A neural marker of content-specific active ignoring

The ability to attend to relevant events and to ignore irrelevant stimuli is crucial to survival. Theories disagree on whether this ability is dependent solely on increased neural activation for relevant items or whether active ignoring can also play a role. The authors examined the active ignoring of stimuli using a preview search procedure, where irrelevant faces appeared prior to relevant house stimuli. They found increased activation in brain regions associated with spatial memory and in content-specific face-processing areas when participants ignored the irrelevant faces. Differences arose even on trials when only previewed faces appeared, and the magnitude of these differences predicted how well faces were ignored in search. Activation associated with active ignoring decreased when a secondary task was imposed during the preview. The data reveal a neural marker for the process of actively ignoring the content and locations of irrelevant stimuli.     

Lesbian Women of Color: Therapeutic Issues and Challenges

Lesbian women of color may seek professional help to find their way through the challenges of being a triple minority. The authors discuss specific issues faced by African American, Asian American, Latina American, and Native American lesbian women, offering guidelines for affirmative practice when working with these women in a counseling context. Mujeres lesbianas de color pueden buscar ayuda profesional para poder navegar los desafíos de estar en una triple minoría. Los autores describen problemas específicos que enfrentan mujeres afro‐americanas, asiático‐americanas, latinoamericanas, e indígenas lesbianas, y ofrecen gufas para prácticas afirmativas cuando se trabaja con estas mujeres en un contexto de consejería.     

When Is Believing “Seeing”? Hostile Attribution Bias as a Function of Self‐Reported Aggression1

Repeated exposure to adverse advents (e.g., risky driving) was thought to increase expectations for the recurrence of the event. Community‐based drivers (130 men, 133 women) were given scenarios depicting everyday road events that could be construed as benign, ambiguous, or malign by the degree of perceived provocation. Differences between levels of gender, ethnicity, age, aggressiveness, and provocation were measured by attributions of intent, hostility, and anger. Results showed that, overall, drivers accurately perceived provocation conditions. Hostile attributional biases were not evident among the sample as a whole, but were dependent on level of aggressiveness and provocation. Analysis of self‐reported driving behavior showed that young, aggressive majority group drivers who experience greater aggression on the road also were more likely to take more risks while driving. Controlling for miles driven, gender differences were not found.     

Stress state mediation between environmental variables and performance: The case of noise and vigilance

Effects of environmental variables on performance may be mediated by individual stress states. In this study the effects of jet-aircraft engine noise and signal salience on vigilance performance and self-reported stress state were examined. One hundred and ninety-two (96 female and 96 male) participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions consisting of 48 participants each resulting from the factorial combination of signal salience (high and low salience signals) and noise (95 dBA intermittent aircraft noise or quiet). Performance metrics and self-reported stress state (Task Engagement, Distress, and Worry) were collected. Performance in the noise conditions was significantly better than in the quiet conditions. Performance in the high salience conditions was significantly better than the low salience conditions. Noise elevated Task Engagement and low signal salience elevated Distress. Moreover, structural equation model analyses were used to examine stress state mediation between the experimental variables and performance. These analyses indicated Engagement mediates between noise and vigilance performance.     

Sexual reinforcement in the female rat.

Sexual reinforcement in the female rat was studied in a preparation that allowed continuous operant responding for access to a male rat leading to intromission. Experiment 1 used a high operant level nose-poke response to test the possible reinforcing effects of some components of access to a male. A simple tone stimulus used as a conditioned reinforcer and two odor stimuli, target male bedding and emulsified preputial gland, were tested. None of these contingent events altered responding above or below operant level. Access to the male, which was always accompanied by intromission, immediately increased response rate when it was made contingent upon the nose-poke response. Performance on fixed-ratio schedules was erratic, and response rate was low in comparison to typical food-reinforced responding. An interresponse-time analysis indicated, however, that some effect of the ratio contingency may have been present. In Experiment 2, several modifications of the procedure were tested with the objective of creating a more tractable preparation for behavior analysis. Response type and the hormone delivery method were changed, and 2 target males were used instead of 1. The latter tripled the average number of reinforcers earned in a single session. Differences between sexual and other reinforcers are discussed in terms of procedural, quantitative, and motivational aspects of the sexual reinforcement procedure.