Barbiturates and Human Physical Aggression

The effects of barbiturates on aggressive behavior were investigated in two studies. In both studies, subjects were given the opportunity to administer electric shocks to an opponent within the context of a competitive reaction time task. In Study 1, 30 subjects received increasing provocation from an opponent following their ingestion of one of three doses of secobarbital. Aggressive behavior was not found to increase as a function of drug dosage. In Study 2, 30 subjects ingested a placebo or one of two doses of pentobarbital. Once again, the barbiturate did not influence aggressive responding. The findings suggest that barbiturates, in moderate, clinically appropriate doses do not facilitate aggressive responding.     

Adult attachment and declining birthrates

Attachment scores for 658 young adults living in the U.S.A. were obtained using the Experiences in Close Relationships scale. The participants came from a subsample of the RELATE data set, who had also filled out the adult attachment measure. Those young adults living in Utah County, Utah, an area of the country with a higher than normal birthrate (88% members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), also had higher than average adult attachment scores. While the methodology was not sufficient to assess causal direction nor eliminate the possibility of unidentified influences, an undiscussed psychological factor, adult attachment, may play a role in the numerical declines observed among nonimmigrant communities in the USA and Europe.     

The Turing Test as Interactive Proof

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test based on indistinguishability of verbal behavior as a replacement for the question “Can machines think?” Since then, two mutually contradictory but well‐founded attitudes towards the Turing Test have arisen in the philosophical literature. On the one hand is the attitude that has become philosophical conventional wisdom, viz., that the Turing Test is hopelessly flawed as a sufficient condition for intelligence, while on the other hand is the overwhelming sense that were a machine to pass a real live full‐fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence. The arguments against the sufficiency of the Turing Test for determining intelligence rely on showing that some extra conditions are logically necessary for intelligence beyond the behavioral properties exhibited by an agent under a Turing Test. Therefore, it cannot follow logically from passing a Turing Test that the agent is intelligent. I argue that these extra conditions can be revealed by the Turing Test, so long as we allow a very slight weakening of the criterion from one of logical proof to one of statistical proof under weak realizability assumptions. The argument depends on the notion of interactive proof developed in theoretical computer science, along with some simple physical facts that constrain the information capacity of agents. Crucially, the weakening is so slight as to make no conceivable difference from a practical standpoint. Thus, the Gordian knot between the two opposing views of the sufficiency of the Turing Test can be cut.     

Family dynamics as predictors of infant disposition

In this longitudinal study of mothers, their families, and their infants, both discriminant and regression analyses showed that prenatal reports of family dynamics predicted infant disposition at 8 months with considerable accuracy. The most important predictive component was organization and consistency within the family unit as well as the dependability of other family members. Possible mechanisms by which family dynamics might affect the infant's developing disposition are discussed.     

The effects of word co-occurrence on short-term memory: associative links in long-term memory affect short-term memory performance

In immediate serial recall tasks, high-frequency words are recalled better than low-frequency words. This has been attributed to high-frequency words' being better represented and providing more effective support to a redintegration process at retrieval (C. Hulme et al., 1997). In studies of free recall, there is evidence that frequency of word co-occurrence, rather than word frequency per se, may explain the recall advantage enjoyed by high-frequency words (J. Deese, 1960). The authors present evidence that preexposing pairs of low-frequency words, so as to create associative links between them, has substantial beneficial effects on immediate serial recall performance. These benefits, which are not attributable to simple familiarization with the words per se, do not occur for high-frequency words. These findings indicate that associative links between items in long-term memory have important effects on short-term memory performance and suggest that the effects of word frequency in short-term memory tasks are related to differences in interitem associations in long-term memory.     

Temporal Fluctuations in Suicide Calls to a Crisis Intervention Service

Suicide-related calls received by a crisis intervention center were analyzed for temporal variations. The overall number of calls, calls concerning personal suicidal ideation, and calls concerning third-person suicide potential varied by both month and day of the week. Ideation calls and calls involving a suicide attempt varied by day of the month. Month and day of the week variation in third-person calls paralleled variations in completed suicides. Fluctuations were large enough to be useful in scheduling crisis center staff. The possibility that third-person calls represent a greater suicide threat than first-person calls is discussed.