Money does not bring well‐being,but it does help! The relationship between financial resources and life satisfaction of the chronically ill mediated by social deprivation and loneliness

Chronically ill people have lower incomes and higher illness‐related costs than the general population. Therefore, their financial situation can be considered vulnerable, like their health. The aims of this study were (1) to assess the strength of the relationship between financial resources and life satisfaction of patients with chronic physical illness and (2) to investigate the mediating roles of social deprivation and loneliness in this relationship. Data were used of 1265 patients diagnosed with one or more somatic chronic disease(s), aged 25 years and older, who were recruited from 56 general practices in The Netherlands. GPs provided data on diagnoses and illness duration; chronically ill patients provided data on their functional status, financial situation, social deprivation, loneliness and life satisfaction. Data were analysed by means of correlation and linear regression analyses as well as LISREL path analysis. Available income correlates 0.13 with life satisfaction, which is similar to correlations found in general Western populations. The effect of available income on life satisfaction is mainly an indirect effect that can be explained by the mediating roles of social deprivation and loneliness. Policy should pay specific attention to income support of the chronically ill and disabled in order to improve their opportunities for social participation and increase the quality of their life. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Its own reward: lessons to be drawn from the reversed-reward contingency paradigm

This is a review of the reversed-reward contingency (RRC) paradigm in animals and the cognitive functions on which it is founded. I shall present the RRC basic paradigm and the ensuing modifications it underwent, the animals tested, the results obtained and the analyses offered within the literature. Then I would the claim that RRC is a case of a compound cognitive behavior, one that is the result of interactions between three other cognitive functions: crude numerical assessment and economic choice (uniting value assignment and behavioral inhibition). I will present data concerning these three fields and will demonstrate how they are both affecting and affected by the findings of the RRC scheme. RRC is treated here as a test case for a broader type of analysis, one which, hopefully, will show that in order to fully understand composite and complex behavior we need to meticulously explore its building blocks and their dynamic interplay.

Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses

Six studies investigated the relationship between production and comprehension by examining how relative clause production mechanisms influence the probabilistic information used by comprehenders to understand these structures. Two production experiments show that accessibility-based mechanisms that are influenced by noun animacy and verb type shape relative clause production. Two corpus studies confirm these production mechanisms in naturally occurring productions. Two comprehension studies found that nouns and verb types occurring in structures that speakers do not produce are difficult to comprehend. Specifically, the probability of producing a passive structure for a verb type in a given animacy configuration, as measured in the production and corpus studies, predicts comprehension difficulty in active structures. Results suggest that the way in which the verb roles are typically mapped onto syntactic arguments in production plays a role in comprehension. Implications for the relationship between production, comprehension and language learning are discussed.     

Lean and mean rats: Some effects of acute changes in the food supply upon territorial aggression

In experiment 1, individually housed rats subjected to short-term food restriction displayed more territorial aggression toward conspecific intruders than controls maintained on a free-feeding diet. In experiment 2, small groups of three adult male rats had access to either a standard laboratory diet or the standard diet plus sucrose. Groups with the sucrose supplement were significantly less aggressive toward intruders than controls. Sucrose availability did not produce appreciable gains in body weight but it did reliably decrease within-colony weight variation. The results suggest the existence of an effective dietary mechanism that enables a social species such as Rattus norvegicus to tolerate each other in dense feeding aggregations when food is abundant. Conversely, when food is limited, social intolerance increases and serves to limit the development of large feeding groups.     

Effects of qualitatively different reinforcers on the parameters of the response-strength equation.

This experiment examined the relationship between two qualitatively different reinforcers and the parameters of a quantitative model of reinforced responding, referred to as the response-strength equation or the Herrnstein equation. A group of rats was first food deprived and later water deprived. An 11.5% sucrose solution served as the reinforcer in the food-deprivation condition, and water was the reinforcer in the water-deprivation condition. Each experimental session consisted of a series of seven variable-interval schedules, providing reinforcement rates that varied between 20 and 1,200 reinforcers per hour. The response rates increased in a negatively accelerating function in a manner consistent with the response-strength equation. This equation has two fitted parameters, k and Re. According to one theory, the k parameter is a measure of motor performance, and Re is indicative of the relative reinforcement efficacy of the background uncontrollable sources of reinforcement in relation to the experimentally arranged reinforcer. In this study, k did not change as a result of the different reinforcers, but Re was significantly larger in the sucrose-reinforcement condition. These results are consistent with the interpretation that k and Re measure two independent and experimentally distinguishable parameters and provide further evidence that absolute response rate is a function of relative reinforcement rate, as implied by the derivation of the response-strength equation based on the matching law.     

A RESPONSE-RESTRICTION ANALYSIS OF STEREOTYPY IN ADOLESCENTS WITH MENTAL RETARDATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

The behavior of 4 adolescents with severe or profound mental retardation was evaluated in the presence of four sets of materials during periods of unstructured leisure activity. Functional engagement with the materials, stereotypic engagement with the materials, stereotypy without interaction with the materials, and other aberrant behaviors were recorded. Across a series of experimental conditions, the number of sets of materials was reduced from four to one by eliminating the set most frequently manipulated in each preceding condition. In the final condition, four sets of materials were again made available for manipulation. The procedures replicated Green and Striefel's (1988) response-restriction analysis of the activity preferences and play behaviors of children with autism. In general, the results of the present experiment replicate those of Green and Striefel in that reallocation of responding was idiosyncratic and unpredictable as sets of materials were removed. Nevertheless, the results provided insight into how responding might be reallocated if it were restricted through behavioral interventions rather than by restriction of access. Thus, the results are discussed with respect to how response-restriction analyses may be useful in identifying topographies of behavior that could be included in differential reinforcement contingencies that are designed to affect stereotypic behavior and in the selection and arrangement of environmental stimuli to minimize the presence of evokers of stereotypy.     

Topography of signal-centered behavior in the rat: Effects of deprivation state and reinforcer type

In a series of three experiments, groups of food-deprived and water-deprived rats were given pairings of a retractable lever (CS⁺) with response-independent deliveries of either solid or liquid reinforcers. In Experiment 1 food-deprived rats given a solid-pellet reinforcer differentially tended to sniff, paw, mouth, and bite the CS⁺ lever more often than a lever that was not paired with food (CS⁻), whereas food-deprived rats given a liquid reinforcer tended to differentially sniff, paw, and lick the CS⁺ lever. 23½-hour water-deprived rats given liquid reinforcers showed very little CS⁺ contact. In Experiment 2 increasing the severity of water deprivation from 23½ to 47½ hours significantly increased CS⁺ contact. In Experiment 3, subjects that were simultaneously food and water deprived and given a water reinforcer failed to exhibit differential CS⁺ contact, but subjects that were simultaneously food and water deprived and given a food reinforcer did acquire differential CS⁺-contact behavior. These results suggest that (a) even under a single motivational state the nature of signal-centered behavior can be determined by type of reinforcer, (b) although water reinforcement produces less signal contact than food reinforcement, this can be facilitated with more severe water-deprivation levels, and (c) high CS-contact rates using food reinforcement are not simply a product of reductions in body weight with food deprivation.     

Falsification of matching theory: changes in the asymptote of Herrnstein''s hyperbola as a function of water deprivation.

Five rats pressed levers on variable-interval schedules of water reinforcement at various levels of water deprivation. In one phase of the experiment, three deprivation conditions that replicated conditions in Heyman and Monaghan (1987) were arranged, along with three less extreme deprivation conditions. In a second phase, water deprivation was arranged so that subjects were exposed to a greater range of access to water per day. Herrnstein's hyperbola described the rats' response-rate data well. The y asymptote, k, of the hyperbola appeared roughly constant over the conditions that replicated those of Heyman and Monaghan, but decreased markedly when less extreme deprivation conditions were included. In addition, k varied systematically when the second method of arranging deprivation was used. These results falsify a strong form of matching theory and confirm predictions made by linear system theory.     

Effects of body weight on discriminative-stimulus control by phencyclidine in the pigeon.

Using a color-tracking procedure with responses reinforced under a second-order schedule, the discriminative-stimulus properties of phencyclidine were studied in pigeons maintained at 70%, 80%, or 90% of their free-feeding weights. The generalization curves for phencyclidine were similar at all three body weights. Generalization curves for pentobarbital, d-amphetamine, and saline were also unrelated to body weight. These data suggest that food deprivation may not influence the discriminative-stimulus properties of drugs in the way that it influences the reinforcing-stimulus properties of drugs. The reason may be that during discrimination training interoceptive stimuli resulting from food deprivation do not become conditioned to the stimulus properties of the drug, because the food-deprivation stimuli are paired equally often with the presence and absence of drug stimuli.     

Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given the words that have been heard so far. To calculate the predictions of this metric, Wilson and Carroll's (1954) original entropy reduction idea is extended to infinite languages. This is demonstrated with a mildly context-sensitive language that includes relative clauses formed on a variety of grammatical relations across the Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977). Predictions are derived that correlate significantly with repetition accuracy results obtained in a sentence-memory experiment (Keenan & Hawkins, 1987).