On the self-protective nature of inconsistency-negativity management: using the person memory paradigm to examine self-referent memory

How do individuals remember feedback that is inconsistent or negative? According to the inconsistency-negativity resolution model, individuals are motivated to reduce uncertainty and resolve inconsistency even when threat to self is potential. They more deeply process and better remember negative self- than other-referent information. According to the inconsistency-negativity neglect model, individuals are motivated to protect the self against threat. They engage in more shallow processing and remember less negative self- than other-referent information. Participants read and recalled either self- or other-referent mixed-valence information. The neglect model was supported in personality and minimal feedback settings. A chronometric exploration of processing mechanisms and the ruling out of a retrieval interference account clarified aspects of the model. Individuals are hypersensitive to threat potential: They will protect the self against even hypothetical threat.     

Age changes in the missing-letter effect revisited

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due to both word function and word frequency. With children, it is unclear whether the growing size of the missing-letter effect across development is due to a larger effect of word function, word frequency, or both because previous studies with children seeking to isolate the influence of word frequency and word function suffer from important methodological limitations. With these methodological limitations eliminated (Experiments 1 and 2), performance in a letter detection task was assessed for children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 as well as for undergraduate students. The results revealed that the influence of word function increases with age, whereas the effect of frequency is fairly stable across ages. Furthermore, normative predictability data collected in Experiment 3 revealed that third graders and undergraduate students were equally good at predicting function slots in a sentence.     

MORPHINE TOLERANCE AS A FUNCTION OF RATIO SCHEDULE: RESPONSE REQUIREMENT OR UNIT PRICE?

Key pecking by 3 pigeons was maintained by a multiple fixed-ratio 10, fixed-ratio 30, fixed-ratio 90 schedule of food presentation. Components differed with respect to amount of reinforcement, such that the unit price was 10 responses per 1-s access to food. Acute administration of morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-dependently decreased overall response rates in each of the components. When a rate decreasing dose of morphine was administered daily, tolerance, as measured by an increase in the dose that reduced response rates to 50% of control (i.e., the ED50 value), developed in each of the components; however, the degree of tolerance was smallest in the fixed-ratio 90 component (i.e., the ED50 value increased the least). When the l-methadone dose-effect curve was redetermined during the chronic morphine phase, the degree of cross-tolerance conferred to l-methadone was similar across components, suggesting that behavioral variables may not influence the degree of cross-tolerance between opioids. During the chronic phase, the cocaine dose-effect curve shifted to the right for 2 pigeons and to the left for 1 pigeon, which is consistent with predictions based on the lack of pharmacological similarity between morphine and cocaine. When the morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-effect curves were redetermined after chronic morphine administration ended, the morphine and l-methadone ED50s replicated those obtained prior to chronic morphine administration. The morphine data suggest that the fixed-ratio value (i.e., the absolute output) determines the degree of tolerance and not the unit price.     

Prefrontal brain activity predicts temporally extended decision-making behavior

Although functional neuroimaging studies of human decision-making processes are increasingly common, most of the research in this area has relied on passive tasks that generate little individual variability. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ability of brain activity to predict overt behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying behavior during a dynamic decision task that required subjects to select smaller, short-term monetary payoffs in order to receive larger, long-term gains. The number of trials over which the longterm gains accrued was manipulated experimentally (2 versus 12). Event-related neural activity in right lateral prefrontal cortex, a region associated with high-level cognitive processing, selectively predicted choice behavior in both conditions, whereas insular cortex responded to fluctuations in amount of reward but did not predict choice behavior. These results demonstrate the utility of a functional neuroimaging approach in behavioral psychology, showing that (a) highly circumscribed brain regions are capable of predicting complex choice behavior, and (b) fMRI has the ability to dissociate the contributions of different neural mechanisms to particular behavioral tasks.     

Communication flow and change theory within a family therapy supervision model

This article portrays a model of family therapy clinical supervision using change theory that is most appropriate for use with the videotape, audiotape, case presentation and debriefing from the live session. The most powerful tool during this process is that of communication and assessment of change theorys tools of confidence and conviction. The concepts presented are meant to add an additional dimension to family therapy supervision in cooperation of other theories, not as an end in themselves.Special thanks to Ms. Geri Koncilja of the Informational Technology Center at Colorado State University, Pueblo for illustration and graphic assistance.     

Attentional inhibition has social-emotional consequences for unfamiliar faces

Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as "more trustworthy" and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as "less trustworthy." For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is "on a lighter background" vs. "on a darker background"). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.     

An evaluation of the Psychache Scale on an offender population

This study examined the generalizability of a self-report measure of psychache to an offender population. The factor structure, construct validity, and criterion validity of the Psychache Scale was assessed on 136 male prison inmates. The results showed the Psychache Scale has a single underlying factor structure and to be strongly associated with measures of depression and hopelessness and moderately associated with psychiatric symptoms and the criterion variable of a history of prior suicide attempts. The variables of depression, hopelessness, and psychiatric symptoms all contributed unique variance to psychache. Discussion centers on psychache's theoretical application to the prediction of suicide.     

Last word: imagining the future

H.G. Wells warned, in 1895, not to allow economic injustices to become so acute that they ultimately transform human biology. Wells's warning is all the more pertinent today as society contemplates the use of biotechnologies to manipulate or "enhance" the human genome.     

Purkinje cell activity in the cerebellar anterior lobe after rabbit eyeblink conditioning

The cerebellar anterior lobe may play a critical role in the execution and proper timing of learned responses. The current study was designed to monitor Purkinje cell activity in the rabbit cerebellar anterior lobe after eyeblink conditioning, and to assess whether Purkinje cells in recording locations may project to the interpositus nucleus. Rabbits were trained in an interstimulus interval discrimination procedure in which one tone signaled a 250-msec conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) interval and a second tone signaled a 750-msec CS-US interval. All rabbits showed conditioned responses to each CS with mean onset and peak latencies that coincided with the CS-US interval. Many anterior lobe Purkinje cells showed significant learning-related activity after eyeblink conditioning to one or both of the CSs. More Purkinje cells responded with inhibition than with excitation to CS presentation. In addition, when the firing patterns of all conditioning-related Purkinje cells were pooled, it appeared that the population showed a pattern of excitation followed by inhibition during the CS-US interval. Using cholera toxin-conjugated horseradish peroxidase, Purkinje cells in recording areas were found to project to the interpositus nucleus. These data support previous studies that have suggested a role for the anterior cerebellar cortex in eyeblink conditioning as well as models of cerebellar-mediated CR timing that postulate that Purkinje cell activity inhibits conditioned response (CR) generation during the early portion of a trial by inhibiting the deep cerebellar nuclei and permits CR generation during the later portion of a trial through disinhibition of the cerebellar nuclei.