Self-awareness: behavior analysis and neuroscience

Self-awareness is a specific type of autoclitic discriminative behavior and inferential generalization to similar performances exhibited by other people. Brain imaging findings take on special importance within behavior analysis when they indicate that dysfunctions in these areas are related to differential effects of our interventions, with some acquiring substantially typical self-awareness skills and others failing to do so. It appears that those individuals whose brain dysfunctions are limited to these areas, and are not part of more generalized brain abnormalities, are amenable to substantial acquisition of those most basic of human skills called self-awareness, whereas individuals with more generalized brain dysfunction are not so disposed. Through a combination of less or more effective teaching contingencies during childhood, and degrees of dysfunction of those brain structures, some children grow up lacking self-reflective abilities and self-insight, whereas others are extraordinarily astute at those capacities. Among children with autism spectrum disorders who lack those skills due to abnormal brain development, approximately half of them can acquire those skills, at least to some degree through the use of effective, intensive, early behavior therapy methods.     

EQUIVALENCE CLASS FORMATION: A METHOD FOR TEACHING STATISTICAL INTERACTIONS

Many students struggle with statistical concepts such as interaction. In an experimental group, participants took a paper‐and‐pencil test and then were given training to establish equivalent classes containing four different statistical interactions. All participants formed the equivalence classes and showed maintenance when probes contained novel negative exemplars. Thereafter, participants took a second paper‐and‐pencil test. Participants in the control group received two versions of the paper‐and‐pencil test without equivalence‐based instruction. All participants in the experimental group showed increased paper‐and‐pencil test scores after forming the interaction‐indicative equivalence classes. Class‐indicative responding also generalized to novel exemplars and the novel question format used in the paper‐and‐pencil test. Test scores did not change with repetition for control group participants. Implications for behavioral diagnostics and teaching technology are discussed.     

On Cheering Charles Bronson: The Ethics of Vigilantism

Vigilantes are a staple of popular culture, from Charles Bronson's 1974 classic Death Wish, and its parade of sequels, to the latest batch of Batman films. Outside of the fictional sphere, society continues to wrestle with vigilantism, notably in the current debates over the prudence and ethics of the Minuteman civilian border patrol group. And though vigilantism has been the subject of speculation and debate among criminologists, historians, and legal scholars, it has unfortunately been given scant attention by philosophers. Surely a topic of such prominence in popular culture, and continued relevance in real life, is ripe for treatment by applied ethicists. In this paper I seek to formulate a definition of vigilantism and then argue that there are conditions under which vigilantism is not only permissible but, at least for some, obligatory.     

The effects of prenatal stress on motivation in the rat pup

Exposure to prenatal stress (PNS) has been shown to induce a set of psychological and behavioral changes in developing offspring. We used the rodent model to investigate whether PNS produces changes in the ability of the pup to express social motivation. We used a set of behavioral tasks including monitoring ultrasonic vocalizations after isolation, a conditioned place preference, and a novel and familiar odor approach test. Pregnant Long-Evans rats were exposed to an unpredictable, variable stressor twice daily during the third week of gestation. Isolation vocalizations were assessed on postnatal day (PND) 10. Pup affinity for the dam was evaluated on PND 15. Typically, pups display a selective preference for an odor-paired environment only after the odor has been associated with the dam. This previous association produces a positive conditioned stimulus (CS). Normally, pups exposed to a neutral CS (odor paired with cotton balls) do not form this place preference. Results indicate that PNS exposed pups had significantly increased distress vocalizations and an equal preference for the positive and neutral conditioned stimuli. This type of alteration in forming early preferences could be detrimental because of decreases in the specificity of social learning and an impaired responsiveness in social relationships.     

Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: distraction reverses emotional biases

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available.     

Distinguishing Between Self-Classified Religious and Spiritual Groups of Emerging Adult Males: Conceptual and Psychometric Challenges

This study sought to determine whether measures of religion and spirituality could discriminate between emerging adult males who self-identified as both religious and spiritual (B), religious only (R), spiritual only (S), or neither (N). Two religion measures and three spirituality measures were employed to assess the constructs. It was predicted that those who self-identify as religious only would score significantly higher on the religion measures than those who identified as spiritual only, and those that identified as spiritual only would score significantly higher on the spirituality measures than those who identified as religious only. Results supported the first hypothesis, but not the second. The relationship between spirituality and religion measures indicated substantial overlap and the possibility of differential relationships between emerging male and female adults.