnel is creating a significant healthcare challenge. These findings have served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD. Virtual Reality delivered exposure therapy for PTSD has been previously used with reports of positive outcomes. This article details how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify and treat combat-related PTSD in OIF/OEF Service Members and Veterans. The summarized projects in these areas have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center, and this paper will detail efforts to use virtual reality to deliver exposure therapy, assess PTSD and cognitive function and provide stress resilience training prior to deployment.