Contextual control in discrimination reversal learning

In 3 human predictive learning experiments, the authors examined contextual control of responding in discrimination reversal learning. In Phase 1, a discrimination between 2 stimuli (A+, B-) was trained in Context 1. During Phase 2, participants received discrimination reversal training (A-, B+) in Context 2. Testing occurred in Context 1 and Context 2 (Experiments 1A and 1B) or in Context 1 and Context 3 (Experiment 2). During the test phase, performance in Context 1 and Context 2 reflected the contingencies trained during Phase 1 and Phase 2, respectively. When testing occurred in Context 3, there was no discriminative responding between A and B. In addition, the experiments demonstrated that discriminating stimuli with a consistent reinforcement history were also affected by contextual manipulations. Results indicate that each training context acquires the ability to control performance. Unique-cue and configural approaches account for a major part of the results.     

Outpatient group psychotherapy following day treatment for patients with personality disorders

This prospective, naturalistic study evaluated the practice and effectiveness of an outpatient group therapy program following day treatment for patients with personality disorders (PDs). One hundred and eighty-seven patients (86% patients with PDs and 14% with no PDs), were treated in outpatient psychodynamic group therapy. Outcome was assessed by Global Assessment of Functioning, Symptom Check List 90-R, and Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-Circumplex, short version, at admission and discharge from day treatment, and at the end of outpatient group therapy. Average length of outpatient therapy was 24 months. Forty-three percent terminated in an irregular manner. Outcome of the continuation therapy was satisfactory for patients without PDs. For PD patients, the improvement from the day treatment was maintained during outpatient therapy, but further improvements were modest for symptoms and interpersonal distress, somewhat better for global functioning. Implications for further treatment development are discussed.     

Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: The case of Dutch plural nouns

It has recently been shown that listeners use systematic differences in vowel length and intonation to resolve ambiguities between onset-matched simple words (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003). The present study shows that listeners also use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimize morphological processing. The precise acoustic realization of the stem provides crucial information to the listener about the morphological context in which the stem appears and attenuates the competition between stored inflectional variants. We argue that listeners are able to make use of prosodic information, even though the speech signal is highly variable within and between speakers, by virtue of the relative invariance of the duration of the onset. This provides listeners with a baseline against which the durational cues in a vowel and a coda can be evaluated. Furthermore, our experiments provide evidence for item-specific prosodic effects.     

Three traditional and three new childhood anxiety questionnaires: their reliability and validity in a normal adolescent sample

The current study examined the psychometrics of three traditional [i.e., the trait anxiety version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC), the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), and the Fear Survey Schedule for Children - Revised (FSSC-R)] and three new childhood anxiety scales [the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC), the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED), and the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS)] in a large sample of normal adolescents (N=521). Childhood anxiety scales were generally found to be reliable in terms of internal consistency. Furthermore, evidence was obtained for the convergent and divergent validity of the various anxiety questionnaires. That is, anxiety questionnaire scores were found to be substantially intercorrelated. Particularly strong associations were found between total scores of the STAIC and the RCMAS, total scores of the SCARED and the SCAS, and between subscales that intend to measure specific categories of anxiety symptoms. Childhood anxiety questionnaires were substantially connected to an index of depression, although correlations among anxiety questionnaires were generally higher than those between anxiety scales and a measure of depression.     

Coordination between breathing and mental grouping of pianistic finger movements

6 pianists (age 22 to 43 years) performed a simple finger exercise at a spontaneously chosen most comfortable tempo on a Yamaha-Disklavier piano. Five versions of the exercise, notated in quarter notes, were presented with different types of meters: (1) 3/4, (2) 4/4, (3) 5/4, (4) 6/4, and (5) 7/4. The onsets of finger strokes were measured while respiration was recorded in parallel by means of a thermistor placed at the front of the dominant nostril. The chosen tempo (finger-beat-rate) was about 3 Hz on all trials but not exactly constant. Correspondingly, the meter-rate chosen was faster for 3/4 and 4/4 meter (around 1 Hz), slower for 5/4, 6/4, and 7/4 meter (around 0.5 Hz). Mean breathing rate while playing the piano (0.38 Hz) was significantly higher than while resting (0.22 Hz, p<.05). Pooling the data of all subjects, the ratios of instantaneous meter and breathing rates clustered around different integer values, depending on the type of meter. Also the individual data indicated integer ratios between instantaneous meter and breathing rates. Even periods of constant phase relations between onsets of the meter and of inspiration could be observed. Thus, the mental process of grouping the same piece of music by various musical meters interacts with unconscious breathing rhythm.     

The subjects as a simple random effect fallacy: subject variability and morphological family effects in the mental lexicon

This is a methodological study addressing the appropriateness of standard by-subject and by-item averaging procedures for the analysis of repeated-measures designs. By means of a reanalysis of published data (Schreuder & Baayen, 1997), using random regression models, we present a proof of existence of systematic variability between participants that is ignored in the standard psycholinguistic analytical procedures. By applying linear mixed effects modeling (Pinheiro & Bates, 2000), we call attention to the potential lack of power of the by-subject and by-item analyses, which in this case study fail to reveal the coexistence of a facilitatory family size effect and an inhibitory family frequency effect in visual and auditory lexical processing.     

Linking elements in Dutch noun-noun compounds: constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies

This study addresses the choice of linking elements in novel Dutch noun-noun compounds. Previous off-line experiments (Krott, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2001) revealed that this choice can be predicted analogically on the basis of the distribution of linking elements in the left and right constituent families, i.e., the set of existing compounds that share the left (or right) constituent with the target compound. The present study replicates the observed graded analogical effects under time pressure, using an on-line decision task. Furthermore, the analogical support of the left constituent family predicts response latencies. We present an implemented interactive activation network model that accounts for the experimental data.     

Past experience influences the processing of stimulus compounds in human Pavlovian conditioning

In two human skin conductance conditioning experiments we investigated whether processing of stimulus compounds can be influenced by past experience. Participants were either pre-trained with a discrimination problem that could be solved elementally (A+, B−, AB+, C− in Experiment 1 and A+, AB+, C−, CB− in Experiment 2) or one that required a configural solution (AB+, BC−, CD+, DA− in Experiment 1 and A−, AB+, C+, CB− in Experiment 2). After pre-training, participants were shown an EX+, FX− discrimination. Subsequently, responding to individual components (E and F) was tested. After elemental pre-training, participants showed larger responses to the component from the previously reinforced compound (E) than to the component from the nonreinforced compound (F) whereas no such difference was found after configural pre-training. This means that the kind of pre-training influenced whether the later discrimination problem was processed elementally or configurally. The results indicate that organisms can flexibly process stimulus compounds in different ways.     

Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men

Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate the effect of expression intensity on gender differences in the recognition of facial emotions. The first experiment compared recognition accuracy between female and male participants when emotional faces were shown with full-blown (100% emotional content) or subtle expressiveness (50%). In a second experiment more finely grained analyses were applied in order to measure recognition accuracy as a function of expression intensity (40%-100%). The results show that although women were more accurate than men in recognizing subtle facial displays of emotion, there was no difference between male and female participants when recognizing highly expressive stimuli.