Acquisition and maintenance of trusting behavior

This study determined whether a two-person exchange situation contained natural contingencies for trusting behavior or whether external contingencies were necessary. Pairs of college students worked matching-to-sample problems for money. On each trial there was one problem and the subjects determined which of them would solve it. Trusting behavior was defined as an increase in the number of consecutive problems each subject allowed his partner to work during sessions that also ended with an equitable distribution. Simply, trust was a temporary deviation from equity. A subject could give the problem to the other person (cooperate), or not respond and let the other person take the problem (share). Other possibilities were for both subjects to try to take the problem (complete), or for neither subject to respond and thereby let the person who worked the last problem also work the next one (passive trust). When only four lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (no external contingencies to reach either equity or trust) subjects reached equity, but only minimal trust (strict alternation of single problems) developed in 18 sessions. When 30 or 60 lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (smaller response requirement for passive trust and therefore a contingency for trust), trusting behavior developed after a few sessions (fixed ratio 30) or after several trials of the first session (fixed ratio 60) and it ordinarily expanded gradually to 10 to 15 consecutive problems through passive trust. The aversiveness of the inequity involved in trusting appears to necessitate a contingency for acquisition. Once trust develops, however, this aversiveness is reduced as subjects learn the inequity is only temporary (e.g., once trust was acquired at fixed ratio 60 it was maintained at fixed ratio 4, which would not initially produce it), and the direction of the inequity appears to become of questionable importance (e.g., being behind was alternated over rather than within sessions and usually not in a systematic manner).     

Challenges of patient‐led mental health services to psychoanalytic clinicians

This paper considers implications to psychoanalytic psychotherapy of the British Government's decision to implement a patient choice agenda for state‐funded mental health services in England and Wales. It places the patient choice agenda in the context of consumerist society and argues that the complex nature of psychoanalytic psychotherapy leaves it more vulnerable than other psychological therapy modalities to compete in the current reality of ‘consumer’‐led public mental health, which, in turn reflects a profoundly changed social context from that to which psychoanalysis traces its roots. Unless psychoanalytic clinicians recognize and find ways to adjust to this context they will jeopardize the survival of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in an increasingly market‐orientated model of mental healthcare provision in the public sector, eager to promote more ‘consumer friendly’ psychological therapy models.     

The contradictory effects of nostalgic advertisements on nostalgia for products and on remembering advertisements1

Our purpose was to investigate the relationships between the names of items that easily evoke nostalgic feelings and nostalgic advertisements from the perspective of nostalgia for the names of these items and from the perspective of source monitoring. We measured the effect of nostalgia on source monitoring and whether the names of items evoked nostalgic feelings when they were presented alone. We found that, from the perspective of the nostalgic feelings, we directly demonstrated that the names of articles that easily evoke nostalgic feelings are more likely to evoke nostalgia when they are presented with nostalgic advertisements than when they are presented with non‐nostalgic advertisements. From the perspective of source monitoring, we revealed that nostalgic advertisements are more forgettable than non‐nostalgic advertisements when they present the names of articles that easily evoke nostalgic feelings.     

Harnessing the wandering mind: The role of perceptual load

Perceptual load is a key determinant of distraction by task-irrelevant stimuli (e.g., Lavie, N. (2005). Distracted and confused?: Selective attention under load. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 75-82). Here we establish the role of perceptual load in determining an internal form of distraction by task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs or “mind-wandering”).Four experiments demonstrated reduced frequency of TUTs with high compared to low perceptual load in a visual-search task. Alternative accounts in terms of increased demands on responses, verbal working memory or motivation were ruled out and clear effects of load were found for unintentional TUTs. Individual differences in load effects on internal (TUTs) and external (response-competition) distractors were correlated. These results suggest that exhausting attentional capacity in task-relevant processing under high perceptual load can reduce processing of task-irrelevant information from external and internal sources alike.     

Can Competition Ever be Fair? Challenging the Standard Prejudice

In this paper, we challenge the usual argument which says that competition is a fair mechanism because it ranks individuals according to their relative preferences between effort and leisure. This argument, we claim, is very insufficient as a justification of fairness in competition, and we show that it does not stand up to scrutiny once various dynamic aspects of competition are taken into account. Once the sequential unfolding of competition is taken into account, competition turns out to be unfair even if the usual fairness argument is upheld. We distinguish between two notions of fairness, which we call U-fairness, where U stands for the usual fairness notion, and S-fairness, where S stands for the sequential aspect of competition. The sequential unfairness of competition, we argue, comprises two usually neglected aspects connected with losses of freedom: first of all, there is an eclipse of preferences in the sense that even perfectly calculating competitors do not carry out a trade-off between effort and ranking; and second, competitive dynamics leads to single-mindedness because the constraints on the competitors choices always operate in the sense of increased competitiveness and, therefore, in the direction of an increased effort requirements. We argue (1) that competition is S-unfair even if it is U-fair, (2) that as S-unfairness increases, the ethical relevance of U-fairness itself vanishes, so that (3) by focusing as they usually do on U-fairness alone, economists neglect a deeper aspect of unfairness.     

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) holding on to memories: response competition causes retroactive interference effects

Five experiments on honeybees examined how the learning of a second task interferes with what was previously learned. Free flying bees were tested for landmark-based memory in variations on a paradigm of retroactive interference. Bees first learned Task 1, were tested on Task 1 (Test 1), then learned Task 2, and were tested again on Task 1 (Test 2). A 60-min delay (waiting in a box) before Test 2 caused no performance decrements. If the two tasks had conflicting response requirements, (e.g., target right of a green landmark in Task 1 and left of a blue landmark in Task 2), then a strong decrement on Test 2 was found (retroactive interference effect). When response competition was minimised during training or testing, however, the decrement on Test 2 was small or nonexistent. The results implicate response competition as a major contributor to the retroactive interference effect. The honeybee seems to hold on to memories; new memories do not wipe out old ones.     

Representation and competition in the perception of spoken words

We present data from four experiments using cross-modal priming to examine the effects of competitor environment on lexical activation during the time course of the perception of a spoken word. The research is conducted from the perspective of a distributed model of speech perception and lexical representation, which focuses on activation at the level of lexical content. In this model, the strength of competition between simultaneously active lexical items depends on the degree of coherence between their distributed semantic and phonological representations. Consistent with this model, interference effects are more complete when the purely semantic aspects of these coactive representations are probed (using semantic priming) than when phonological aspects are probed as well (using repetition priming).     

Gender-Role Congruence and Self-Referencing as Determinants of Advertising Effectiveness

In an initial experiment, men and women with varied gender-role orientations evaluated gender-stereotyped and nonstereotyped advertisements for gendered products that are actually used by both sexes. Consistent with a gender-role congruence model of advertising effectiveness, traditional participants (masculine men; feminine women) responded more favorably to traditional (i.e., gender-stereotyped) than to nontraditional advertisements, whereas nontraditional participants (androgynous individuals; feminine men; masculine women) reacted somewhat more favorably to the nontraditional advertisements. Experiment 2 revealed that when encouraged to self reference, traditional participants became much more responsive to nontraditional advertisements, even more so than were the nontraditional participants. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Assessing the role of alternative response rates and reinforcer rates in resistance to extinction of target responding when combining stimuli

Studies of behavioral momentum reveal that reinforcing an alternative response in the presence of a target response reduces the rate of target responding but increases its persistence, relative to training the target response on its own. Because of the parallels between these studies and differential‐reinforcement techniques to reduce problem behavior in clinical settings, alternative techniques to reduce problem behavior without enhancing its persistence are being explored. One potential solution is to train an alternative response in a separate stimulus context from problem behavior before combining the alternative stimulus with the target stimulus. The present study assessed how differences in reinforcement contingencies and rate for alternative responding influenced resistance to extinction of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli in pigeons. Across three experiments, alternative stimuli signaling a response–reinforcer dependency and greater reinforcer rates more effectively decreased the persistence of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli within the same extinction tests, but not when compared across separate extinction tests. Overall, these findings reveal that differences in competition between alternative and target responding produced by contingencies of alternative reinforcement could influence the effectiveness of treating problem behavior through combining stimulus contexts.     

Some conditions affecting the choice to cooperate or compete

Three experiments investigated conditions affecting the choice to cooperate or compete. Experiment I compared the effects first of an individual activity, then of a competitive task as an alternative to cooperation. For both comparisons, subjects could earn more by cooperating. Choice of competition, but not individual activity, was found to depend on the task choice contingencies. Competition predominated when both subjects could compete if either or both chose competition. Previously competitive pairs cooperated when both subjects could cooperate if either or both chose cooperation. Experiment II investigated the effects of differences in magnitude of the reinforcers for cooperating or competing. Choice between the two alternatives was manipulated in all pairs by varying reinforcer difference. Competition was chosen over cooperation only within the limits within which competition was potentially profitable. Experiment III replicated the findings of Experiment II using triads. Subjects in triads, however, were more likely to withdraw from the experiment. Thus, the data for pairs and triads suggest an orderly relation between reinforcer difference for cooperating or competing and task choice. Motivation of subjects to maximize relative gain by competing can be overridden by moderate reinforcer differences favoring cooperation.