The premack principle, response deprivation, and establishing operations

This paper describes response deprivation as an establishing operation. In this context, we review the concept of establishing operation, in particular, its reinforcer-establishing and evocative effects; we place response deprivation in the literature on the reinforcing effects of behavioral activity, wherein response deprivation subsumes the Premack principle; we describe the reinforcer-altering and evocative effects of response deprivation; and we address a methodological concern about the evocative effect. In closing, we discuss some conceptual and empirical implications of the foregoing analyses.     

A sublexical locus for repetition blindness: evidence from illusory words.

Six experiments used an illusory words paradigm to demonstrate that repetition blindness (RB) in orthographically similar words affects only the words' shared letters. Rapid serial visual presentation streams of words and word fragments allowed the unique letters of the 2nd critical word to combine with a subsequent fragment to create a word, as in rock shock ell. The illusory word shell was reported 2-3 times as frequently in RB conditions as in control conditions. Further experiments ruled out letter migration, contour summation, and differences in processing load as explanations for the results. These findings are inconsistent with current proposals that orthographic RB represents similarity inhibition or lexical competition or that it reflects problems with word-level token individuation.     

Pain and Pain-Related Impairment in Adults with Cystic Fibrosis

The Multidimensional Pain Inventory (MPI) was utilized in a sample of adult outpatients with cystic fibrosis (CF) to assess their perception of pain and its psychosocial consequences. Subsequently, the data were compared to the ratings of pain and pain-related impairment in these patients as perceived by two nurses from the CF treatment team, as well as to a quantitative measure of illness severity. The results of these comparisons demonstrate that the majority of adult outpatients with CF reported experiencing lower levels of pain and pain-related impairment than expected, although the male patients tend to report experiencing significantly less impact in these domains than do the female patients. Additionally, the nurses do not underestimate the degree to which patients, especially males, experience pain and pain-related interference from chronic illness. Finally, there was no significant relationship between patients' self-report of pain severity or pain-related interference and an objective measure of disease severity.     

Hyperactivity in boys with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): the association between deficient behavioral inhibition, attentional processes, and objectively measured activity

Contemporary models of ADHD hypothesize that hyperactivity reflects a byproduct of inhibition deficits. The current study investigated the relationship between children's motor activity and behavioral inhibition by experimentally manipulating demands placed on the limited-resource inhibition system. Twenty-two boys (ADHD = 11, TD = 11) between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a conventional stop-signal task, two choice-task variants (no-tone, ignore-tone), and control tasks while their motor activity was measured objectively by actigraphs placed on their nondominant wrist and ankles. All children exhibited significantly higher activity rates under all three experimental tasks relative to control conditions, and children with ADHD moved significantly more than typically developing children across conditions. No differences in activity level were observed between the inhibition and noninhibition experimental tasks for either group, indicating that activity level was primarily associated with basic attentional rather than behavioral inhibition processes.     

Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.     

Research productivity and scholarly impact of APA-accredited school psychology programs: 2005-2009

This study examined the research productivity and scholarly impact of faculty in APA-accredited school psychology programs using data in the PsycINFO database from 2005 to 2009. We ranked doctoral programs on the basis of authorship credit, number of publications, and number of citations. In addition, we examined the primary publication outlets of school psychology program faculties and the major themes of research during this time period. We compared our results with those of a similar study that examined data from a decade earlier. Limitations and implications of this study are also discussed.