State of Food Deprivation as a Factor in Radiation Mortality of Rats

(Eysenck, H. J. The Structure of Human Personality. London: Methuen, 1953. Pp. 348.) Reviewed By George A. Talland.     

Visual Acuity Performance of Normal and Chronic Focal-Head Irradiated Monkeys

The study reported by Griffiths, Shantz, and Sigel (4) on children's understanding of relational terms in conservation tasks is used in a case study to illustrate a number of problematic practices in the use of psychological literature. A number of examples are given that reflect a negligent or clearly inaccurate reading of the Griffiths et al. report. Common errors made by authors in citing the published research of others are failure to examine closely the study's methodology, uncritical acceptance of authors' conclusions, and misinterpretation or confusion of the study's findings.     

Valuing Ideas of Social Justice in MFT Curricula

Training programs committed to the development of culturally sensitive family therapists must support dialogue that creates awareness of social structures promoting inequity and oppression. In order to facilitate meaningful conversations about issues of social justice educators have to critically examine their own philosophies and teaching methods to create a learning environment that promotes this dialogue for all students. This article outlines our philosophy of teaching and presents two core MFT graduate courses as examples of how issues of social justice can be valued in the didactic component of marital and family therapy (MFT) training.     

Discrete and Contextual Cue Alterations Eliminate the Instrumental Appetitive-to-Aversive Transfer Impairment in Phenytoin-Treated Rats

We have shown previously that the antiepileptic phenytoin impairs transfer in an instrumental learning task (Banks et al., 1999). The present study examined the effects of contextual alterations on appetitive-to-aversive transfer performance of rats treated with either phenytoin or tang. Adult rats were tested in tone-signaled appetitive and aversive instrumental tasks, where the animal bar-pressed to obtain a food reward (sugar pellet) or to avoid shock. Rats were trained on the appetitive task for 31 days. Beginning on the twenty-first day, rats were gavaged with either phenytoin or tang twice daily. Animals were then transferred to aversive training, with the phenytoin or tang treatment continuing throughout the 25 testing days. For some animals, contextual changes were introduced as they shifted from appetitive to aversive training, while for other animals these changes were not made. Phenytoin-treated rats that were presented with changes in context as they transferred from the appetitive to the aversive task learned the avoidance response to levels substantially higher than drug-treated rats not presented with the contextual changes. These results indicate that phenytoin impairs avoidance learning following transfer from the appetitive task, and that this impairment can be eliminated by introducing changes in context at the point of transfer. In the tang-treated control subjects, on the other hand, there was no improvement in transfer learning performance associated with the changes in contextual cues. This pattern of results suggests that contextual encoding processes in rats being trained in an instrumental appetitive-to-aversive paradigm are dramatically affected by phenytoin.     

Neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of reflexive and volitional saccades: evidence from studies of humans

This review provides a summary of the contributions made by human functional neuroimaging studies to the understanding of neural correlates of saccadic control. The generation of simple visually guided saccades (redirections of gaze to a visual stimulus or pro-saccades) and more complex volitional saccades require similar basic neural circuitry with additional neural regions supporting requisite higher level processes. The saccadic system has been studied extensively in non-human (e.g., single-unit recordings) and human (e.g., lesions and neuroimaging) primates. Considerable knowledge of this system’s functional neuroanatomy makes it useful for investigating models of cognitive control. The network involved in pro-saccade generation (by definition largely exogenously-driven) includes subcortical (striatum, thalamus, superior colliculus, and cerebellar vermis) and cortical (primary visual, extrastriate, and parietal cortices, and frontal and supplementary eye fields) structures. Activation in these regions is also observed during endogenously-driven voluntary saccades (e.g., anti-saccades, ocular motor delayed response or memory saccades, predictive tracking tasks and anticipatory saccades, and saccade sequencing), all of which require complex cognitive processes like inhibition and working memory. These additional requirements are supported by changes in neural activity in basic saccade circuitry and by recruitment of additional neural regions (such as prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices). Activity in visual cortex is modulated as a function of task demands and may predict the type of saccade to be generated, perhaps via top-down control mechanisms. Neuroimaging studies suggest two foci of activation within FEF - medial and lateral - which may correspond to volitional and reflexive demands, respectively. Future research on saccade control could usefully (i) delineate important anatomical subdivisions that underlie functional differences, (ii) evaluate functional connectivity of anatomical regions supporting saccade generation using methods such as ICA and structural equation modeling, (iii) investigate how context affects behavior and brain activity, and (iv) use multi-modal neuroimaging to maximize spatial and temporal resolution.     

Reactions to Physical Contact Among Coaches and Players: The Influence of Coach Sex, Player Sex, and Attitudes Toward Women

The purpose of the current study was to examine factors that impact people's reactions to physical contact by an athletics coach toward a player. Participants (82 undergraduate students in the U.S.) took part in a 2 (coach sex) × 2 (player sex) experiment aimed at assessing their perceived appropriateness of the coach striking the player and their preferred consequences for that action. Hierarchical regression analysis provided support for a coach sex × player sex × participant attitudes toward women interaction in predicting the perceived appropriateness of the physical contact. Multinomial logistic regression then indicated that perceived appropriateness was inversely related to the severity of the preferred consequences for the coach. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.