So far away from one's partner, yet so close to romantic alternatives: avoidant attachment, interest in alternatives, and infidelity

Temptation pervades modern social life, including the temptation to engage in infidelity. The present investigation examines one factor that may put individuals at a greater risk of being unfaithful to their partner: dispositional avoidant attachment style. The authors hypothesize that avoidantly attached people may be less resistant to temptations for infidelity due to lower levels of commitment in romantic relationships. This hypothesis was confirmed in 8 studies. People with high, vs. low, levels of dispositional avoidant attachment had more permissive attitudes toward infidelity (Study 1), showed attentional bias toward attractive alternative partners (Study 2), expressed greater daily interest in meeting alternatives to their current relationship partner (Study 5), perceived alternatives to their current relationship partner more positively (Study 6), and engaged in more infidelity over time (Studies 3, 4, 7, and 8). This effect was mediated by lower levels of commitment (Studies 5-8). Thus, avoidant attachment predicted a broad spectrum of responses indicative of interest in alternatives and propensity to engage in infidelity, which were mediated by low levels of commitment.     

Posttraumatic Stress in U.S. Marines: The Role of Unit Cohesion and Combat Exposure

Combat exposure is a consistent predictor of posttraumatic stress (PTS). Understanding factors that might buffer the effects of combat exposure is crucial for helping service members weather the stress of war. In a study of U.S. Marines returning from Iraq, hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that unit cohesion and combat exposure predicted PTS, depression, and anger. Furthermore, results indicated that unit cohesion may be an important buffer, possibly limiting the development of PTS and depression following combat exposure.     

A Quantitative Analysis and Natural History of B. F. Skinner's Coauthoring Practices

This paper describes and analyzes B. F. Skinner's coauthoring practices. After identifying his 35 coauthored publications and 27 coauthors, we analyze his coauthored works by their form (e.g., journal articles) and kind (e.g., empirical); identify the journals in which he published and their type (e.g., data-type); describe his overall and local rates of publishing with his coauthors (e.g., noting breaks in the latter); and compare his coauthoring practices with his single-authoring practices (e.g., form, kind, journal type) and with those in the scientometric literature (e.g., majority of coauthored publications are empirical). We address these findings in the context of describing the natural history of Skinner's coauthoring practices. Finally, we describe some limitations in our methods and offer suggestions for future research.     

High psychopathic trait females exhibit reduced startle potentiation and increased p3 amplitude

While there has been steady progress in identifying psychophysiological traits associated with psychopathy, most of the existing research has been carried out using incarcerated male participants, and data that include females are particularly rare. This study examined both affective startle blink modulation and P3 amplitude in a sample of female undergraduates grouped by scores on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R). Those scoring high for psychopathic traits lacked startle blink potentiation and demonstrated larger P3 amplitudes during auditory and visual oddball tasks. These data support the generalizability of deficient startle potentiation to non-incarcerated females with psychopathic traits, and add to a growing body of literature suggesting that psychopathic traits are associated with distinctive information-processing characteristics as indexed by P3 amplitude.     

Physical Attractiveness and Candidate Evaluation: A Model of Correction

Voters typically evaluate an attractive candidate more favorably than an (otherwise equivalent) unattractive candidate. However, some voters “correct” for the biasing influence of physical appearance. This reduces, eliminates, or even reverses the physical attractiveness effect. Correction occurs when political experts evaluate a political candidate under nondistracting conditions. Under these “high cognitive capacity” conditions, voters primarily correct for physical unattractiveness. However, correction fails to occur when voters possess low levels of expertise or are distracted. Thus, in most circumstances, attractive candidates are evaluated more favorably than unattractive candidates. Two experiments provide support for this model of appearance‐based candidate evaluation.     

Professional Counselors’ Interest in Counseling Older Adults

The authors surveyed professional counselors (N = 956) to examine self‐efficacy in counseling older adults, contact with older adults, and ageism as related to their interest in working with older adults. Higher self‐efficacy, contact, and positive ageism predicted increased interest. These results and implications for counseling older adults are discussed.     

Bidirectional priming in infants

In associative priming, the direct activation of one concept indirectly activates others that are associated with it, depending on the directionality of the association. We asked whether associative priming in preverbal infants is bidirectional. Infants associated a puppet imitation task with an operant train task by watching an adult model target actions on the puppet in the incidental context of the train. Later, priming of the forgotten memory of the train task reactivated the infants' memory of the puppet task (Experiment 1), and priming of the infants' forgotten memory of the puppet task reactivated their memory of the train task (Experiment 2). The finding that associative priming was bidirectional offers new insights into the nature of the mnemonic networks formed early in infancy. Additionally, the fact that the present association was formed rapidly and incidentally suggests that a fast mapping, general learning mechanism, like that posited to mediate word-object learning, was responsible for its encoding.     

Blocking and backward blocking involve learned inattention

Four experiments examine blocking of associative learning by human participants in a disease diagnosis procedure. The results indicate that after a cue is blocked, subsequent learning about the cue is attenuated. This attenuated learning after blocking is obtained for both standard blocking and for backward blocking. Attenuated learning after blocking cannot be accounted for by theories such as the Rescorla-Wagner model that rely on lack of learning about a redundant cue, nor can it be accounted for by extensions of the Rescorla-Wagner model designed to address backward blocking that encode absent cues with negative values. The results are predicted by the hypothesis that people learn not to attend to the blocked cue.     

Prevention of eating disorders and obesity via the internet

Internet technology has been expanding rapidly and has had a dramatic impact on how people communicate, learn and share information. This article presents applications of internet technology to the psychological domain, particularly in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders and obesity. Information regarding advantages and disadvantages of computerized interventions are discussed and several examples of randomized controlled trials with this technology are presented. The studies presented are not meant to be comprehensive of psychological interventions in general, but are examples of computerized applications from the eating disorder and obesity literatures. Ethical considerations and areas for future direction are also discussed.     

Adaptive learning and forgetting in an unconventional experimental routine

Forgetting is often thought of as the inability to remember, but remembering and forgetting allow behavior to adapt to a changing environment in distinct and separable ways. Learning and forgetting were assessed concurrently in two pigeon experiments that involved the same unconventional routine where the schedule of reinforcement changed every session. Sessions were run back-to-back with a 23-h mid-session break such that in a single visit to the testing chamber, a pigeon completed the second half of one session and the first half of the next. The beginning of a new session was either signaled or unsignaled. Experiment 1 involved concurrent variable–interval variable–interval schedules with four possible reinforcer ratios. Response allocation was sensitive to the richer schedule and was retained through the mid-session break. Experiment 2 involved peak interval schedules of varying durations. Temporal discrimination was rapidly acquired before and after the mid-session break, but not retained. Signaling the session change decreased control by past contingencies in both experiments, demonstrating that learning and forgetting can be investigated separately. These results suggest that the temporal structure of training, such as multiple short daily sessions instead of one long session, can meaningfully impact measurement of animals’ capacity to forget and remember.