Scaling relative incentive value in consummatory behavior

Surprising downshifts from more preferred (training incentive) to less preferred incentives (test incentive) are usually accompanied by emotional activation and suppression of conditioned behavior in rats. Two experiments were designed to determine whether consummatory behavior is similarly affected by downshifts of equal proportions. Within limits, the degree of consummatory responding during incentive downshift was similar with equal ratios of test concentration to training concentration. Thus, 32–4% and 16–2% downshifts (1:8 test/training ratios) caused similar levels of consummatory behavior, despite differences in the absolute concentrations of the solutions involved in the downshift. An interpretation based on sensory contrast was discarded because of the long intervals between training and test solutions (40 min and 24 h in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). It is suggested that Weber’s law regulates behavioral suppression after reward downshifts. A theoretical framework for the interpretation of these data is presented.     

Wallace’s and Darwin’s natural selection theories

Synthese - This work takes a stand on whether Wallace should be regarded as co-author of the theory of natural selection alongside Darwin as he is usually considered on behalf of his alleged...     

Historical Inquiry to Challenge the Narrative of Racial Progress

This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and historical inquiry activities explore how (a) Mexican Americans claimed legal Whiteness to gain access to better schools and (b) how Mendez upheld race and language-based segregation. This article outlines how students engage in 4 levels of historical analysis: evidenceless claims, emerging complexity, relational analysis, and multidimensionality. In each type of analysis, students use the antiessentialist historical content to complicate the narrative of racial progress. They highlight, to different degrees, how racial discriminatory policies adapt to continue upholding discrimination. With the antiessentialist historical content in place, the narrative of racial progress functioned as a template, not to emulate but, rather, as a point of comparison. It encouraged students to engage in a complex analysis where they considered how Mendez was an incomplete victory. This research provides insight into levels of analysis that up to now have mostly been theoretical. The larger lesson here, as it applies to how educators teach history, is that (a) the experiences of people of color cannot be essentialized, (b) inquiry can be a useful tool in encouraging historical reasoning that considers such racial/ethnic nuance, and (c) collective memory might be leveraged to encourage students to develop such relational analysis.     

Pretreatment Correlates of the Therapeutic Alliance in the Chronically Depressed

We examined the relationship between patient characteristics and the working alliance in a multisite trial for chronic depression. Patients treated with the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP), alone (n = 169) or combined with nefazodone (n = 198), completed the Working Alliance Inventory during the 2nd week of treatment. Within the CBASP alone group, a history of drug abuse/dependence, lower peak social adjustment over the past five years, and lower current social adjustment predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Within the combination group, male gender and a distancing coping style predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Results should be interpreted with caution since they did not replicate across treatment groups, and the number of significant findings were not much greater than chance expectations.     

Time (also) flies from left to right

Everyday linguistic expressions in many languages suggest that back and front space is projected onto temporal concepts of past and future (as in the sentencewe are years ahead of them). The present experiment tested the psychological reality of a different space-time conceptual metaphor—projecting the past to left space and the future to right space—for which there are no linguistic traces in any language. Participants categorized words as referring to the past or to the future. Irrelevant to this task, words appeared either to the left or right of the screen, and responses were given by keypresses of the left or right hand. Judgments were facilitated when word position and response mapping were congruent with the left-past right-future conceptual metaphor. These results are discussed in the context of current claims about the embodiment of meaning and the possible mechanisms by which conceptual metaphors can be acquired.     

Making Sense of Work Life: A Structural Model of Burnout

Hospital-based nurses ( N  = 832) and doctors ( N  = 603) in northern and eastern Spain completed a survey of job burnout, areas of work life, and management issues. Analysis of the results provides support for a mediation model of burnout that depicts employees' energy, involvement, and efficacy as intermediary experiences between their experiences of work life and their evaluations of organizational change. The key element of this model is its focus on employees' capacity to influence their work environments toward greater conformity with their core values. The model considers 3 aspects of that capacity: decision-making participation, organizational justice, and supervisory relationships. The analysis supports this model and emphasizes a central role for first-line supervisors in employees' experiences of work life.     

Evaluating the Etiology of Anxiety Sensitivity: Relation to Cardiovascular Perception and Reactivity

A large body of research has suggested that anxiety sensitivity (AS) acts as a specific vulnerability factor in the development of anxiety pathology. More recently, attention has turned to the etiology of AS per se. The present study tested several related etiological hypotheses derived from Expectancy theory. S. Reiss and R. J. McNally (1985) originally proposed that greater physiological reactivity would increase risk for developing heightened AS. Reactive individuals are believed to have greater opportunity to perceive unpleasant bodily perturbations, thereby increasing the likelihood that concerns and fears could be attached to the sensations. Nonclinical participants (N = 86) completed physical (e.g., orthostatic) and biological (e.g., 35% CO₂) challenges and a heart beat perception task. AS was not related to heart beat perception but was related to greater tonic heart rate and greater diastolic blood pressure (DBP) reactivity to both the challenges. Higher DBP and higher heart beat accuracy interacted to predict higher AS.     

Two Levels of Metacognition

Two main theories about metacognition are reviewed, each of which claims to provide a better explanation of this phenomenon, while discrediting the other theory as inappropriate. The paper claims that in order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of metacognition, we must distinguish two levels of this capacity—each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. It will be shown that each of the reviewed theories has been trying to explain only one of the two levels and that, consequently, the conflict between them can be dissolved. The paper characterizes the high-level as a rationalizing level where the subject uses concepts and theories to interpret her own behavior and the low-level as a controlling level where the subject exploits epistemic feelings to adjust her cognitive activities. Finally, the paper explores three kinds of interaction between the levels.     

Enhancing Immediate Retention with Clickers Through Individual Response Identification

Classroom audience response systems, in which students respond to class questions via a remote ‘clicker’ unit, are widely used as a method for increasing student participation and providing immediate feedback in the form of a group frequency distribution. The phenomenon of social facilitation shows that task performance can be enhanced with co‐action of others or with the presence of an audience. To enhance the audience effect, we employed a unique feedback system that displays each individual's response. After reading a text passage, participants responded via a remote clicker to a series of comprehension questions. Participants were provided with no feedback regarding other respondents' answers, group feedback, or individual feedback. The results demonstrated significantly higher test performance with individual response identification. Implications are discussed in terms of applied classroom settings and social facilitation with enhanced options for displaying different types of feedback with clickers during instruction. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.