From an insecure base: Parent-child relations and internalizing behaviour in the pre-school

Eighty-three two-parent families were recruited via eight pre-school programmes in order to explore the origins of internalizing behaviour problems of pre-school children. Children were assessed by their teachers using standard checklists of anxious and prosocial behaviour as well as rank orders of dependency and social competence. Observers contributed measures of solitary activity and interactive play. In the home, mothers and fathers completed a 100-item Q-sort on parent-child attachment. Internalizing and competence measures were predictable from parent-child relations. Mother-child variables were more generally and significantly related to pre-school measures than father-child variables. In particular, boys who were highly dependent on their mothers were anxious and withdrawn in the pre-school, overly dependent on their teachers, and low in teacher assessments of prosocial behaviour and social competence. In addition to quantitative differences in the predictive power of maternal and paternal variables, qualitative differences were found indicating secure base behaviour as a more important dimension of mother-child relations, while affective sharing during play may be a more salient marker of the quality of father-child relations.     

Clustering in the output of behavior

Pigeons exposed to fixed-interval schedules of 3, 5, 15, 40, and 120 minutes all maintained considerable variability in daily response rates for as many as 104 sessions. However, variations did not occur at random. Instead, rate in a session appeared dependent on those occurring previously. The series displayed a wave-like form arising because a group of high rates was followed by a group of low rates and vice versa. These sequential relations produced a curve having irregular periodicity, sometimes superimposed on a declining or rising linear trend. Whether grouping of response rates stemmed from experimental or extra-experimental sources was not determined. If the phenomenon was either totally or partially produced by the schedule itself, it suggests that response rate is determined by a combination of positive and negative feedback. Control by factors extrinisic to the experiment itself implies that response rate may be influenced by some rhythmic physiological process.     

The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach

Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the “multi-head” view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct ordering is observed; this is predicted by the multi-head view, under the assumption that structures resulting in shorter dependencies are preferred. A short-long preference is also observed for left-branching constituents (such as subject NPs), which is less obviously accommodated by the multi-head view but not incompatible with it. The repetition of determiners was also examined (the dog and cat versus the dog and the cat), and a stronger preference was found for repetition with singular count nouns as opposed to mass or plural nouns; this accords well with the multi-head view, under the reasoning that single-determiner constructions require crossing dependencies with count nouns but not with plural or mass nouns.     

Serial conditioning as a function of stimulus, response, and temporal dependencies

Six experiments were used to examine the effects of explicit response, stimulus, and temporal dependencies on responding in an interfood interval. The first two experiments demonstrated that 10-segment 60-s interfood clocks controlled similar distributions of key pecking in pigeons regardless of whether response–reinforcement contiguity was required, allowed, or precluded. The third and fourth experiments found that in the absence of an explicit response–reinforcement dependency, systematic explicit stimuli in an interfood interval were sufficient to establish and maintain the characteristic distribution of key pecking and that an interval without an explicit clock failed to establish or maintain key pecking. The last two experiments demonstrated that the interfood interval need not be of fixed length, and that a simple correlation of stimuli with increments from either a minimum to a maximum imminency or probability of food presentation controlled behavior in a similar manner. Successively higher rates generally occurred to successively later stimuli in the upper half of the range.     

Chlordiazepoxide effects on ethanol self-administration: dependence on concurrent conditions.

Experiments examined the effects of acute doses of chlordiazepoxide upon ethanol self-administration in the rat. A concurrent-schedule procedure was used that employed choice between ethanol (5%) and a second fluid (either water or a 1% sucrose solution). When ethanol and water were the available fluids, chlordiazepoxide at doses of 15 and 20 mg/kg reduced ethanol-reinforced responding and intake, with a greater reduction occurring at the 20 mg/kg dose. However, when ethanol and sucrose were concurrently available, in many rats only the 20 mg/kg dose of chlordiazepoxide reduced ethanol-reinforced responding. The differences in dose response function occurred in most animals without large changes in the baseline ethanol-reinforced responding across the two concurrent conditions. Thus the dose-effect curve relating chlordiazepoxide and ethanol self-administration can be altered, dependent upon the nature of the concurrently available reinforcers.     

Accountability and ideology: When left looks right and right looks left

Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems.     

Fuzzy Genes: Epistemic Tensions in Genomics

Genomics contributed to making modern biology a prolific multi-disciplinary field leading to new approaches such as systems biology. Reporting in the media reflects the high stakes involved in these changes, but such reporting often appears inconsistent as contradictory claims are made about new applications contrasting with uncertainties from new insights. Such inconsistent claims might relate to different disciplines involved in the field. New approaches from engineering disciplines such as computer science have changed research practices and approaches towards the object; the meaning of genes having become context-dependent. Since disciplines must cooperate, tensions arise over methods, evidence criteria and the significance of hypotheses. The concept of epistemic cultures, developed to highlight differences between distant fields such as high-energy physics and molecular biology, can render insights into the ‘cultures’ related to practices and approaches within genomics. Qualitative interviews with scientists shed light on how computer science and experimental molecular biology co-operate and which problems arise from epistemic differences as the criteria for relevant findings become subject to the disciplinary context. In addition, genomics-like approaches have entered other fields of biological research, whilst systems biology further challenges hypothesis-driven experimentation. This may lead to a new epistemic culture differing from the one previously described. These findings provide insights into how different accounts arise and shed light on general properties of prolific multi-disciplinary research fields. Inconsistencies in the way such fields appear from outside might be considered normal rather than the exception.     

Outcome-specific transfer between predictive and instrumental learning is unaffected by extinction but reversed by counterconditioning in human participants

Three experiments were conducted to explore the effects of different interference treatments upon outcome-specific transfer from predictive learning to instrumental responding. A computer game was designed in which participants had to defend Andalusia from navy and air-force attacks. Participants learned the relationship between two instrumental responses (two keys in a standard keyboard) and two different outcomes (destruction of the ships or destruction of the planes). Then, they learned to predict which of two different cues predicted either outcome. Finally, participants were allowed to give either of the two instrumental responses in the presence of each cue. Outcome-specific transfer was shown as a preference for the response that shared the outcome with the current cue. Extinction of the cue before the transfer test had no effect upon transfer, regardless of the level of extinction (Experiments 1-3). However, pairing the cue with the alternative outcome (counterconditioning) reversed the outcome-based transfer effect (Experiment 3). The implications of these results for the contents of extinction in human predictive learning are discussed.     

Is it even worth it? The effect of loss prospects in the outcome distribution of a public goods dilemma

Contributions to public goods are premised on the expectation that the collective will realize benefit in excess of the value of required contributions. However, past research has focused on public goods of fixed and known value, for which the added value of the produced public good is obvious. Research has largely ignored public goods whose eventual value is uncertain at the time contribution decisions are made. Two studies explored the effects of outcome variance on individuals’ contributions to a public good and their reasons for contributing. Contributions were negatively affected by loss prospects in the distribution of possible outcomes. Further, loss prospects directly discouraged contributions because of loss aversion, and indirectly discouraged contributions by fueling fears that others would not contribute. The negative effects of loss prospects were stronger when social uncertainty was low. Implications for social dilemma research and the effective management of collective action are discussed.