Does direct human eye contact function as a warning cue for domestic sheep (Ovis aries)?

Direct eye contact may function as a warning cue during interspecific interactions, and human staring has been shown to influence the behavior of many species. The authors used an arena test to assess whether human staring altered the behavior of domestic sheep (Ovis aries) compared with no human eye contact. Sheep glanced at the staring human's face more often in the first 2 min of the test, indicating that they perceived a difference between the human stimuli. Staring also elicited more locomotor activity and urination than averted gaze. However, there were no differences in fear-related behaviors, suggesting that a staring human did not represent a greater immediate threat than a nonwatching human. These results imply that human staring is a warning cue for domestic sheep, but no more. Without further reinforcement, sheep quickly habituated to the warning cue.     

The Growing Evidence for Demonic Possession: What Should Psychiatry’s Response be?

Evidence of evil spirits is voluminous and comes from many cultures, both ancient and modern. Cases from China, India, and the United States are examined and evaluated. The actual experience of spirit victims, the universality of spirit oppression, the superhuman phenomena associated with possession, and the comparative success of deliverance and exorcism vs. psychiatry are considered. Potential arguments against the spirit hypothesis center on the antecedent improbability of spirits, multiple personality disorder, and the effectiveness of medication; but these can be countered. Psychiatrists should question their materialist assumption that mental illness is strictly a matter of an aberrant brain, carefully examine the literature of possession, experiment to determine why exorcists and deliverance ministers often succeed where psychiatry fails, and develop a more complete inventory of techniques for healing the complete person.     

A Comparison of Underage,Young, Middle,and Late Adults in Indicated Prevention Following Impaired Driving

The authors examined age differences in baseline features and program response in individuals completing indicated prevention (Prime For Life^®) for impaired driving. Risk perception, substance use, and support differed by age at baseline and, despite improvements, continued to differ postprogram.     

Disconfirmation and dual hypotheses on a more difficult version of wason's 2-4-6 task

This paper reports two experiments in which subjects worked to solve a more difficult version of Wason's 2-4-6 task: instead of the usual “numbers must ascend in order of magnitude” rule, a more general rule, “the three numbers must be different”, was used. The first experiment established that instructing subjects to disconfirm on the “three different numbers” did not significantly improve their performance, as compared with confirmatory and control groups. Disconfirmatory subjects did try to propose more triples at variance with their hypotheses but were unable to obtain the necessary disconfirmatory information.

To help subjects represent the task in a way that facilitated disconfirmation, the second experiment utilized a procedure in which subjects were told that they were looking for two rules, Dax and Med-the Dax rule corresponding to “three different numbers” and the Med rule to its complement, i.e. two or more numbers the same. Of subjects in the Dax-Med condition, 88% solve the rule, as opposed to 21% of subjects in a control condition. Dax-Med subjects tended to search for positive instances of the Med rule, which, in turn, forced them to test the limits of the Dax rule. It was concluded that the Dax-Med manipulation did facilitate a different mental representation of the task than the normal procedure.