Exploring Daily Religious/Spiritual Activities Among Older Couples: Religious/Spiritual Influence Moderating the Effects of Health Symptoms on Marital Interactions

Using data from 191 later-life couples across 14 days, patterns of husband and wife religious/spiritual activities were explored, as well as how those activities predicted daily marital processes and how they moderated the links between daily physical symptoms and marital interactions. Husband and wife reports of religious/spiritual influence were linked with their own positive and negative marital interactions (“actor” effects). However, only husband religious/spiritual influence was linked with wife marital interactions (“partner” effects). Religious/spiritual influence moderated the link between symptoms and marital interactions for wives. Findings suggest a buffering effect of religious/spiritual activities on daily symptoms for older married wives.     

Reinforcer choice as an antecedent versus consequence

Four children with autism received opportunities to choose among several preferred stimuli either immediately before or after task responding. The response requirement for reinforcement systematically increased within each session. Two children engaged in higher levels of responding when reinforcement choice was provided as an antecedent to task completion, and 3 of the 4 children showed a preference for the antecedent choice condition.     

心理理论与社会互动方式对初中生社会善念发展的影响

为了探讨初中生社会善念的发展特点及相关影响因素,实验1采用卡通插图范式和SoMi范式,以628名7~9年级初中生为被试,考察不同心理理论类型初中生的社会善念的发展;实验2使用社会互动情境和SoMi范式,以360名7~9年级初中生为被试,考察社会互动方式与反馈类型对不同年级初中生社会善念的影响。结果发现:(1)初中生的社会善念不存在年级和性别差异,但7年级中高情感心理理论初中生的社会善念显著多于高认知心理理论初中生;(2)7年级初中生在积极反馈条件下的社会善念较多,而8年级初中生在消极反馈条件下较多,9年级初中生在这两种条件下则不存在显著差异;(3)在合作情境中,初中生在积极反馈下的社会善念更多,而在竞争情境中,初中生在消极反馈下的社会善念更多。研究说明初中生的社会善念具有跨年龄和跨性别的稳定性,并且会受到心理理论、社会互动方式及反馈类型的影响。     

A novel approach to mechanical foot stimulation during human locomotion under body weight support

Input from the foot plays an essential part in perceiving support surfaces and determining kinematic events in human walking. To simulate adequate tactile pressure inputs under body weight support (BWS) conditions that represent an effective form of locomotion training, we here developed a new method of phasic mechanical foot stimulation using light-weight pneumatic insoles placed inside the shoes (under the heel and metatarsus). To test the system, we asked healthy participants to walk on a treadmill with different levels of BWS. The pressure under the stimulated areas of the feet and subjective sensations were higher at high levels of BWS and when applied to the ball and toes rather than heels. Foot stimulation did not disturb significantly the normal motor pattern, and in all participants we evoked a reliable step-synchronized triggering of stimuli for each leg separately. This approach has been performed in a general framework looking for “afferent templates” of human locomotion that could be used for functional sensory stimulation. The proposed technique can be used to imitate or partially restore surrogate contact forces under body weight support conditions.     

Right hemisphere dominance for emotion processing in baboons

Asymmetries of emotional facial expressions in humans offer reliable indexes to infer brain lateralization and mostly revealed right hemisphere dominance. Studies concerned with oro-facial asymmetries in nonhuman primates largely showed a left-sided asymmetry in chimpanzees, marmosets and macaques. The presence of asymmetrical oro-facial productions was assessed in Olive baboons in order to determine the functional cerebral asymmetries. Two affiliative behaviors (lipsmack, copulation call) and two agonistic ones (screeching, eyebrow-raising) were recorded. For screeching, a strong and significant left hemimouth bias was found, but no significant bias was observed for the other behaviors. These results are discussed in the light of the available literature concerning asymmetrical oro-facial productions in nonhuman primates. In addition, these findings suggest that human hemispheric specialization for emotions has precursors in primate evolution.     

Contingent Stimuli Signal Subsequent Reinforcer Ratios

Conditioned reinforcer effects may be due to the stimulus' discriminative rather than its strengthening properties. While this was demonstrated in a frequently‐changing choice procedure, a single attempt to replicate in a relatively static choice environment failed. We contend that this was because the information provided by the stimuli was nonredundant in the frequently‐changing preparation, and redundant in the steady‐state arrangement. In the present experiments, 6 pigeons worked in a steady‐state concurrent schedule procedure with nonredundant informative stimuli (red keylight illuminations). When a response‐contingent red keylight signaled that the next food delivery was more likely on one of the two alternatives, postkeylight choice responding was reliably for that alternative. This effect was enhanced after a history of extended informative red keylight presentation (Experiment 2). These results lend support to recent characterizations of conditioned reinforcer effects as reflective of a discriminative, rather than a reinforcing, property of the stimulus.     

Examining the discriminative and strengthening effects of reinforcers in concurrent schedules

Reinforcers may increase operant responding via a response-strengthening mechanism whereby the probability of the preceding response increases, or via some discriminative process whereby the response more likely to provide subsequent reinforcement becomes, itself, more likely. We tested these two accounts. Six pigeons responded for food reinforcers in a two-alternative switching-key concurrent schedule. Within a session, equal numbers of reinforcers were arranged for responses to each alternative. Those reinforcers strictly alternated between the two alternatives in half the conditions, and were randomly allocated to the alternatives in half the conditions. We also varied, across conditions, the alternative that became available immediately after a reinforcer. Preference after a single reinforcer always favored the immediately available alternative, regardless of the local probability of a reinforcer on that alternative (0 or 1 in the strictly alternating conditions, .5 in the random conditions). Choice then reflected the local reinforcer probabilities, suggesting some discriminative properties of reinforcement. At a more extended level, successive same-alternative reinforcers from an alternative systematically shifted preference towards that alternative, regardless of which alternative was available immediately after a reinforcer. There was no similar shift when successive reinforcers came from alternating sources. These more temporally extended results may suggest a strengthening function of reinforcement, or an enhanced ability to respond appropriately to "win-stay" contingencies over "win-shift" contingencies.     

Human responding with mutual reinforcement: Baseline and effects of an intervention1

Pressing a key by one undergraduate provided another undergraduate with points exchangeable for money, and vice versa. Four types of response patterns were found. Points were often delivered with a delay from the last response or with no response. When a contingency that responses lost points (punishment) was added to participants who had emitted more responses than the partner had, their response rates decreased while the rates of their partners increased. These results demonstrate that, under the contingency of mutual reinforcement: (a) response patterns that had occurred between monkeys were replicated between humans; (b) obtained response‐reinforcer relations were different from those generally programmed in the basic reinforcement schedules; and (c) the behavior of the participant was controlled by changing the behavior of the partner.     

Effects of pre-trial response requirements on self-control choices by rats and pigeons

Parallel experiments with rats and pigeons examined whether the size of a pre-trial ratio requirement would affect choices in a self-control situation. In different conditions, either 1 response or 40 responses were required before each trial. In the first half of each experiment, an adjusting-ratio schedule was used, in which subjects could choose a fixed-ratio schedule leading to a small reinforcer, or an adjusting-ratio schedule leading to a larger reinforcer. The size of the adjusting ratio requirement was increased and decreased over trials based on the subject's responses, in order to estimate an indifference point-a ratio at which the two alternatives were chosen about equally often. The second half of each experiment used an adjusting-delay procedure-fixed and adjusting delays to the small and large reinforcers were used instead of ratio requirements. In some conditions, particularly with the reinforcer delays, the rats had consistently longer adjusting delays with the larger pre-trial ratios, reflecting a greater tendency to choose the larger, delayed reinforcer when more responding was required to reach the choice point. No consistent effects of the pre-trial ratio were found for the pigeons in any of the conditions. These results may indicate that rats are more sensitive to the long-term reinforcement rates of the two alternatives, or they may result from a shallower temporal discounting rate for rats than for pigeons, a difference that has been observed in previous studies.