Visual-reinforcer color-and operant behavior in Siamese fighting fish

Male Siamese Fighting Fish (Betta splendens) were conditioned to emit an operant response sequence reinforced by presentation of a model of a male Siamese Fighting Fish in aggressive display. Operant response rate varied as a function of the color of the model with respect to the color of the subject.     

��Is Getting Well Ever An Art?��: Psychopharmacology and Madness in Robert Lowell��s Day by Day

On the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959, some critics were shocked by the poet's use of seemingly frank autobiographical material, in particular the portrayal of his hospitalizations for bipolar disorder. During the late fifties and throughout the sixties, a rich vein, influenced by Lowell, developed in American poetry. Also during this time, the nascent science of psychopharmacology competed with and complemented the more established somatic treatments, such as psychosurgery, shock treatments, and psychoanalytical therapies. The development of Thorazine was a remarkable breakthrough allowing patients previously thought incurable to leave hospital. In 1955, the release of Miltown, the first 'minor' tranquilizer, was heralded with a media fanfare promising a new dawn of psychological cure-all. These two events blurred the boundary between 'normality' and madness by making treatment in the community more widely possible and by medicalizing more commonplace distress. Lowell's early depictions of madness situate it as emblematic of the cultural malaise of 'the tranquilized fifties.' By his final collection, Day by Day (1977), mental illness had lost its symbolic power. These late poems explore the power of art as a way of representing and remedying suffering in a culture where psychopharmacology has normalized madness.     

Performance of schizophrenia and bipolar patients on verbal and figural working memory tasks

Working memory (WM) was studied in 82 healthy volunteers, 43 schizophrenia patients, and 81 bipolar patients. Schizophrenia patients were impaired on verbal and figural WM tasks that possessed similar test discriminating power. Bipolar patients performed similarly to healthy volunteers. A mathematical model of WM performance revealed a primary role for reduced WM span in accounting for the impaired verbal WM of schizophrenia patients and a primary role for diminished attention in accounting for impaired figural WM. Although WM impairment in schizophrenia is due neither to the general effects of severe mental illness nor to the specific type of material studied, the microarchitecture of abnormal WM in schizophrenia may depend on the stimulus material presented.     

The Frog in Kierkegaard’s Beer: Finding Meaning in the Threat-Compensation Literature

Much existential philosophical theorizing and experimental psychological research is consistent with the notion that people experience arousal when committed beliefs are violated, and this prompts them to affirm other committed beliefs. People depend on meaning frameworks to make sense of their experiences, and when these expected associations are violated, the offending anomaly is often either assimilated into the existing meaning framework, or their meaning framework is altered to accommodate the violation. The meaning maintenance model proposes that because assimilation is often incomplete and accommodation demands cognitive resources, people may instead respond to anomalies by affirming alternative meaning frameworks or by abstracting novel meaning frameworks. Empirical evidence and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Divine hiddenness and the opiate of the people

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in the current philosophy of religion literature. Schellenberg (Divine hiddenness and human reason 1993), one of the problem’s prominent advocates, holds that the only way to prevent completely the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief would be for God to have granted all of us a constant awareness of Him (or at least a constant availability of such awareness) from the moment we achieved the age of reason. Now, if that were the case, we might be faced with a difficult obstacle to the development of a proper, meaningful relationship with God: namely, since the experience of God would be so unutterably wonderful (at least for some), we could be at risk of coming to commune with God not from love of Him but for the amazing experience that that communion involves. In other words, given that mystical union with infinite perfection is, qua experience, inconceivably better than that of any drug, we might come to treat God as something analogous to a powerful narcotic, seeking the experience for the pleasure of the experience more than from any devotion. Since God wants to foster genuinely meaningful relationship with Him, He rightly delays granting us such awareness of Himself, even though that leaves open the risk that nonresistant nonbelief could arise.     

Current misuses of multiple regression for investigating bivariate hypotheses: an example from the organizational domain

By definition, multiple regression (MR) considers more than one predictor variable, and each variable’s beta will depend on both its correlation with the criterion and its correlation with the other predictor(s). Despite ad nauseam coverage of this characteristic in organizational psychology and statistical texts, researchers’ applications of MR in bivariate hypothesis testing has been the subject of recent and renewed interest. Accordingly, we conducted a targeted survey of the literature by coding articles, covering a five-year span from two top-tier organizational journals, that employed MR for testing bivariate relations. The results suggest that MR coefficients, rather than correlation coefficients, were most common for testing hypotheses of bivariate relations, yet supporting theoretical rationales were rarely offered. Regarding the potential impact on scientific advancement, in almost half of the articles reviewed (44 %), at least one conclusion of each study (i.e., that the hypothesis was or was not supported) would have been different, depending on the author’s use of correlation or beta to test the bivariate hypothesis. It follows that inappropriate decisions to interpret the correlation versus the beta will affect the accumulation of consistent and replicable scientific evidence. We conclude with recommendations for improving bivariate hypothesis testing.