Clamped Corticosterone (B) Reveals the Effect of Endogenous B on Both Facilitated Responsivity to Acute Restraint and Metabolic Responses to Chronic Stress

To determine the effects of both corticosterone (B) and chronic stressors on acute ACTH responses to restraint, young male rats were exposed to streptozotocin-induced diabetes, cold (5-7 degreesC) or intracerebroventricular (icv) neuropeptide Y (NPY) for 5 d and then exposed to restraint within 2 h after lights on. Two groups of rats were studied: intact and adrenalectomized replaced with B pellets that maintained plasma B in the normal mean 24-h range of intact rats. In addition to ACTH and B responses to restraint on d 5, body weight, food intake, fat depots, glucose and other hormones were measured to determine the role of stress-induced elevations in B on energy balance. ACTH responses to restraint were normal in intact rats subjected to diabetes or cold. By contrast, there was no ACTH or B response to restraint in NPY-infused intact rats. All 3 groups of chronically stimulated adrenalectomized rats with clamped B had facilitated ACTH responses to restraint compared to their treatment controls. Overall food intake increased in all groups of stressed rats; however, augmented intake occurred only during the light in intact rats and equally in the light and dark in B-clamped rats. White adipose depot weights were decreased by both diabetes and cold and increased by NPY in intact rats; the decreases with cold and increases with NPY were both blunted and changes in fat stores were not significant in adrenalectomized, B-clamped rats. We conclude that: 1. diabetes- and cold-induced facilitation of restraint-induced afferent input to hypothalamic control of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is opposed in intact rats by the elevated feedback signal of B secretion; 2. NPY does not induce facilitation of afferent stress pathways; 3. chronic stimulation of the HPA axis induces acute hyperresponsiveness of hypothalamic neurons to restraint provided that the afferent input of this acute stimulus is not prevented by B feedback; 4. stimulus-induced elevations in B secretion result in day-time feeding; 5. insensitivity of both caloric efficiency and white fat stores to chronic stress in adrenalectomized, B-clamped rats results from loss of normally variable B levels.     

“Rules” of language: A reply

Philosophical Studies -     

On the alleged ineffability of death

A number of recent theorists, all proceeding on the assumption that there is no afterlife, argue that the notion of one's own death defies comprehension in ways that have important implications. Some argue this "ineffability" of death precludes a rational decision to die. Dr. Edwin Shneidman maintains that it makes the notion of our own death unintelligible to each of us. In this paper, these arguments are criticized. It is maintained that death is not so inscrutible as these theorists would have us believe.     

Gender,Race, and Performance Expectations of College Students

Women often have low performance expectations for themselves but expect other women to succeed. We found minority students think not only that they will do worse than other minority group members, but also that their group will do poorly. Low individual and group success expectations make the results for minorities doubly troubling.     

Adding fuel to fire: the impact of followers' arousal on ratings of charisma

The authors conducted an experimental laboratory study and a longitudinal field study to investigate the impact of followers' arousal on ratings of charisma. Both studies examined 2 contrasting hypotheses: (a) the misattribution hypothesis, which posits a direct effect of arousal, and (b) the response-facilitation hypothesis, which posits an interactive effect of arousal and leaders' charismatic appeal on ratings of charisma. The overall results from both studies provide support for the response-facilitation hypothesis. In addition, the authors tested the hypothesis that arousal effects are limited to ratings of charisma. As expected, ratings of transactional leadership, in contrast with ratings of charisma, were not influenced by followers' arousal states. The authors discuss the implications of these results and offer suggestions for future research.     

Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants

Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.     

The Power of Persuasion: Lessons in Personal Selling from the White House

Those Presidents who historians agree have been most successful have been able to sell themselves and their programs to many different constituencies. They have recognized that effective leadership requires many of the same skills as effective personal selling. The experiences of those who have worked in the Oval Office underscore some of the simple but often forgotten lessons of personal selling, and this article catalogs some of the most important of these.     

Dialogue as Constructivist Pedagogy: Probing the Minds of Psychology's Greatest Contributors

In this article, I report on my use of dialogue as an exploratory teaching tool in an undergraduate colloquium titled Historical Foundations of Psychology. Students completed written assignments in which they identified the contributors to psychology associated with each of a series of position statements that capture the intellectual, philosophical, or theoretical views of these individuals. Students were not told in advance the identity of contributors relative to their respective position statements, which assumed the form of excerpts and quotations (direct or paraphrased) from original and secondary sources. As part of their written responses, students provided supporting rationale for their answers and discussed the truths and misconceptions inherent in each statement. Afterward, students engaged in class discussion involving peer critique of their written responses. Through qualitative assessment, the dialogue method was shown to advance critical thinking and participation in the learning process. Students generally described dialogue as challenging, helpful, and enjoyable in exploring the views of eminent thinkers throughout the history of psychology. Findings are discussed in light of constructivist pedagogy, in which students actively and interactively create their own conceptual understandings. In line with the conclusion that dialogue is a promising instructional technique, future classroom applications are also presented.     

An analysis of immediate serial recall performance in a macaque

There has been considerable research into the ability of nonhuman primates to process sequential information, a topic that is of interest in part because of the extensive involvement of sequence processing in human language use. Surprisingly, no previous study has unambiguously tested the ability of nonhuman primates to encode and immediately reproduce a novel temporal sequence of perceptual events, the ability tapped in the immediate serial recall (ISR) task extensively studied in humans. We report here the performance of a rhesus macaque on a spatial ISR task, closely resembling tasks widely used in human memory research. Detailed analysis of the monkey’s recall performance indicates a number of important parallels with human ISR, consistent with the idea that a single mechanism for short-term serial order memory may be shared across species.