Drug Tolerance, Drug Addiction, and Drug Anticipation

ABSTRACT— Environmental cues associated with drugs often elicit withdrawal symptoms and relapse to drug use. Such cues also modulate drug tolerance. The contribution of drug-associated stimuli to withdrawal and tolerance is emphasized in a Pavlovian-conditioning analysis of drug administration. Conditional responses occur in the presence of cues that have been associated with the drug in the past, such as the setting in which the drug was taken. These conditional responses mediate the expression of tolerance and withdrawal symptoms. Recently, it has become apparent that internal predrug cues, as well as environmental cues, elicit pharmacological conditional responses that contribute to tolerance and withdrawal. Such internal cues include cognitive or proprioceptive cues incidental to self-administration, drug-onset cues that are experienced shortly after administration, and emotional cues. According to the conditioning analysis, addiction treatment should incorporate learning principles to extinguish the association between stimuli (environmental and internal) present at the time of drug administration and the effects of the addictive drug.     

Attentional spread in deaf and hearing participants: Face and object distractor processing under perceptual load

The case of human deafness constitutes a unique opportunity to examine possible consequences for perceptual processing due to altered sensory experiences. We tested whether deaf??in contrast to hearing??individuals are more susceptible to visual distraction from peripheral than from central face versus object stimuli. The participants were required to classify the gender of a target male or female symbol presented either alone (low perceptual load) or together with three filler symbols (high perceptual load), while ignoring gender-congruent or -incongruent face versus object distractors presented at central or peripheral positions. The gender classifications were affected by distractor gender under low, but not under high, perceptual load in hearing participants. In contrast, the responses of deaf participants were similarly influenced by distractor gender under both levels of perceptual load. There was no evidence for generally enhanced attention to the visual periphery in deaf individuals. Our results indicate that auditory deprivation may result in enhanced attentional capacities under high perceptual load.     

Very brief exposure II: the effects of unreportable stimuli on reducing phobic behavior

This experiment compared the effects of exposure to masked phobic stimuli at a very brief stimulus-onset asynchrony on spider-phobic and non-phobic individuals. Participants were identified through a widely used questionnaire and a Behavioral Avoidance Test (BAT) with a live, caged tarantula to establish baseline levels of avoidance. One week later, they were individually administered one of two continuous series of masked images: spiders or flowers. Preliminary masking experiments showed that independent samples of participants from the same populations failed to recognize these stimuli. Participants in the main experiment reported ratings of subjective distress immediately before and after the exposure manipulation. Then they engaged in the BAT once again. Very brief exposure to images of spiders reduced phobic participants' avoidance of the tarantula. No effects were evidenced on subjective distress, or on non-phobic participants. Theoretical implications for the non-conscious basis of fear are discussed.     

Dying for romance: risk taking as purposive behavior

Many approaches have been utilized to understand adolescent risk taking. The current research frames risk taking as a purposive behavior enacted with a specific goal in mind. Rather than assuming adolescent risk taking to be the result of arrogance or perceived invulnerability, adolescent risk taking is interpreted as a means to an end. Stemming from a Tolmanian framework, an alternative explanation for adolescent risk taking is tested: adolescents are willing to take risks to the extent that the risk is associated with a needed outcome - the greater the need for the outcome, the greater the willingness to take risks. To test the proposed hypothesis, 192 participants completed a survey about their need for a romantic relationship and their willingness to endure harm to obtain a romantic relationship. Data were collected at two time points. A hierarchical regression revealed that need for romance is a significant predictor of willingness to endure harm for romance, even after gender and sensation seeking are statistically controlled. Moreover, need for romance at T1 was shown to be predictive of harm for romance at T2. Results are supportive of taking a purposive - that is, Tolmanian - approach, as a means for interpreting adolescent behavior.     

Continuous visual cues trigger automatic spatial target updating in dynamic scenes

Dynamic tasks often require fast adaptations to new viewpoints. It has been shown that automatic spatial updating is triggered by proprioceptive motion cues. Here, we demonstrate that purely visual cues are sufficient to trigger automatic updating. In five experiments, we examined spatial updating in a dynamic attention task in which participants had to track three objects across scene rotations that occurred while the objects were temporarily invisible. The objects moved on a floor plane acting as a reference frame and unpredictably either were relocated when reference frame rotations occurred or remained in place. Although participants were aware of this dissociation they were unable to ignore continuous visual cues about scene rotations (Experiments 1a and 1b). This even held when common rotations of floor plane and objects were less likely than a dissociated rotation (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, identifying only the spatial reference direction was not sufficient to trigger updating (Experiment 3). Thus we conclude that automatic spatial target updating occurs with pure visual information.     

Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing

Two studies examined the relationship between authoritarianism, cognitive style and heuristic processing. Focusing on Epstein’s (2003) cognitive-experiential self-theory, Study 1 shows that authoritarianism is related to Epstein’s dimension of faith in intuition, but not need for cognition, even when controlling for individual differences in need for structure. Study 2 confirms that authoritarianism is related to greater heuristic processing. The discussion suggests ways in which individual differences in cognitive style and heuristic processing may account for established effects of authoritarianism.     

Disentangling the relationship between hemispheric asymmetry and cognitive performance

It is widely believed that advantages of hemispheric asymmetries originated in better cognitive processing, hence it is often implied that the relationship between hemispheric asymmetry and cognitive performance is linearly positive: the higher the degree of lateralization in a specific cognitive domain, the better the performance in a corresponding task. Yet, the empirical evidence for this notion is mixed and the statistical methods to analyze this relationship have been criticized. The present study therefore investigated the relationship between hemispheric asymmetries and cognitive performance in two behavioral tasks (a left-lateralized word-matching task and a right-lateralized face-decision task) in 230 participants (140 women, 90 men) by using two different approaches. Both methods correspondingly revealed that a relationship between hemispheric asymmetries and cognitive performance does exist. Contrary to a positive (linear) relationship however, the data could be best described by an inverted U-shaped curve. Although the optimal degree of lateralization seemed to be task-specific, a slight or moderate degree of hemispheric asymmetry achieved best cognitive performance in all tasks. Moreover, performances deteriorated towards extreme ends of lateralization (i.e., participants with either extreme left or right hemispheric biases). Taken together, the present study provides evidence against the notion that higher lateralization is related to enhanced cognitive performance.     

A Pilot Study of Psychotherapist Trainees' Alpha-Amylase and Cortisol Levels During Treatment of Recently Suicidal Clients With Borderline Traits

Psychotherapists often experience stress while providing psychotherapy, in particular when working with difficult presentations such as suicidality. As part of a larger study on the treatment of recently suicidal college students with borderline traits, 6 therapists in training collected their own salivary samples for alpha-amylase (AA) and cortisol (C) analyses immediately before and after sessions with 2 selected clients. On average, samples were collected for the same therapist-patient dyad throughout the year-long study to ensure that data reflected therapist responses across stages of treatment. Therapists also completed a working alliance questionnaire and rated perceived session difficulty immediately after each selected session. Contrary to expectations, therapists demonstrated elevated levels of stress as measured by AA and C at presession relative to postsession levels. Greater session difficulty was related to more pronounced declines in AA, whereas a stronger working alliance was linked to more pronounced reductions in C. Results suggest that physiological stress responses while working with recently suicidal clients with borderline traits occur primarily in terms of session anticipatory anxiety, whereas AA and C changes may be affected differently by factors such as session difficulty and working alliance. This is a pilot study, limited by its sample size, but the design, findings, and inclusion of physiological measures present an initial step in an essential line of research.     

Predicting academic success with the Big 5 rated from different points of view: Self‐rated,other rated and faked

Self‐ratings of personality predict academic success above general intelligence. The present study replicated these findings and investigated the increment of other‐ratings or intentionally distorted self‐ratings. Participants (N = 145) had to compile a personality questionnaire twice. First they were given neutral instructions. The second time they were asked to imagine a specific applicant setting. Furthermore, two peers rated each participant. Additionally, verbal, numerical and figural reasoning scores were obtained. Grades on a statistics exam obtained 2 months later served as the criterion. Results replicated prior findings and showed incremental validity for self‐ and other‐rated personality, which was stable after controlling for intelligence. Faking had no impact on the domain‐score level, but results on the facet‐score level were less encouraging. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.