Use of Anticipatory Cues to Reduce Dependence on Physical Prompts by an Adolescent with Multiple Disabilities

Anticipatory cues (vibratory stimulation activated through remote control) were used in this study to help an adolescent with multiple disabilities to reduce his dependence on the caregiver's physical prompts. The results show that anticipatory cues were effective in helping the adolescent perform practical daily responses independently of physical prompts. Towards the end of the study, the adolescent could also perform increasingly independently of the anticipatory cues. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Emotional responses to a negative emotion induction procedure in Borderline Personality Disorder

The aim of this study was to determine if patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) present higher emotional response than healthy controls in a laboratory setting. Fifty participants (35 patients with BPD and 15 healthy controls) underwent a negative emotion induction procedure (presentation of standardized unpleasant images). Subjective emotional responses were assessed by means of self-reported questionnaires while biological reactivity during the procedure was measured through levels of salivary cortisol (sCORT) and alphaamylase (sAA). Patients with BPD exhibited significant lower cortisol levels and higher sAA levels compared to controls. Self-reported emotional reactivity did not give rise to differences between groups but participants with BPD did present higher levels of negative emotional intensity at baseline and during the entire procedure. The findings do not give support to the emotional hyperreactivity hypothesis in BPD. However, BPD patients presented heightened negative mood intensity at baseline, which should be considered a hallmark of the disorder. Further studies using more BPD-specific emotion inductions are needed to confirm the trends observed in this study.     

Personality traits and affective states: Relationships with and without affect induction

Substantial evidence shows that extraversion is related to positive affect (PA) and neuroticism is related to negative affect (NA), and there are several possible explanations for these relationships. The current paper replicates these findings and examines relationships between the other Big Five traits with general positive and negative states (N = 257). Agreeableness was negatively related to NA, while conscientiousness and openness were positively related to PA. Next, affect was induced and extraversion and conscientiousness predicted changes in affect following an affect-induction (N = 262). The current findings support some theoretical understandings of broad personality traits and their relationships to general affect, and also suggests some refinements.     

Effects of induced and naturalistic mood on the temporal allocation of attention to emotional information

Building upon recent findings that affective states can influence the allocation of spatial attention, we investigate how state, trait and induced mood are related to the temporal allocation of attention to emotional information. In the present study, 125 unscreened undergraduates completed a modified rapid serial visual presentation task designed to assess the time course of attention to positive and negative information, comparing a neutral baseline mood induction to either a positive or negative mood induction. Induced negative mood facilitated attentional engagement to positive information while decreasing attentional engagement to negative information. Greater naturally occurring negative state mood was associated with faster or more efficient disengagement of attention from negative information in the presence of manipulated negative mood, relative to baseline. The engagement findings were inconsistent with our mood-congruence hypotheses and may be better explained by mood repair or affective counter-regulation theories. In contrast, the disengagement findings for state mood were somewhat consistent with our mood-congruence hypotheses. The relationship between mood and attention to emotional information may differ depending on the combination of attentional mechanism (engagement versus disengagement), aspect of mood (state, trait or induced), stimulus valence (positive versus negative) and timescale (early versus late) under investigation.     

对妊娠晚期畸形胎儿实施致死性引产的可行性分析

在妊娠晚期发现胎儿畸形,许多胎儿父母要求引产。一些患儿父母因为在医院引产出活体畸形婴儿而与医院产生纠纷。本文考虑采用医疗方法在引产前或引产中使胎儿心跳停止,确保引产出的胎儿为死婴（即致死性引产）以减少纠纷,利于社会。本文试图从医疗、伦理、法律的角度,探讨在胎儿父母要求下,对妊娠晚期畸形胎儿实施致死性引产的可行性。     

Is manipulation of mood a critical component of cognitive bias modification procedures?

This paper investigates whether changes in mood state are an important component of cognitive bias modification (CBM) procedures. In a novel CBM procedure participants read either positive or negative statements relating to social issues for 5 min. Interpretation bias was measured by means of a scrambled sentence test, which was presented both before and after the CBM procedure. Participants who read the positive statements made more positive resolutions to the scrambled sentences, while participants who read the negative statements made more negative resolutions. Thus, the appropriate positive and negative interpretative biases were induced by the CBM procedure. However, significant mood changes also occurred following CBM. In Experiment 2, a musical mood induction procedure was presented with depressing or elating music. As before, a scrambled sentence test was presented both before and after the musical mood induction. Mood changed in accordance with the valence of the music to the same extent as with CBM. Critically however, performance on the scrambled sentence task did not change for both groups. This demonstrates that a change in mood state is not sufficient for a change in cognitive bias to occur.     

A Negative Mood Induction Procedure with Efficacy Across Repeated Administrations in Women

Although several experimental techniques are effective in inducing negative mood, none has established efficacy over repeated testing. The lack of mood induction tools validated across repeated administrations impedes study of emotional changes in the same individual over time. A brief, sad mood induction combining music and an autobiographical memory was administered to 17 women on 6 occasions (two 3-day sets over a 2-week period of time). Mood was measured before and after the induction procedure. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that the induction produced a large increase in POMS depression (d = 1.48) that recurred consistently across all testing days. A brief negative mood induction combining music and autobiographical memory appears suitable for use in studies that involve repeated administrations.     

Instability, Modus ponens and uncertainty of deduction

Considering the instability of nonlinear dynamics, the deductive inference rule Modus ponens itself is not enough to guarantee the validity of reasoning sequences in the real physical world, and similar results cannot necessarily be obtained from similar causes. Some kind of stability hypothesis should be added in order to draw meaningful conclusions. Hence, the uncertainty of deductive inference appears to be like that of inductive inference, and the asymmetry between deduction and induction becomes unrecognizable such as to undermine the basis for the fundamental cleavage between analytic truth and synthetic truth, as W. V. O. Quine pointed out. Induction is not inferior to deduction from a pragmatic point of view.     

Making the sour sweet? Upcoming food-pellet reinforcement produces positive induction when rats press a lever for unsweetened lemon juice

Research has suggested that rats increase their response rate for a low-valued reinforcer when a high-valued reinforcer will soon be available (i.e., positive induction) because the value of the low-valued substance has increased. The present study tested if such a procedure could be used to increase rats’ responding for a non-reinforcing food. Rats pressed a lever for unsweetened lemon juice in the first half of a 50-min session and, in treatment conditions, for food pellets in the second half. Experiment 1 demonstrated that rates of responding for the lemon juice generally varied directly with the upcoming rate of food-pellet reinforcement and that responding in lemon juice-only sessions did not differ significantly from that observed during extinction. Experiment 2 demonstrated that rats consumed more lemon juice following a condition in which they were displaying positive induction than following a condition in which they only responded for lemon juice. The present results are consistent with the increase in value account of positive induction. More importantly, they may indicate that certain environmental conditions can increase food-directed behavior for a non-reinforcing food, a finding which may have implications for our understanding of eating behavior and dysfunctions (e.g., overeating).     

Discovering syntactic deep structure via Bayesian statistics

In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner's job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the patterns of regular and irregular syntactic constructions listed in the lexicon. Specifically, the learner discovers what transformations apply in the language, how often they apply, and in what contexts. It considers simpler systems of transformations to be more probable a priori. Experiments show that the learned transformations are more effective than previous statistical models at predicting the probabilities of lexical entries, especially those for which the learner had no direct evidence.