Sequential comparisons of relaxation training and biofeedback in the treatment of three kinds of chronic headache or,the machines may be necessary some time of the time

Two studies are reported in which patients with chronic headache, who did not improve significantly as a result of a 10-session, 8-week relaxation training program, were subsequently treated with biofeedback. For the tension headache sufferers, 36% of the relaxation non-responders showed significant improvement with frontal EMG biofeedback training. For those with vascular headaches, 44% of the relaxation non-responders showed significant improvement with thermal biofeedback. Vascular headache patients with combined migraine and tension symptoms did better than those with only migraine. Psychological test scores significantly differentiated successful vs non-successful biofeedback responders.     

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

Participants' representations of the concept human were examined to differentiate three types of associations between concepts and their component attributes: the capacity of concepts to cue attributes (attribute accessibility), the capacity of attributes to cue concepts (instance accessibility), and the extent to which attributes are thought of as central to concepts (attribute centrality). The findings provide information about the concept human itself and, more generally, about the functionally distinct roles those different attribute-concept associations play in guiding imaginative thought. College students listed attributes that differentiate humans from other animals, rated the centrality of those attributes, and listed animals that possess those attributes. Other students drew and described extraterrestrials that possessed some of the attributes that were found to vary across those listing and rating tasks. Rated centrality was the most important determinant of an attribute's impact on imaginative generation. When the imagined extraterrestrials were supposed to possess attributes that had been rated as central to humans (intelligence, emotional complexity, or opposable thumbs), participants projected more aspects of human form onto them than when the creatures were supposed to possess less central attributes or when attributes were unspecified.     

The rationale for an “oblimax” method of transformation in factor analysis

Factorial transformation is viewed as an estimation problem in which the usual assumption of homogeneously distributed error cannot be applied, but may be replaced by a principle of maximum kurtosis. This leads to quartimax in the orthogonal case, and to oblimax in the oblique case. Oblimax is readily programmable, and typically provides results similar to those of subjective rotation. However, oblimax may encounter special difficulty in data which do not determine a simple structure, or which have been imprecisely factored.The Managing Editor has substituted the word transformation for the word rotation in the title and throughout this paper, on the grounds that oblique rotation is a self-contradictory term, the use of which need not be perpetuated.This paper is primarily a condensation of material that first appeared in ETS Research Bulletins 53-10 and 54-31, both long out of print. In this treatment the principle of maximum kurtosis receives increased emphasis, and the special case for equation (10) is recognized. The writer is indebted to his former colleagues, Mr. Charles Pinzka and Dr. Ledyard Tucker, for invaluable assistance in achieving a straightforward and general derivation of equation (10).     

Discriminative control of punished stereotyped behavior in humans

The purpose of this experiment was to establish discriminative control of responding by an antecedent stimulus using differential punishment because the results of past studies on this topic have been mixed. Three adults with mental retardation who exhibited stereotypy not maintained by social consequences (i.e., automatic reinforcement) participated. For each subject, stereotypy occurred frequently in the presence of a stimulus correlated with nonpunishment of stereotypy and rarely, if ever, in the presence of a stimulus correlated with punishment of stereotypy. Latency measures showed that the antecedent stimulus correlated with punishment served as the discriminative stimulus for the suppression of stereotypy. These results are important insofar as they show that discriminative control by an antecedent stimulus develops with punishment, and because it sometimes may be desirable to establish such control of socially inappropriate behavior.     

Spontaneously hypertensive, Wistar Kyoto and Sprague-Dawley rats differ in their use of place and response strategies in the water radial arm maze

This study further characterises the use of mnemonic systems in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR), which is frequently used as a rodent model of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The objective of this study was to assess the preference of male SHR, Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats for a place or response strategy when trained on an ambiguous T-maze task, and also to examine whether all strains acquired information about both strategies during ambiguous training, regardless of their preferred strategy. In the first experiment, SHR and WKY showed a preference for a response strategy on the ambiguous T-maze task; in contrast, SD displayed a preference for a place strategy. In the second experiment, all strains demonstrated that they learned information about both the response and place strategies during ambiguous training. However, on a conditioned place preference test SHR did not display as strong a preference for the place arm as WKY and SD. This finding supports previous research in a conditioned cue preference test, in which SHR did not display a preference for the cue associated with the platform. These observations that the strains differ with respect to behavioural strategy in a learning task suggest that they differ in the underlying neural circuitry that serves goal-directed behaviour, and are consistent with SHR having deficits associated with the nucleus accumbens.     

Strictness and Congregational Growth in Middletown

The relative effectiveness of strictness theory and modernization theory in explaining congregational growth is tested using a random sample of white, Protestant churches in Middletown (N = 98). Although the former theory predicts that growth is positively related to an authoritative structure and to enforcing rules of ascetic strictness, modernization theory predicts the opposite pattern. For our sample, authoritative leadership seemed not to produce congregational growth. The main finding was that strict rules positively related to growth among working-class congregations, but negatively related to growth among middle-class congregations.     

Derived Conditional Position Discrimination in Individuals without Naming Skills

The Psychological Record - Derived conditional discrimination was evaluated in 2 men with mental retardation whose language was limited to gestural requests. In each conditional-discrimination...