A PARADIGM FOR OPERANT CONDITIONING IN BLOW FLIES (PHORMIA TERRAE NOVAE ROBINEAU‐DESVOIDY, 1830)

An operant conditioning situation for the blow fly (Protophormia terrae novae) is described. Individual flies are trained to enter and reenter a hole as the operant response. Only a few sessions of contingent reinforcement are required to increase response rates. When the response is no longer followed by food, the rate of entering the hole decreases. Control procedures revealed that rate of responding is not a simple overall result of feeding or of aging. The flies entered into the hole only if the response was required to obtain the food.     

Des conduites à risques aux assuétudes comportementales : le trouble addictif au danger

Several studies show that playing a dangerous sport has a direct influence on the emotional state of athletes. Engaging in such behaviour would not only reduce negative affect but also produce a positive affect that does not equate only relief but an “extraordinary experienced”. Notwithstanding the unique qualities of these sports, it is likely that some subclinical individual characteristics such as sensation seeking, emotional–behavioural deregulation can promote a self-reinforcement of these practices or even facilitated the installation of an addictive tendency. Risk and intense sensation are also at the heart of dangerous games. Four points seem to motivate these practices: risk-taking, intensity, loss of consciousness, and the “wake survival”. In addition, practitioners are characterized by a more severe depressive symptomatology than non-practitioners. Some of these depressive elements are probably anterior to the game, but it is also possible that others are the consequence; this has the effect of strengthening the emotional–behavioural addiction. Through these extreme sports and games of non-oxygenation, the level of danger appears to be a real source of excitement. Playing with death is going to give inner magnitude to the experience. Without the sense of risk, the practice of the activity would not make sense. Psychological functioning of these sports and these “players” is based on the need to be stimulated, to be excited by the risk or even the fear in order to be appeased. Also, treat the danger, but also and mainly deal with emotions. The danger as a means of activation may fill in a toxic function of emotional and behavioural self-regulation including a risk that this excitation will self-sustained. Indeed, some of these athletes and these “players” increase their practice and push the safety threshold by adopting behaviours more and more risky in order to experiment higher sensations. When some semiological clues characterize the practice of risky activities like the repetition of a dangerous situation, loss of control, the invasion of the psychic life, time spent at the expense of social, family and school activities… they may reflect a real addiction to danger. It therefore becomes necessary for the clinician and the researcher to identify all these prodromal symptoms and signs of addiction. Criteria for the diagnosis of Addictive Disorder to Danger are proposed and discussed.     

Structural properties of spatial representations in blind people: Scanning images constructed from haptic exploration or from locomotion in a 3-D audio virtual environment

When people scan mental images, their response times increase linearly with increases in the distance to be scanned, which is generally taken as reflecting the fact that their internal representations incorporate the metric properties of the corresponding objects. In view of this finding, we investigated the structural properties of spatial mental images created from nonvisual sources in three groups (blindfolded sighted, late blind, and congenitally blind). In Experiment 1, blindfolded sighted and late blind participants created metrically accurate spatial representations of a small-scale spatial configuration under both verbal and haptic learning conditions. In Experiment 2, late and congenitally blind participants generated accurate spatial mental images after both verbal and locomotor learning of a full-scale navigable space (created by an immersive audio virtual reality system), whereas blindfolded sighted participants were selectively impaired in their ability to generate precise spatial representations from locomotor experience. These results attest that in the context of a permanent lack of sight, encoding spatial information on the basis of the most reliable currently functional system (the sensorimotor system) is crucial for building a metrically accurate representation of a spatial environment. The results also highlight the potential of spatialized audio-rendering technology for exploring the spatial representations of visually impaired participants.     

Neurocognitive Performance in Children with ADHD and OCD

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) have both been linked to dysfunction in the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuitry (CSTCC). However, the exact nature of neurocognitive deficits remains to be investigated in both disorders. We applied two neuropsychological tasks that tap into different functions associated with the CSTCC, namely a serial reaction time (SRT) task, developed to assess implicit sequence learning, and a delay aversion (DA) task in order to assess abnormal motivational processes. The performance data of boys with ADHD (n = 20), OCD (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 25), all aged 10–18 years, were compared. Subjects with ADHD less frequently chose the larger, more delayed reward compared to those with OCD and controls, while subjects with OCD showed impaired implicit learning. In contrast, the ADHD group was unimpaired in their implicit learning behavior and the OCD group was not characterized by a DA style. Within the OCD-group, severity of obsessions was associated with implicit learning deficits and impulsive symptoms with DA in the ADHD-group. This double dissociation highlights the distinct cognitive dysfunctions associated with ADHD and OCD and might possibly point to different neural abnormalities in both disorders.     

Mother‐child relationships and creativity

The present study focused on the relationship between young children's level of differentiation and creative potential as assessed by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The mothers of high and low creative children were interviewed in order to establish the degree to which they encouraged differentiation in their children. Their level of involvement with their children was also evaluated using the Family Relations Test (FRT). Mothers of high creative children were less emotionally involved with their children than other mothers, less likely to be perceived as overprotective, and less likely to deny their feelings of hostility towards them. They were more self‐confident and self‐realized in their homes and had higher occupational levels than other mothers. The present study also assessed the level of differentiation in both creative and uncreative children with the Draw‐a‐Person and Kinetic Family Drawing Tests. Results indicated that highly creative children were more differentiated than uncreative children.     

Analogous mechanisms of selection and updating in declarative and procedural working memory: Experiments and a computational model

The article investigates the mechanisms of selecting and updating representations in declarative and procedural working memory (WM). Declarative WM holds the objects of thought available, whereas procedural WM holds representations of what to do with these objects. Both systems consist of three embedded components: activated long-term memory, a central capacity-limited component for building structures through temporary bindings, and a single-element focus of attention. Five experiments test the hypothesis of analogous mechanisms in declarative and procedural WM, investigating repetition effects across trials for individual representations (objects and responses) and for sets (memory sets and task sets), as well as set-congruency effects. Evidence for analogous processes was obtained from three phenomena: (1) Costs of task switching and of list switching are reduced with longer preparation interval. (2) The effects of task congruency and of list congruency are undiminished with longer preparation interval. (3) Response repetition interacts with task repetition in procedural WM; here we show an analogous interaction of list repetition with item repetition in declarative WM. All three patterns were reproduced by a connectionist model implementing the assumed selection and updating mechanisms. The model consists of two modules, an item-selection module selecting individual items from a memory set, or responses from a task set, and a set-selection module for selecting memory sets or task sets. The model codes the matrix of binding weights in the item-selection module as a pattern of activation in the set-selection module, thereby providing a mechanism for building chunks in LTM, and for unpacking them as structures into working memory.     

Gambling: Relationship Between the Frequency of Wins and Irrational Thinking

In this study, we evaluated the relationship between the number of wins and the number of irrational verbalizations on the part of individuals playing American roulette. We predicted that subjects who win frequently would make more irrational verbalizations than rational verbalizations compared to subjects who win infrequently. Twenty Canadian subjects (8 men, 12 women) were randomly divided into two experimental groups (frequent vs. infrequent wins). The subjects used the thinking aloud procedure to verbalize their thoughts, which were then classified according to degree of rationality or irrationality. The results showed that irrational verbalizations outnumbered rational verbalizations in both groups. A few wins were sufficient to evoke an illusory perception of control.     

Gender differences in implicit and explicit personality traits

This article investigates gender differences in implicit and explicit measures of the Big Five traits of personality. In a high-powered study (N = 14,348), we replicated previous research showing that women report higher levels of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism. For implicit measures, gender differences were much smaller for all, and opposite in sign for Extraversion. Somewhat higher levels of implicit Neuroticism and Agreeableness were observed in women, and somewhat higher levels of implicit Extraversion and Openness were observed in men. There was no gender difference in implicit Conscientiousness. A possible explanation is that explicit self-concepts partly reflect social norms and self-expectations about gender roles, while implicit self-concepts may mostly reflect self-related experiences.     

Relationships Between Leader-Contingent and Non-contingent Reward and Punishment Behaviors and Subordinates’ Perceptions of Justice and Satisfaction, and Evaluation of the Moderating Influence of Trust Propensity, Pay Level, and Role Ambiguity

Purpose

This research evaluates how reward and punishment behaviors are related to employee satisfaction, and how perceptions of justice mediate the effects of these behaviors. This study also seeks to examine the connection between some boundary conditions and the efficacy of reward and punishment behaviors.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were collected using questionnaires, and hypotheses were tested using a sample of 3,065 managers from 41 business units.

Findings

We found that contingent financial and social rewards were positively related to fairness and satisfaction, whereas punishment behaviors exert a negative influence. Findings reveal that high-trust propensity and low-pay level strengthen the positive influence of rewards on distributive justice, whereas high role ambiguity increases the positive effect of reward behaviors and the negative influence of non-contingent punishment (NCP) on superior satisfaction.

Implications

This study provided evidence that using contingent rewards is more effective in promoting positive attitudes at work than using contingent punishments. Our findings add to the evidence that organizations would benefit from encouraging their managers to use financial and social rewards and reducing the administration of NCP among performing employees.

Originality/Value

This study represents a first attempt to examine an integrated model of the effects of reward and punishment behaviors. It also contributes to this field by empirically evaluating the impact of individual and situational boundary conditions in the efficacy of these leader behaviors.