Relative contributions of aggression and reproduction to behavioral endocrinology

Reproductive activity has been the behavior of choice for research in behavioral endocrinology. Why this is so and the consequences to the study of aggression and to behavioral endocrinology in general are explored.     

Protective factors and behavioral adjustment in preschool children of Iranian Martyrs

Out of 228 Iranian preschool Martyrs' children whose behaviour adjustment in the nursery settings was screened using the Preschool Behaviour Checklist, 12 well adjusted, zero scorers were compared with 8 poorly adjusted, high scorers. Using the parent's Behaviour Checklist, high scorers showed significantly more problems at home than zero scorers. On the Malaise Inventory, mothers of high scorers showed poorer mental health than mothers of zero scorers. Home observations showed that mother-child interaction was more aversive in high scorers than in zero scorers. More mothers of zero scorers had remarried.     

Unit price as a useful metric in analyzing effects of reinforcer magnitude.

In this paper, we applied the behavioral-economic concept of unit price to the study of reinforcer magnitude in an attempt to provide a consistent account of the effects of reinforcer magnitude on behavior. Recent research in the experimental analysis of behavior and in behavioral pharmacology suggests that reinforcer magnitude interacts with the schedule of reinforcement to determine response rate and total consumption. The utility of the unit-price concept thus stems from its ability to quantify this interaction as a cost-benefit ratio (i.e., unit price = characteristics of the schedule of reinforcement divided by magnitude of reinforcement). Research employing the unit-price concept has shown that as unit price increases, a positively decelerating function exists for consumption (i.e., a function with an increasingly negative slope, when plotted on log coordinates) and a bitonic function exists for response rate. Based on these findings, the present analysis applied the unit-price concept to those studies of reinforcer magnitude and drug self-administration that examined the effects of reinforcer magnitude on response rate using simple schedules of reinforcement (e.g., fixed-ratio schedule). This resulted in three findings: (a) Reinforcer-magnitude manipulations and schedule manipulations interact in a manner that can be quantified in terms of unit price as benefit and cost factors, respectively; (b) different reinforcer-magnitude manipulations are functionally interchangeable as benefit factors in the unit-price ratio; and (c) these conclusions appear warranted despite the differences in reinforcers (food or drug), species (dogs, monkeys, or rats), and schedules (interval or ratio), and despite the fact that these studies were not designed for a unit-price analysis. In methodological terms, these results provide further evidence that employing the unit-price concept is a parsimonious method for examining the effects of reinforcer magnitude. In theoretical terms, these results suggest that a single process may underlie the effect of combined reinforcer-magnitude and schedule manipulations.     

ANALYSIS OF A HIGH-PROBABILITY INSTRUCTIONAL SEQUENCE AND TIME-OUT IN THE TREATMENT OF CHILD NONCOMPLIANCE

This study evaluated the effectiveness of high-probability requests and time-out as treatments for noncompliance that appeared to be maintained by contingent attention in 2 developmental normal children. The introduction of high-probability requests increased compliance for 1 child but not the other. Time-out was effective with both children, and improvements in compliance were maintained at an 8-week follow-up.     

Adaptive rewiring in weighted networks

Human connectome studies suggest that the brain has a modular small world network structure with rich-club effect. Such structure emerges spontaneously in simple model neural networks, (e.g. coupled maps), through adaptive rewiring according to the dynamic functional connectivity. The utility of adaptive rewiring has so far exclusively been demonstrated for unweighted networks; it is anything but guaranteed to work as well for weighted networks. We investigate adaptive rewiring in weighted networks, comparing various right-skewed, symmetrical, and left-skewed fixed weight distributions. We examine how network clustering, path length, modularity, and rich club coefficients develop for weakly, intermediate and strongly coupled networks. At low coupling strength, the weight distribution, as well as episodes of functional synchrony, have a significant effect on network evolution. With increased coupling strengths, all weighted networks robustly develop architectures similar to the unweighted ones. Adaptive rewiring appears relatively ineffective in networks with (biologically implausibly) extreme right-skewed weight distributions but performed most economically in biologically plausible log-normal distributions.     

Speaker identification using multi-modal i-vector approach for varying length speech in voice interactive systems

The development in the interface of smart devices has lead to voice interactive systems. An additional step in this direction is to enable the devices to recognize the speaker. But this is a challenging task because the interaction involves short duration speech utterances. The traditional Gaussian mixture models (GMM) based systems have achieved satisfactory results for speaker recognition only when the speech lengths are sufficiently long. The current state-of-the-art method utilizes i-vector based approach using a GMM based universal background model (GMM-UBM). It prepares an i-vector speaker model from a speaker’s enrollment data and uses it to recognize any new test speech. In this work, we propose a multi-model i-vector system for short speech lengths. We use an open database THUYG-20 for the analysis and development of short speech speaker verification and identification system. By using an optimum set of mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) based features we are able to achieve an equal error rate (EER) of 3.21% as compared to the previous benchmark score of EER 4.01% on the THUYG-20 database. Experiments are conducted for speech lengths as short as 0.25 s and the results are presented. The proposed method shows improvement as compared to the current i-vector based approach for shorter speech lengths. We are able to achieve improvement of around 28% even for 0.25 s speech samples. We also prepared and tested the proposed approach on our own database with 2500 speech recordings in English language consisting of actual short speech commands used in any voice interactive system.     

The controversy around the concept of archetypes

The paper reviews the course of the controversy surrounding Jung's theory of archetypes beginning in the mid 1990s and continuing to the present. Much of this controversy was concerned with the debate between the essentialism of the evolutionary position of Anthony Stevens as found in his 1983 book Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self, and the emergence model of the archetypes proposed in various publications by Hogenson, Knox and Merchant, among others. The paper then moves on to a consideration of more recent developments in theory, particularly as derived from an examination of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who introduces Bergson's somnambulistic unconscious into the discussion of Jung's theories. It is suggested that this largely unexamined influence on Jung may provide answers to some of the unanswered questions surrounding his theorizing. The paper concludes by suggesting that the notion of the somnambulistic unconscious may resemble Atmanspacher's argument for a dual‐aspect monism interpretation of Jung.     

Anxiety Influences the Perceptual-Motor Calibration of Visually Guided Braking to Avoid Collisions

We investigated whether anxiety influences perceptual-motor calibration in a braking to avoid a collision task. Participants performed either a discrete braking task (Experiment 1) or a continuous braking task (Experiment 2), with the goal of stopping before colliding with a stop sign. Half of participants performed the braking task after an anxiety induction. We investigated whether anxiety reduced the frequency of crashing and if it influenced the calibration of perception (visual information) and action (brake pressure) dynamically between-trials in Experiment 1 and within-trials in Experiment 2. In the discrete braking task, anxious participants crashed less often and made larger corrective adjustments trial-to-trial after crashing, suggesting that the influence of anxiety on behavior did not occur uniformly, but rather dynamically with anxiety amplifying the reaction to previous crashes. However, when performing continuous braking, anxious participants crashed more often, and their within-trial adjustments of deceleration were less related to visual information compared to controls. Taken together, these findings suggest that the timescale and nature of the task mediates the influence of anxiety on the performance of goal-directed actions.     

A Systems Approach to the Treatment of Chemical Addiction

Therapists are increasingly considering chemical addiction from a family systems perspective. Effects of chemical dependency upon the family are discussed and intervention approaches aimed toward assisting the family as families redefine themselves and change their structure are considered. The integration of chemical dependency treatment and the family therapy is also discussed as it is practiced in an intensive outpatient program at a psychiatric hospital.