Occasion setting and drug tolerance

There is considerable evidence that drug-paired cues become associated with drug effects. It has been hypothesized that these cues act as Pavlovian conditional stimuli (CSs), and elicit conditional compensatory responses that contribute to tolerance. On the basis of a conditioning analysis of tolerance, we would expect that is should be possible to establish drug-paired cues as occasion setters, as well as conditional stimuli. Using feature-positive discrimination training, we evaluated the contribution of occasion-setting stimuli (as well as CSs) to tolerance to the hypothermic effect of ethanol in rats. The results indicated that a complete associative analysis of drug tolerance should incorporate not only the CS properties of predrug cues, but also the occasion-setting properties of such cues. The findings have implications for interpreting conflicting findings concerning extinction of tolerance and for cue-exposure treatments of addiction.     

A Survey of Management Educators’ Perceptions of Unethical Faculty Behavior

To help academic associations in management develop, refine, and implement a code of ethics, we conducted a survey of management educators’ perception of the ethicality of 142 specific behaviors in teaching, research, and service. The results of the survey could be used to inform ethics committees of these associations regarding the level of acceptability of such conduct. The potential value of our study for the Academy of Management or similar management associations lie in our (1) systematically involving the members in building support for the code of ethics, (2) assessing members’ ethical judgments on both cross-sectional and longitudinal bases so as to identify areas needing particular attention in ethical training, (3) providing an extensive list of specific examples of questionable and potentially unethical behaviors so as to make it easier to implement the code, and (4) providing a template survey document for potential use in involving more stakeholder groups in the development of codes of ethics.

Rationality,Reasonableness, and Critical Rationalism: Problems with the Pragma-dialectical View

A major virtue of the Pragma-Dialectical theory of argumentation is its commitment to reasonableness and rationality as central criteria of argumentative quality. However, the account of these key notions offered by the originators of this theory, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, seems to us problematic in several respects. In what follows we criticize that account and suggest an alternative, offered elsewhere, that seems to us to be both independently preferable and more in keeping with the epistemic approach to arguments and argumentation we favor.

The predictive power of low-arousal positive affect

Motivation and Emotion - Relative to high-arousal positive affect (HAPA), low-arousal positive affect (LAPA) is less likely to be included in research on positive affect and emotion. To gauge the...     

Exploratory behavior as a function of environmental novelty and complexity in male and female rats

Laboratory rats show a positive response to low- and nonstressful novel events. The novel event may involve a number of aspects of the stimulus field. It is usually associated with a change in amount of environmental complexity. Most studies concerning novelty-related behavior involve the introduction of novel objects or the rearrangement of familiar objects. The present purpose was to measure exploratory behavior in response to environments of increased and decreased complexity. Both directions of environmental change are conditions of novelty. A two-way manipulation of increasing and decreasing the complexity of the environment was used. Rats of both sexes showed increased exploration to exposure to novelty, no matter which manipulation was applied; however, female and male rats behaved differently to the two types of novelty. Males responded more to novelty from the introduction of an unfamiliar object. The results indicate novel stimulation, whether of increasing or decreasing complexity, has reward properties. Perhaps the male-specific behavior directed toward unfamiliar objects may serve an adaptive function.     

Reading,syntactic, orthographic,and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Canadian children

This study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 56 bilingual Arab-Canadian children age's 9-14. English was their main instructional language, and Arabic was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program in Toronto where they were taught to read and write Arabic. The children were administered word and pseudo-word reading, language, and working memory tests in English and Arabic. The majority of the children showed at least adequate proficiency in both languages. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudo-word reading working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The poor readers in Arabic had lower scores on all linguistic tasks, except the visual task. There were no significant differences between bilingual English Arabic children and monolingual English-speaking children on the reading, language, and memory tasks. However, bilingual English Arabic children who had reading problems in English had higher scores on English pseudo-word reading and spelling tasks than monolingual English-speaking children with reading disabilities, probably because of positive transfer from the regular nature of Arabic orthography. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of language reading skills in both languages—Arabic and English—despite the different nature of the two orthographies.     

Extending Corporate Social Responsibility Research to the Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior Domains: A Look to the Future

Although issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have become an important topic of research, there have been few studies on this topic conducted in the fields of human resource (HR) management and organizational behavior (OB). To address this gap, we edited a special issue of Personnel Psychology that explicitly focuses attention on CSR in the HR/OB domains. In this introductory editorial, we synthesize and extend the four articles published in the special issue. We also address issues relating to the conceptualization and measurement of CSR, the application of microlevel theories to CSR, and the practical and methodological implications of research in this domain. Finally, we provide suggestions for future research linking CSR with some of the most frequently studied topics in HR/OB. We propose that a focus on HR/OB will improve our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of CSR and also benefit HR/OB in terms of bridging the science–practice and micro–macro gaps.     

Environmental attitudes, knowledge, intentions and behaviors among college students

College students (N = 90) reported their pro-environment behaviors as well as their pro-environment intentions, their explicit and implicit attitudes about the environment, and their knowledge about environmental issues. Intentions and knowledge significantly and independently predicted behavior. Environmental knowledge was not significantly related to attitudes. Implicit and explicit attitudes were significantly but only moderately related. Only explicit attitudes, however, were strongly related to intentions, and intentions completely mediated the influence of explicit attitudes on behavior. Men were found to be more knowledgeable than women about environmental issues; older students had more favorable implicit and explicit environmental attitudes. This research suggests that knowledge about the environment and explicit attitudes influence behavior through different pathways, which may have implications for interventions seeking to increase environmentally friendly behavior.     

The effects of naloxone and cage size on social play and activity in isolated young rats

The effects of large and small housing environments as well as naloxone on social play (as defined by pinning behavior) in isolated postweanling male rats were investigated. Animals housed in small cages played significantly more than those housed in larger cages. This effect was not observed when cage size was reversed. Administration of 0.5, 1.0, and 5.0 mg/kg of naloxone resulted in significant decreases in play behavior as compared to saline controls, both before housing environments were switched, and after. Animals in both isolation conditions were also compared to animals that were socially housed. Isolation was found to increase social play as well as the time spent in active social interaction, but had no effect on locomotor activity. While housing in a small cage increases play behavior, it had no effect on the amount of time spent in active social interaction or on activity. While administration of 0.5, 1.0, and 5.0 mg/kg naloxone to habituated animals differentially housed did not result in an overall decrease in activity, when compared with saline controls, only those animals housed in small cages and injected with the high dose of naloxone differed significantly from controls. In animals having no prior play experience, the activity of animals housed in the large and small cages differed significantly from each other only in the saline and 5.0 mg/kg naloxone conditions. Since naloxone's effect on play behavior was strong, but its effect on activity was not profound, our data suggest that naloxone primarily affects the affective component of play rather than altering activity levels.