Loss aversion is an affective forecasting error

Loss aversion occurs because people expect losses to have greater hedonic impact than gains of equal magnitude. In two studies, people predicted that losses in a gambling task would have greater hedonic impact than would gains of equal magnitude, but when people actually gambled, losses did not have as much of an emotional impact as they predicted. People overestimated the hedonic impact of losses because they underestimated their tendency to rationalize losses and overestimated their tendency to dwell on losses. The asymmetrical impact of losses and gains was thus more a property of affective forecasts than a property of affective experience.     

Loving yourself abundantly: relationship of the narcissistic personality to self- and other perceptions of workplace deviance, leadership, and task and contextual performance

The authors report results from 2 studies assessing the extent to which narcissism is related to self- and other ratings of leadership, workplace deviance, and task and contextual performance. Study 1 results revealed that narcissism was related to enhanced self-ratings of leadership, even when controlling for the Big Five traits. Study 2 results also revealed that narcissism was related to enhanced leadership self-perceptions; indeed, whereas narcissism was significantly positively correlated with self-ratings of leadership, it was significantly negatively related to other ratings of leadership. Study 2 also revealed that narcissism was related to more favorable self-ratings of workplace deviance and contextual performance compared to other (supervisor) ratings. Finally, as hypothesized, narcissism was more strongly negatively related to contextual performance than to task performance.     

Growing older does not always mean moving slower: examining aging and the saccadic motor system

Although humans typically move more slowly as they age, one exception may be the saccadic motor system. To fully determine whether the execution of saccades is affected by age, the authors examined detailed kinematics of vertical and horizontal saccades across a range of saccadic amplitudes (4 degrees, 8 degrees, and 12 degrees). Ten younger and 20 older adults participated in each experiment. Whereas in the 1st experiment, the authors assessed volitionally generated saccades, in the 2nd experiment, they evaluated reflexively generated saccades. The results of those experiments showed that the saccadic motor system is relatively impervious to the effects of aging; in fact, the differences between vertical and horizontal saccades were more evident than were differences between saccades produced by younger and older adults. The authors discuss possible reasons for that relative resistance to aging.     

The structure of vocational interests in Filipino adolescents

The structure of vocational interests was investigated in Filipino high school students (N = 503), who rated their interest in 303 culture-relevant occupational titles and 93 major fields of study. Item-level principal components analyses identified general interest, prestige, and sex-type dimensions, rather than Prediger's (1982) People/Things and Data/Ideas dimensions. Additional factor analyses were conducted to derive scales that measure more specific interests, including Unskilled/Semiskilled Labor, Male-dominated, Engineering/Technology, Science, Medical, Arts, Commerce, Government/Law, and Education. The interest scales showed some resemblance or overlap with Holland's types, and gender differences on the scales conformed to expectations. However, the relationships among the scales and occupations were better accounted for by prestige and sex-type than by People/Things and Data/Ideas dimensions or by Holland's circular model. Developmental, cultural, educational, and economic factors that might account for Filipino students' focus on prestige and sex-type were discussed.     

Decisions from experience: Why small samples?

In many decisions we cannot consult explicit statistics telling us about the risks involved in our actions. In lieu of such data, we can arrive at an understanding of our dicey options by sampling from them. The size of the samples that we take determines, ceteris paribus, how good our choices will be. Studies of decisions from experience have observed that people tend to rely on relatively small samples from payoff distributions, and small samples are at times rendered even smaller because of recency. We suggest one contributing and previously unnoticed reason for reliance on frugal search: Small samples amplify the difference between the expected earnings associated with the payoff distributions, thus making the options more distinct and choice easier. We describe the magnitude of this amplification effect, and the potential costs that it exacts, and we empirically test four of its implications.     

An investigation of differential reinforcement of alternative behavior without extinction

We manipulated relative reinforcement for problem behavior and appropriate behavior using differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) without an extinction component. Seven children with developmental disabilities participated. We manipulated duration (Experiment 1), quality (Experiment 2), delay (Experiment 3), or a combination of each (Experiment 4), such that reinforcement favored appropriate behavior rather than problem behavior even though problem behavior still produced reinforcement. Results of Experiments 1 to 3 showed that behavior was often sensitive to manipulations of duration, quality, and delay in isolation, but the largest and most consistent behavior change was observed when several dimensions of reinforcement were combined to favor appropriate behavior (Experiment 4). Results suggest strategies for reducing problem behavior and increasing appropriate behavior without extinction.     

EFFECTS OF TREATMENT INTEGRITY FAILURES DURING DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT OF ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOR: A TRANSLATIONAL MODEL

Differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) is used frequently as a treatment for problem behavior. Previous studies on treatment integrity failures during DRA suggest that the intervention is robust, but research has not yet investigated the effects of different types of integrity failures. We examined the effects of two types of integrity failures on DRA, starting with a human operant procedure and extending the results to children with disabilities in a school setting. Human operant results (Experiment 1) showed that conditions involving reinforcement for problem behavior were more detrimental than failing to reinforce appropriate behavior alone, and that condition order affected the results. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the effects of combined errors and sequence effects during actual treatment implementation.     

Conditioned reinforcement and response strength

Stimuli associated with primary reinforcers appear themselves to acquire the capacity to strengthen behavior. This paper reviews research on the strengthening effects of conditioned reinforcers within the context of contemporary quantitative choice theories and behavioral momentum theory. Based partially on the finding that variations in parameters of conditioned reinforcement appear not to affect response strength as measured by resistance to change, long-standing assertions that conditioned reinforcers do not strengthen behavior in a reinforcement-like fashion are considered. A signposts or means-to-an-end account is explored and appears to provide a plausible alternative interpretation of the effects of stimuli associated with primary reinforcers. Related suggestions that primary reinforcers also might not have their effects via a strengthening process are explored and found to be worthy of serious consideration.     

Inaccurate self-knowledge formation as a result of automatic behavior

Four studies tested a post-priming misattribution process whereby a primed goal automatically influences people's behavior, but because people are unaware of that influence, they misattribute their behavior to some other internal state. People who were primed with a goal were more likely to choose an activity that was relevant to that goal, but did not recognize that the prime had influenced their choices. Instead, people used more accessible and plausible reasons to explain their behavior. The goals were seeking romantic interaction (Studies 1 and 2), helping (Study 3) and earning money (Study 4). People made choices related to these goals but misattributed the choices to temporary preferences (Studies 1 and 3) and more permanent dispositions (Studies 2 and 4). The misattribution had downstream effects, leading to choice behavior consistent with the erroneous self-knowledge. We suggest that automatic behavior can lead to a confabulated self-knowledge with behavioral consequences.     

Distributed recognition of natural songs by European starlings

Individual vocal recognition behaviors in songbirds provide an excellent framework for the investigation of comparative psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that support the perception and cognition of complex acoustic communication signals. To this end, the complex songs of European starlings have been studied extensively. Yet, several basic parameters of starling individual vocal recognition have not been assessed. Here we investigate the temporal extent of song information acquired by starlings during vocal recognition learning. We trained two groups of starlings using standard operant conditioning techniques to recognize several songs from two conspecific male singers. In the first experiment we tested their ability to maintain accurate recognition when presented with (1) random sequences of 1–12 motifs (stereotyped song components) drawn from the training songs, and (2) 0.1–12-s excerpts of continuous song drawn from the training songs. We found that song recognition improved monotonically as more vocal material is provided. In the second experiment, we systematically substituted continuous, varying length regions of white noise for portions of the training songs and again examined recognition accuracy. Recognition remained above chance levels for all noise substitutions tested (up to 91% of the training stimulus) although all but the smallest substitutions led to some decrement in song recognition. Overall, above chance recognition could be obtained with surprisingly few motifs, short excerpts of song, and in the absence of large portions of the training songs. These results suggest that starlings acquire a representation of song during individual vocal recognition learning that is robust to perturbations and distributed broadly over large portions of these complex acoustic sequences.