Response–reinforcer dependency and resistance to change

The effects of the response–reinforcer dependency on resistance to change were studied in three experiments with rats. In Experiment 1, lever pressing produced reinforcers at similar rates after variable interreinforcer intervals in each component of a two‐component multiple schedule. Across conditions, in the fixed component, all reinforcers were response‐dependent; in the alternative component, the percentage of response‐dependent reinforcers was 100, 50 (i.e., 50% response‐dependent and 50% response‐independent) or 10% (i.e., 10% response‐dependent and 90% response‐independent). Resistance to extinction was greater in the alternative than in the fixed component when the dependency in the former was 10%, but was similar between components when this dependency was 100 or 50%. In Experiment 2, a three‐component multiple schedule was used. The dependency was 100% in one component and 10% in the other two. The 10% components differed on how reinforcers were programmed. In one component, as in Experiment 1, a reinforcer had to be collected before the scheduling of other response‐dependent or independent reinforcers. In the other component, response‐dependent and ‐independent reinforcers were programmed by superimposing a variable‐time schedule on an independent variable‐interval schedule. Regardless of the procedure used to program the dependency, resistance to extinction was greater in the 10% components than in the 100% component. These results were replicated in Experiment 3 in which, instead of extinction, VT schedules replaced the baseline schedules in each multiple‐schedule component during the test. We argue that the relative change in dependency from Baseline to Test, which is greater when baseline dependencies are high rather than low, could account for the differential resistance to change in the present experiments. The inconsistencies in results across the present and previous experiments suggest that the effects of dependency on resistance to change are not well understood. Additional systematic analyses are important to further understand the effects of the response–reinforcer relation on resistance to change and to the development of a more comprehensive theory of behavioral persistence.     

Writing life narratives through art practice

This article shares some of my doctoral experiences in a practice-based PhD research in arts developed at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. It locates art practice within the academic research realm and contributes to researchers working on autobiographical studies and practice-based research methods. By offering an overview on my research topic focusing on the relationship between language and place in the life of Brazilian women living in London, I reflect on the relevance of “not-knowing” as a fruitful space for researching autobiographical and situated life narratives through art practice. The article concludes that qualitative methods are relevant for building passages from the individual to the collective sphere of an art practice developed within geographical displacement and in the context of academic research.     

The Trait Anxiety Scale for Children: A validation study for European Portuguese children and adolescents

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children is a self-report instrument inspired on the State-Trait theory extended by Spielberger that measures a momentary state of anxiety (state) and a stable tendency to experience anxiety (trait). This study presents an exploratory adaptation of the Trait Scale and provides its psychometric properties for European Portuguese children and adolescents. The influence of sex and age were also explored. Our sample, composed of 402 participants aged 8–14 years, revealed a mean anxiety value of 28.37 (SD = 5.99). As expected, females revealed higher levels of anxiety than boys. Higher anxiety was obtained in our youngest group as compared to the oldest group. The exploratory factor analysis led to retaining only 16-items that presented acceptable adjustment to a one-factorial solution. Good indexes were obtained in the confirmatory analysis. The results also revealed good internal consistency and good test-retest reliability. Our results provide initial evidence that this scale is adequate to measure trait-anxiety in European Portuguese young people.     

Adaptation to Spanish of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-Revised Version (VVIQRV)

Adaptation to Spanish of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-Revised Version (VVIQRV). The main goal of this paper was to adapt to Spanish language and to examine the psychometric properties of the "Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-Revised Version" (VVIQRV), an instrument that can be used to assess vividness of visual imagery. The adaptation was carried out starting from the Spanish version of VVIQ and taking into consideration improvement proposals suggested in other studies. The questionnaire was then administered to a sample of 414 Spanish university students and the psychometric characteristics were estimated on the basis of the classic theory and the Rasch rating scale model (RSM). The results were convergent with previous studies and indicated that the Spanish VVIQRV has good internal consistency and can be characterized by a single main factor structure. Also, the RSM analysis showed that the increment in the number of response categories, a proposal to improve the instrument, was not appropriate.     

Power bases and attribution in three cultures

The authors used a Saudi context to verify the cross-cultural generality of findings (A. Rodrigues & K. L. Lloyd, 1998) reported for U.S. and Brazilian samples in which compliant behavior caused by reward, informational, and referent influences was perceived as more controllable and more internal than compliant behavior resulting from legitimate, expert, and coercive influences. This differential attribution led, in turn, to different affective and behavioral responses. In the present study, cognitive and affective reactions of Saudi students were measured with regard to compliant behavior (leading to a good outcome or a bad outcome) caused by each of the 6 bases of power described by B. H. Raven (1965). As expected, power bases had significant effects. However, when the outcome of the compliant behavior was bad, compliant behavior caused by a coercive influence led to the perception of more internality and controllability. Also--and not found in previous studies--the perception of less internality and controllability of compliant behavior was caused by an informational influence. Findings are discussed in the light of related research and Saudi cultural characteristics.     

Maternal perinatal representations and their associations with mother–infant interaction and attachment: A longitudinal comparison of Portuguese and Brazilian dyads

Prior research in Western countries (mostly the US, Canada and northern Europe) indicates that mothers' representations are associated with mother–infant interaction quality and their child's attachment security later in the first year. Fewer studies, however, have evaluated whether these associations hold for mother–infant dyads in other countries, such as Brazil and Portugal. Although these countries share a similar language and culture, they differ on societal dimensions that may affect parenting attitudes and mother–infant relationships, such as economic stress, social organisation, social policy, and the availability of services for young families. In this longitudinal study, we followed two independent samples of Brazilian and Portuguese mother–infant dyads from the perinatal period to 12 months post-partum. We assessed mothers' perinatal representations using semi-structured interviews in the first 48 hours after the infant's birth, and evaluated the associations of these representations with mother interaction quality at 9 months and infant attachment at 12 months. Results were similar in each country, corroborating prior research in single Western countries: Mothers with more positive perinatal representations were more sensitive to their infants during free play at 9 months and were more likely to have infants classified as securely attached at 12 months.     

Rules-plus-exception tasks: A problem for exemplar models?

Erickson and Kruschke (2002b) have shown that human subjects generalize category knowledge in a rule-like fashion when exposed to a rule-plus-exception categorization task. This result has remained a challenge to exemplar models of category learning. We show that these models can account for such performance, if they are augmented with exemplar-specific specificity or exemplar-specific attention. This result, however, is only achieved if the choice rule that converts evidence for competing categories into probabilities is sensitive to small differences between evidence values close to 0. Exemplar-specific attention provided the best overall approximation of the data. Exemplar-specific specificity provided a slightly worse approximation, but it predicted better the rule-like generalization pattern observed.     

Disorders in planning and strategy application in frontal lobe lesion patients

The aim of this study was to investigate deficits in planning ability using an adapted version of the Modified Six Elements Test, from the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome—BADS [Wilson, B. A., Alderman, N., Burgess, P. W., Emslie, H., & Evans, J. J. (1996). Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS). Bury St Edmunds, U.K.: Thames Valley Test Company. Trans. Ricardo O Souza, Sergio L Schmidt. Rio de Janeiro: Cognição]. Subjects were left- and right-frontal lobe lesion patients. Other measures of executive dysfunctions used were verbal fluency, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and the Trail Making Test. These other instruments were sensitive to detect executive deficits in the left frontal lobe lesion group, except the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which showed impairment only for the frontal lobe lesion group as a whole. The Modified Six Elements Test detected planning disorders in left frontal lobe lesion patients. The deficit of these patients was due to a greater likelihood to break the rules of the task, that is, in plan-following processes, rather than in planning the strategic approach to solve it.     

The role of moral commitment within the Investment Model

The Investment Model (Rusbult, 1980) defines general commitment as a long‐term orientation towards relationship maintenance and feelings of psychological attachment, influenced by satisfaction, quality of alternatives and intrinsic/extrinsic investments. We suggest the importance of additionally assessing moral commitment, defined by an intrapersonal predisposition to remain in the relationship (Johnson, 1991). We argue moral commitment's association to perceived intrinsic investments acting as internal barriers influencing general commitment and promoting relationship maintenance. A correlational study resorting to structural equation modelling showed that moral commitment predicted intrinsic investments, which in turn predicted general commitment (Model 1). No direct paths emerged from moral commitment to satisfaction or quality of alternatives (Model 2), nor it emerged as a fourth direct predictor of general commitment (Model 3). Results are discussed under relationships maintenance and dissolution frameworks.