TOKEN REINFORCEMENT DURING THE INSTATEMENT AND SHAPING OF FLUENCY IN THE TREATMENT OF STUTTERING

The value of token reinforcement in the instatement and shaping of fluency was examined in an intensive treatment program for adult stutterers. Experiment 1 examined the effect of removing the tangible back-up reinforcers for the token system and found that clients' performance in the program was equally good with or without these back-up reinforcers, suggesting that a strict token economy may not be crucial to rapid progress through treatment. Experiment 2 compared contingent and noncontingent token reinforcement, while controlling for some variables that may have confounded the results of earlier research, and found no difference in clients' performance. Experiment 3 examined the effect of the entire removal of token reinforcement. Performance was found to be no worse under a “no tokens” system than under a system of tokens with back-up reinforcers. It is argued that in a highly structured treatment program where many other reinforcers are operating, token reinforcement may be largely redundant. Clinical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Motivated Closed‐Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism

In this article we synthesize theory and research from several areas of psychology and political science to propose and test a causal model of the effects of threat on political attitudes. Based in part on prior research showing that fear, threat, and anxiety decrease cognitive capacity and motivation, we hypothesize that under high (vs. low) threat, people will seek to curtail open‐ended information searches and exhibit motivated closed‐mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure). The subjective desire for certainty, control, and closure, in turn, is expected to increase the individual's affinity for political conservatism, insofar as resistance to change and adherence to authority figures and conventional forms of morality are assumed to satisfy these epistemic motives more successfully than their ideological opposites. Consistent with this account, we find in Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit an increase in motivated closed‐mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous. Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases self‐reported conservatism (or decreases self‐reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by closed‐mindedness. In Study 3, we manipulated closed‐mindedness directly and found that high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic) party. Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led center‐right politicians to score higher on closed‐mindedness and issue‐based political conservatism. Implications for society and for the theory of ideology as motivated social cognition are discussed.     

An experimental analysis of the cost of food in a closed economy.

Rats lived in individual chambers in which the only food available was delivered for lever pressing. During Stage I, a fixed number of presses was required for each food pellet. As this fixed ratio of presses per food pellet was increased daily, a rat's daily intake of food was reduced. During Stage II, the cost of a food pellet was increased by replacing each fixed ratio with its interval equivalent. Each interval was a rat's mean time between the first press of a ratio and the delivery of a pellet during Stage I. During Stage II, only two presses were every required for a food pellet: The first press initiated a delay and the second activated the pellet dispenser after that delay elapsed. Food intakes for the series of fixed ratios and a rat's series of delay equivalents were very similar when plotted as a function of delay, but not when plotted as a function of presses per pellet. Consequently, the fixed ratio reduced food intake because larger ratios increased delay to food from the first press of a ratio. Observations and an analysis of interresponse times further revealed that as the fixed ratio increased, and local as well as overall rate of food intake decreased, lever pressing became more stereotyped. Because this increased stereotypy resulted in greatly increased rates of lever pressing, delay to food was minimized, and perhaps more importantly, so too was the reduction of a rat's baseline daily intake.     

Cosmology: What One Needs to Know

Cosmology, the study of the universe, has a past, which is reviewed here. The standard model—the Big Bang, or the hot, dense early universe that is still expanding—is based on observations that are basically consistent but which require additional input to improve the agreement. Out of the early universe came the galaxies and stars that shine today. The future of the universe depends on the density of matter: too much mass leads to the Big Crunch; too little leads to eternal expans ion and cooling. The dark-matter problem prevents us from knowing which will be the fate of the universe. Thelimits of what may be called "scientific" are addressed.     

Space and time in psychoanalytic listening1

The analytic situation is by definition traumatic because it evokes hilflosigkeit, the state of helplessness of the newborn infant, which is the prototype of the traumatic situation, and at the origin of the experience of anxiety. The author addresses the chain of associations between the state of helplessness, repetition compulsion, trauma, infantile sexuality, pleasure and displeasure, which lie at the core of the transference experience, and which find their ultimate expression in the analyst's listening. The discovery of the compulsion to repeat instituted a paradigmatic shift in Freud's formulations, emphasizing the process of repetition of trauma, and instituting a link between the network of concepts indicated above. In the clinical example discussed, the author defines the psychoanalytic process by the primacy of sexuality, the erotic passivation in the transference that evokes the traumatic childhood sexual scene. Sexuality and sexual phantasies are at the centre of the elaboration of meaning. Furthermore, the author distinguishes between two types of interpretations, namely ‘open’ and ‘closed’.     

Sacred Canopies or Religious Markets? The Effect of County-Level Religious Diversity on Later Changes in Religious Involvement

Secularization theories, such as Berger's Sacred Canopy argument, hold that religious diversity leads to a decline in religious participation. Religious market models (e.g., Finke and Stark) argue the opposite. Voas, Olson, and Crockett found that nearly all of the vast research exploring this important question prior to 2002 was flawed due to a previously unrecognized noncausal statistical relationship between measures of religious diversity and measures of religious participation. Since 2002, this methodological issue has largely stymied research on this important topic. We first describe how, following Voas et al.’s recommendations, longitudinal models can overcome these problems. We then apply these methods to data measuring the religious composition of all U.S. counties found in the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Using multilevel longitudinal regression models, we find that greater county-level religious diversity is followed by later declines in county-level religious participation rates. The negative effect size of religious diversity is large and robust to changes in the control variables and different methods of measuring religious diversity.     

Pigeons' preference for variable-interval water reinforcement under widely varied water budgets.

Water budget of pigeons was varied to assess the dependence of risk-sensitive preferences upon economic context such as has been reported for energy-budget manipulations with small animals in behavioral ecology research. Fixed- and variable-interval terminal-link water schedules reinforced choice between equal variable-interval initial-link schedules arranged on two pecking keys. While keeping a severely restrictive budget the same across three phases of the experiment, a contrasting distinct ample budget was arranged in each. To mimic typical methods in behavioral ecology studies, in each ample budget a more than three-fold increase in amount of water per reinforcer presentation was instituted simultaneously with significantly increased overall access to water. Total choice response rates plummeted in the ample budgets, and body weights either increased significantly or remained unchanged in different phases as expected by the nature of the different manipulations. Clear preferences for the variable-interval schedule were found throughout the experiment, except for rare instances of key bias. The results agree with similar operant food-reinforcement studies and extend conditions under which risk preference apparently does not depend upon economic context.     

Effects of economy type and nicotine on the essential value of food in rats

The exponential demand equation proposed by Hursh and Silberberg (2008) provides an estimate of the essential value of a good as a function of price. The model predicts that essential value should remain constant across changes in the magnitude of a reinforcer, but may change as a function of motivational operations. In Experiment 1, rats' demand for food across a sequence of fixed-ratio schedules was assessed during open and closed economy conditions and across one- and two-pellet per reinforcer delivery conditions. The exponential equation was fitted to the relation between fixed-ratio size and the logarithm of the absolute number of reinforcers. Estimates of the rate of change in elasticity of food, the proposed measure of essential value, were compared across conditions. Essential value was equivalent across magnitudes during the closed economy, but showed a slight decrease across magnitudes during the open economy. Experiment 2 explored the behavioral mechanisms of nicotine's effects on consumption with the results from Experiment 1 serving as a within-subject frame of reference. The same subjects were administered nicotine via subcutaneously implanted osmotic minipumps at a dose of 3 mg/kg/day and exposed to both the one- and two-pellet conditions under a closed economy. Although nicotine produced large decreases in demand, essential value was not significantly changed. The data from the present experiments provide further evidence for the adequacy of the exponential demand equation as a tool for quantifying the rate of change in elasticity of a good and for assessing behavioral mechanisms of drug action.     

Truth as Translation – Part A

According to Tarski's Convention T, the adequacy of a truth definition is (implicitly) defined relatively to a translation mapping from the object language to the metalanguage; the translation mapping itself is left unspecified. This paper restates Convention T in a form in which the relativity to translation is made explicit. The notion of an interpreted language is introduced, and a corresponding notion of a translation between interpreted languages is defined. The latter definition is stated both in an algebraic version, and in an equivalent possible worlds version. It is a consequence of our definition that translation is indeterminate in certain cases. Finally, we give an application of our revised version of Convention T and show that interpreted languages exist, which allow for vicious self-reference but which nevertheless contain their own truth predicate. This is possible if only truth is based on a nonstandard translation mapping by which, e.g., the Liar sentence is translated to its own negation. In this part of the paper this existence result is proved only for languages without quantifiers; in Part B the result will be extended to first-order languages.