Novelty Seeking and Reward: Implications for the Study of High-Risk Behaviors

Novelty seeking and sensation seeking are constructs useful in predicting human risk-taking behaviors. This predictive relation purportedly reflects some rewarding aspect of experiencing novelty. Research has confirmed this assumption. Rats display an increase in preference for an environment that has been differentially paired with novel stimuli. The physiological mechanisms mediating this rewarding effect of novelty involve the neurotransmitter dopamine, whereas those controlling novelty seeking do not. The mechanisms involved in drug seeking and reward show parallel dissociations. This concordance between novelty and drug-abuse research suggests that novelty and drug stimuli may interact in biologically and behaviorally meaningful ways. Indeed, preliminary research examining cocaine and novelty and published work with amphetamines support this suggestion. There is clear need for further systematic research on novelty reward and related processes at all levels of analysis: genetic, biological, behavioral, and social.     

Effects of Violent Versus Nonviolent Video Games on Children's Arousal, Aggressive Mood, and Positive Mood

This study investigated the relationship between violent video games and children's mood. A total of 71 children aged 8 to 12 years played a paper-and-pencil game, a nonviolent video game, and a violent video game. Results indicate that arousal, as measured by heart rate and self-reported arousal, increased significantly after playing the violent video game, as compared with the other two game conditions, with girls reporting more arousal than did boys. There was no significant increase in aggressive mood scores for either boys or girls after playing the violent game. Positive mood, as measured by positive affect, showed no significant increases or decreases after playing either video game. However, positive mood, as measured by general mood, showed a significant increase after playing the violent game for both boys and girls, but only as compared with the paper-and-pencil game. Results are interpreted in terms of social learning and cognitive information processing theories of aggression.     

Insight, rumination, and self-reflection as predictors of well-being

Dispositional private self-focused attention variables such as insight, internal self-awareness (ISA), and self-reflectiveness (SR) have been found to relate to well-being. The present study sought to determine which dispositional private self-focused attention variables have the most predictive power for subjective well-being as measured by the Satisfaction With Life Scale (E. Diener, R. A. Emmons, R. J. Larsen, & S. Griffin, 1985) and for a eudaemonic form of well-being as measured by the Psychological Well-Being Scale (C. D. Ryff, 1989). A total of 121 college student participants completed an online version of the Self-Consciousness Scale-Revised, the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire, the Self-Reflection and Insight Scale, the Satisfaction With Life Scale, and the Psychological WellBeing Scale. Results of a multivariate regression analysis using the Self-Consciousness Scale-Revised's (M. F. Scheier & C. S. Carver, 1985) subfactors of SR and ISA, the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire's (P. D. Trapnell & J. D. Campbell, 1999) subscales of Rumination and Reflection, and the Self-Reflection and Insight Scale's (A. M. Grant, J. Franklin, & P. Langford, 2002) Self-Reflection and Insight subscales revealed that the Insight subscale was the only statistically significant predictor (a positive predictor) for all 6 dimensions of psychological well-being. Insight was also the only significant positive predictor for satisfaction with life. The Rumination subscale was a significant negative predictor for 3 dimensions of psychological well-being, and the Reflection subscale was a significant positive predictor for 1 dimension. Implications of dispositional self-awareness variables and their relation to dimensions of well-being are discussed.     

The influence of role definition and affect in LMX: A process perspective on the personality – LMX relationship

While leader–member exchange (LMX) theorists have argued that role definition and affective processes play a central role in LMX development, research has yet to examine their relative influence. Likewise, few studies have investigated how the personality of leader and follower play out in these processes. Drawing on a sample of 161 managers and their respective leaders, we develop and offer empirical support for a model in which leader and subordinate agreeableness and core self‐evaluations wield their respective influence through the affective and role definition processes underlying LMX. Implications of these findings for the theory and practice of LMX are discussed.     

Robust decision making in a nonlinear world

The authors propose a general modeling framework called the general monotone model (GeMM), which allows one to model psychological phenomena that manifest as nonlinear relations in behavior data without the need for making (overly) precise assumptions about functional form. Using both simulated and real data, the authors illustrate that GeMM performs as well as or better than standard statistical approaches (including ordinary least squares, robust, and Bayesian regression) in terms of power and predictive accuracy when the functional relations are strictly linear but outperforms these approaches under conditions in which the functional relations are monotone but nonlinear. Finally, the authors recast their framework within the context of contemporary models of behavioral decision making, including the lens model and the take-the-best heuristic, and use GeMM to highlight several important issues within the judgment and decision-making literature.     

Phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinase in the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala following memory retrieval or forgetting in developing rats

We examined neuronal correlates of forgetting in rats by detection of phosphorylated mitogen-activated protein kinase (pMAPK) in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala. In Experiment 1, postnatal day (P)23 and P16 rats received paired noise CS-shock US presentations. When tested immediately after conditioning, P23 and P16 rats exhibited similar levels of conditioned fear; when tested after 2 days, however, P16 rats showed poor CS-elicited freezing relative to P23 rats. In Experiment 2, P16 and P23 rats received either paired or unpaired CS-US presentations, and then were tested 48 h later. Consistent with Experiment 1, P16 rats showed forgetting whereas P23 rats exhibited good retention at test. Additionally, unpaired groups showed poor CS-elicited freezing at test. Immunohistochemistry showed that P23 and P16 rats given paired presentations exhibited significant elevation of pMAPK-immunoreactive (ir) neurons in the amygdala compared to rats given unpaired presentations. That is, MAPK phosphorylation in the amygdala tracked learning history rather than behavioral performance at test. In contrast, only the P23-paired group showed an elevated number of pMAPK-ir neurons in mPFC, indicating that MAPK phosphorylation in the mPFC tracks memory expression. Different test-perfusion intervals were employed in Experiment 3, which showed that the developmental dissociation in the pMAPK-ir neurons observed in the mPFC in Experiment 2 was not due to age differences in the rate of phosphorylation of MAPK. These findings provide initial evidence suggesting that while the mPFC is involved in memory retrieval, MAPK phosphorylation in the amygdala may be a persisting neural signature of fear memory.     

Catching a glimpse of working memory: top-down capture as a tool for measuring the content of the mind

This article outlines a methodology for probing working memory (WM) content in high-level cognitive tasks (e.g., decision making, problem solving, and memory retrieval) by capitalizing on attentional and oculomotor biases evidenced in top-down capture paradigms. This method would be of great use, as it could measure the information resident in WM at any point in a task and, hence, track information use over time as tasks dynamically evolve. Above and beyond providing a measure of information occupancy in WM, such a method would benefit from sensitivity to the specific activation levels of individual items in WM. This article additionally forwards a novel fusion of standard free recall and visual search paradigms in an effort to assess the sensitivity of eye movements in top-down capture, on which this new measurement technique relies, to item-specific memory activation (ISMA). The results demonstrate eye movement sensitivity to ISMA in some, but not all, cases.     

What counts as evidence for working memory training? Problems with correlated gains and dichotomization

The question of whether computerized cognitive training leads to generalized improvements of intellectual abilities has been a popular, yet contentious, topic within both the psychological and neurocognitive literatures. Evidence for the effective transfer of cognitive training to nontrained measures of cognitive abilities is mixed, with some studies showing apparent successful transfer, while others have failed to obtain this effect. At the same time, several authors have made claims about both successful and unsuccessful transfer effects on the basis of a form of responder analysis, an analysis technique that shows that those who gain the most on training show the greatest gains on transfer tasks. Through a series of Monte Carlo experiments and mathematical analyses, we demonstrate that the apparent transfer effects observed through responder analysis are illusory and are independent of the effectiveness of cognitive training. We argue that responder analysis can be used neither to support nor to refute hypotheses related to whether cognitive training is a useful intervention to obtain generalized cognitive benefits. We end by discussing several proposed alternative analysis techniques that incorporate training gain scores and argue that none of these methods are appropriate for testing hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of cognitive training.     

Using the memory activation capture (MAC) procedure to investigate the temporal dynamics of hypothesis generation

Research investigating top-down capture has demonstrated a coupling of working memory content with attention and eye movements. By capitalizing on this relationship, we have developed a novel methodology, called the memory activation capture (MAC) procedure, for measuring the dynamics of working memory content supporting complex cognitive tasks (e.g., decision making, problem solving). The MAC procedure employs briefly presented visual arrays containing task-relevant information at critical points in a task. By observing which items are preferentially fixated, we gain a measure of working memory content as the task evolves through time. The efficacy of the MAC procedure was demonstrated in a dynamic hypothesis generation task in which some of its advantages over existing methods for measuring changes in the contents of working memory over time are highlighted. In two experiments, the MAC procedure was able to detect the hypothesis that was retrieved and placed into working memory. Moreover, the results from Experiment 2 suggest a two-stage process following hypothesis retrieval, whereby the hypothesis undergoes a brief period of heightened activation before entering a lower activation state in which it is maintained for output. The results of both experiments are of additional general interest, as they represent the first demonstrations of top-down capture driven by participant-established WM content retrieved from long-term memory.