Taste-mediated potentiation of noningestional stimuli in rats

Holtzman rats drank saccharin in a distinctive environmental chamber prior to lithium-induced toxicosis. This treatment was administered four times. These animals subsequently drank less water or familiar saline in the chamber than animals which received water in the environment during conditioning. In addition, these environmental stimuli blocked the formation of a lithium-mediated coffee aversion more if they were conditioned in the presence of saccharin than if they were conditioned in the presence of water. Such differential blocking provided further evidence that the presence of a taste during conditioning facilitated aversion learning to the environmental chamber.     

Taste familiarity and apomorphine-induced taste aversions in humans

Human volunteers learned taste aversions to a relatively novel cranberry flavor paired with apomorphine-induced illness. These aversions were significantly reduced by pretreatment familiarization to the flavor unless an unpalatable interfering flavor was introduced just prior to the administration of apomorphine. The outcomes have implications for taste-aversion learning in humans and for the control of flavor preferences in patients undergoing illness-inducing chemotherapy.     

Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory

In this paper, we examine the historical development of the groupthink model and discuss recent responses to the body of empirical evidence amassed on the model. We conclude by articulating general lessons implied by the evolution of research on the groupthink model.     

Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy and Behavioral Self-Management in Smoking Cessation1

The relative impacts on smoking behavior of restricted environmental stimulation therapy (REST), behavioral self-management, and the combination were compared. Fifteen smokers from the community were treated in each of the three conditions and followed over a 12-month period. The combined treatment was very successful compared to standard smoking interventions (a mean of 66% reduction from baseline smoking rate and 53% of subjects completely abstinent on the 1-year follow-up), and subjects in this group smoked significantly less than those in either the REST or behavioral self-management only condition. Furthermore, subjects receiving REST, alone or in combination, were significantly less likely to relapse following treatment. The results were taken to support the importance of addressing multiple change objectives in smoking cessation programs.     

Animal,but not human,faces engage the distributed face network in adolescents with autism

Multiple hypotheses have been offered to explain the impaired face‐processing behavior and the accompanying underlying disruptions in neural circuitry among individuals with autism. We explored the specificity of atypical face‐processing activation and potential alterations to fusiform gyrus (FG) morphology as potential underlying mechanisms. Adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and age‐matched typically developing (TD) adolescents were scanned with sMRI and fMRI as they observed human and animal faces. In spite of exhibiting comparable face recognition behavior, the HFA adolescents evinced hypo‐activation throughout the face‐processing system in response to unfamiliar human, but not animal, faces. They also exhibited greater activation in affective regions of the face‐processing network in response to animal, but not human, faces. Importantly, this atypical pattern of activation in response to human faces was not related to atypical structural properties of the FG. This atypical neural response to human faces in autism may stem from abnormalities in the ability to represent the reward value of social (i.e. conspecific) stimuli.