Chance and choice, change and continuity--that's life

Responding to this invitation to write an autobiography, I have tried to put in some order, the jumble of memories that come to mind. There are markers of the journey--the major decisions and changes in direction, many influenced by external events. Despite turns and detours, there is also continuity of interests and behavioral style. My beginnings on a Nebraska farm were a considerable distance in place and character from my current retirement in Oregon. The trail of events was especially marked by the death of my father, early choice of psychology, military service in Germany, marriage in Paris, establishing the university clinic and clinical program at the University of Oregon, starting a school of Community Service and Public Affairs, working with Leona Tyler on books and an extensive research project, and a year going around the world with my family including a long period in India. My principal contributions to personality assessment include cross-cultural studies, development of a boredom scale, community psychology connections, many reviews, books in clinical psychology and assessment, and work with students and others who continue this important branch of psychology.     

The relationship between psychopathic features, violence and treatment outcome: the comparison of three youth measures of psychopathic features

Few studies have compared self-report and clinician-administered measures of youth psychopathic features in juvenile-justice settings in terms of antisocial behavior and treatment indices. In a sample of 85 adjudicated delinquents, the predictive validities of the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD), the modified Childhood Psychopathy Scale (mCPS), and the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) were tested. Three indices of institutional antisocial behavior (physical aggression; verbal aggression; administrative infractions) and two indices of treatment progress (time to treatment level promotion; whether treatment levels were dropped) were used as external correlates. The self-report measures (mCPS more so than APSD) were more consistently and strongly related to antisocial behavior and to the days required to progress in treatment than the PCL:YV. The following issues are discussed: (i) implications of the potential impact of measurement format on the understanding and predictive validity of youth psychopathy features and measures; (ii) the differential predictive validity of self-report versus clinician-administered measures; and (iii) the potential practical utility of measures of psychopathic features in youth.     

Perception of three-dimensional shape from specular highlights, deformations of shading, and other types of visual information

There have been numerous computational models developed in an effort to explain how the human visual system analyzes three-dimensional (3D) surface shape from patterns of image shading, but they all share some important limitations. Models that are applicable to individual static images cannot correctly interpret regions that contain specular highlights, and those that are applicable to moving images have difficulties when a surface moves relative to its sources of illumination. Here we describe a psychophysical experiment that measured the sensitivity of human observers to small differences of 3D shape over a wide variety of conditions. The results provide clear evidence that the presence of specular highlights or the motions of a surface relative to its light source do not pose an impediment to perception, but rather, provide powerful sources of information for the perceptual analysis of 3D shape.     

Intra-amygdala muscimol injections impair freezing and place avoidance in aversive contextual conditioning

Rats were trained by shocking them in a closed compartment. When subsequently tested in the same closed compartment with no shock, normal rats showed an increased tendency to freeze. They also showed an increased tendency to actively avoid the compartment when given access to an adjacent neutral compartment for the first time. Amygdala inactivation with bilateral muscimol injections before training attenuated freezing and eliminated avoidance during the test. Rats trained in a normal state and given intra-amygdala muscimol injections before the test did not freeze or avoid the shock-paired compartment. This pattern of effects suggests that amygdala inactivation during training impaired acquisition of a conditioned response (CR) due either to inactivation of a neural substrate essential for its storage or to elimination of a memory modulation effect that facilitates its storage in some other brain region(s). The elimination of both freezing and active avoidance by amygdala inactivation during testing suggests that neither of these behaviors is the CR. The possibility that the CR is a set of internal responses that produces both freezing and avoidance as well as other behavioral effects is discussed.     

Disruption of latent inhibition to a contextual stimulus with systemic amphetamine

This experiment examined the effects of 0.5 and 1.5 mg/kg doses of amphetamine (AMP) in male Wistar rats, on conditioning to a contextual stimulus that for half the animals has been pre-exposed, in an appetitive conditioning procedure. Amphetamine was administered during both pre-exposure (3 days) and acquisition (15 days). Latent inhibition (LI, reduced conditioning in pre-exposed relative to non-pre-exposed rats) was seen in controls but not at either AMP dose. This abolition of LI was seen under AMP at two levels of responding in acquisition and confirmed in drug free extinction. It suggests that, like conditioning to discrete stimuli, conditioning to contextual stimuli is subject to LI and can be disrupted by AMP.     

Young children who abandon error behaviourally still have to free themselves mentally: a retrospective test for inhibition in intuitive physics

When preschoolers overcome persistent error, subsequent patterns of correct choices may identify how the error had been overcome. Children who no longer misrepresented a ball rolling down a bent tube as though it could only fall vertically, were asked sometimes to approach and sometimes to avoid where the ball landed. All children showed requisite task-switching flexibility. The pattern of 4-year-olds' correct choices among different places showed unnecessary avoidance of any place that would previously have tempted them into a vertical-approach error, 5-year-olds rebounded into a reversal, and 7-year-olds were flexible. The data attest to an inhibition mechanism, ruling out competing possibilities.     

Sex similarities and differences in preferences for short-term mates: what, whether, and why

Are there sex differences in criteria for sexual relationships? The answer depends on what question a researcher asks. Data suggest that, whereas the sexes differ in whether they will enter short-term sexual relationships, they are more similar in what they prioritize in partners for such relationships. However, additional data and context of other findings and theory suggest different underlying reasons. In Studies 1 and 2, men and women were given varying "mate budgets" to design short-term mates and were asked whether they would actually mate with constructed partners. Study 3 used a mate-screening paradigm. Whereas women have been found to prioritize status in long-term mates, they instead (like men) prioritize physical attractiveness much like an economic necessity in short-term mates. Both sexes also show evidence of favoring well-rounded long- and short-term mates when given the chance. In Studies 4 and 5, participants report reasons for having casual sex and what they find physically attractive. For women, results generally support a good genes account of short-term mating, as per strategic pluralism theory (S. W. Gangestad & J. A. Simpson, 2000). Discussion addresses broader theoretical implications for mate preference, and the link between method and theory in examining social decision processes.     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.     

Neuroendocrine responses to psychological stress in eumenorrheic and oligomenorrheic women

Neuroendocrine adaptive responses to psychological stress include activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and sometimes suppression of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. In women who experience chronic stress, these responses are probably responsible for disturbances in the menstrual cycle. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of an acutely stressful situation on the physiological and neuroendocrine responses in college age women. We hypothesized that females who are experiencing some degree of abnormal menstrual function or women who have less-robust cycles (oligomenorrheic females) would exhibit differences in gonadotropin secretion from eumenorrheic females when exposed to psychological stressors. Fifteen women completed this study: eumenorrheic (n = 5) and oligomenorrheic women (n = 5) who experienced a series of psychological stressors, and eumenorrheic controls (n = 5). Blood samples were taken at 10 min intervals for 8 h (09:00-17:00) in each woman during the mid-follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. The psychological stressors were administered for 1 h beginning at 13:00 h. Luteinizing hormone (LH), growth hormone (GH) and cortisol were measured in each sample to assess the effect of stress on secretion of these hormones. Deconvolution analysis was used to analyze pulsatile hormone secretion and the approximate entropy (ApEn) statistic analyzed the regularity of release of each hormone. Although, there were significant changes in heart rate (HR), skin resistance (SR) and cortisol levels in the stressed women during the psychological stressor compared to resting baseline values but not in the controls, there was no difference in either LH or GH secretion between women who experienced stress and those who did not. Furthermore, there were no differences in the LH or GH secretion patterns in the oligomenorrheic and eumenorrheic women exposed to the psychological stressor.     

Dorsal hippocampus function in learning and expressing a spatial discrimination

Learning to discriminate between spatial locations defined by two adjacent arms of a radial maze in the conditioned cue preference paradigm requires two kinds of information: latent spatial learning when the rats explore the maze with no food available, and learning about food availability in two spatial locations when the rats are then confined in one arm with food and the other with no food. Previous research showed that a functional dorsal hippocampus is not required for latent learning. The present experiments show that it is required for learning about food availability, and during retrieval of both types of information.