EFFECTS OF RESPONSE SPACING ON ACQUISITION AND RETENTION OF CONDITIONAL DISCRIMINATIONS

Pigeons were exposed to a repeated acquisition procedure in which no delays were imposed and rate of responding was relatively high. They also were exposed to conditions in which delays were arranged between trials within chains or between completed chains, and rates of responding were lower. Number of trials, rate of reinforcement, difficulty of the discrimination, and motivating operations were held constant. Terminal accuracy was highest under the no‐delay condition, in which rate of responding was highest. Effects of trial spacing on retention were mixed and depended on whether delays were imposed between trials within chains or between completed chains. These findings provide basic‐research support for the rapid presentation of trials in direct instruction and for rate building in precision teaching.     

CHANGES IN BLOOD PRESSURE AND HEART RATE DURING FIXED‐INTERVAL RESPONDING IN SQUIRREL MONKEYS

Episodic and sustained increases in heart rate and mean arterial blood pressure can occur with recurring patterns of schedule‐controlled behavior. Most previous studies were conducted under fixed‐ratio schedules, which maintained a consistent high rate of responding that alternated with periods of no responding during times when the schedule was not in operation. The present study examined changes in heart rate and blood pressure under fixed‐interval schedules which maintained a range of rates that varied from little or no responding at the beginning of the fixed interval to high rates at the end of the interval. The relations of cardiovascular function to rate of responding were examined. Squirrel monkeys prepared with arterial catheters were trained to respond under fixed‐interval schedules of electric‐shock presentation. The duration of the interval was varied across sessions and cardiovascular parameters were examined. Local rates of responding were typically near zero during timeout periods, low at the beginning of each fixed‐interval cycle, and then increased as the fixed interval progressed. At most schedule durations, arterial blood pressure and heart rate levels were lowest at the beginning of the interval cycles, increased as the rate of responding increased, and then decreased during the timeout periods. At all parameters studied, there was a direct relationship between changes in response rate within fixed‐interval cycles and changes in heart rate and blood pressure. The results suggest that a much closer concordance of these cardiovascular parameters and schedule‐controlled responding is obtained by examining ongoing behavior as it occurs within the contingencies by which it is maintained.     

How long do the short‐term violent video game effects last?

How long do the effects of the initial short‐term increase in aggression and physiological arousal last after violent video game play? Study 1 (N=91) had participants complete pre‐ and postvideo game measures of aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, and heart rate. Then, participants completed Time 3 measures after 4 min or 9 min of delay. Study 2 employed a similar procedure, but had participants (N=91) complete the hot sauce paradigm to assess aggressive behavior after a 0, 5, or 10 min delay. First, results indicated that aggressive feelings, aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior, and heart rate initially increased after violent video game play. Second, results of the delay condition revealed that the increase in aggressive feelings and aggressive thoughts lasted less than 4 min, whereas heart rate and aggressive behavior lasted 4–9 min. Aggr. Behav. 35:225–236, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

The Conceptual Complexity of Central Bankers and the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper examines the impact of the conceptual complexity of central bankers on exchange rate volatility during the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Theoretically, this paper develops a framework to study the cognitive style of individual central bankers in conjunction with the institutional features of the central banks they head. The paper also controls for a variety of other common explanations for exchange rate volatility during this time period, including the number of veto players representing the political system and underlying structural features of the Asian economies. Empirically, the cross-sectional time-series analysis finds that more conceptually complex central bankers were able to reduce exchange rate volatility during the crisis years, especially when they inhabited highly independent central banks. This paper concludes that linking the study of key individuals to macroeconomic outcomes in the global political economy is a promising area of research.     

选择、自我表达与选择扩散效应

自我表达会影响西方人的态度, 产生选择扩散效应。国外相关的跨文化研究发现东方人不存在该效应。通过4个实验研究中国文化下自我表达对选择态度的影响, 发现选择方式(主动、被动)和自我表达形式(直接、间接)对选择态度产生影响。无论是自己的主动选择还是强加的被动选择, 直接的自我表达会增加对所获对象的喜爱程度, 表现为对获得性的肯定。研究者认为, 两种选择方式下不同的心理加工过程导致了这种获得性：直接表达使个人态度暴露在外, 进行主动选择时要对他人的给予做出肯定回应; 而进行被动选择时, 人们要减缓因利益受损可能导致的失调, 同时中国文化下的面子策略也使人们增加对所获对象的喜爱程度。不过, 间接的自我表达对选择态度的影响不明显。研究者认为, 多个影响因素的相互消长使选择态度得以维持。     

TYPES OF PRAYER,HEART RATE VARIABILITY,AND INNATE HEALING

Spiritual practices such as prayer have been shown to improve health and quality of life for those facing chronic or terminal illness. The early Christian healing tradition distinguished between types of prayer and their role in healing, placing great emphasis on the healing power of more integrated relational forms of prayer such as prayers of gratitude and contemplative prayer. Because autonomic tone is impaired in most disease states, autonomic homeostasis may provide insight into the healing effects of prayer. I report on observations in five volunteers engaging in five types of prayer. Using heart rate variability as a measure of autonomic tone and adaptability, I review the potential correlation of type of prayer with autonomic rebalance as measured specifically by psychophysiological coherence ratios. The five types—supplication, devotion, intercession, gratefulness, and contemplative prayer—elicited varying degrees of improvements in heart rate variability and corresponding psychophysiological coherence. These observations suggest a correlation of innate healing to prayer type that is consistent with teachings from the Christian healing tradition and with modern research. Further research is warranted to verify these hypotheses.     

Within-session changes in responding during several simple schedules

Pigeons' key pecking was reinforced by food delivered by several fixed-interval, variable-ratio, and differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate schedules. Rate of responding, number of responses per reinforcer, length of postreinforcement pause, running response rate, and the time required to collect an available reinforcer changed systematically within sessions when the schedules provided high rates of reinforcement, but usually not when they provided low rates. These results suggest that the factors that produce within-session changes in responding are generally similar for different schedules of reinforcement. However, a separate factor may also contribute during variable-ratio schedules. The results question explanations for within-session changes that are related solely to the passage of time, to responding, and to one interpretation of attention. They support the idea that one or more factors related to reinforcement play a role.     

Simple additivity of stochastic psychological processes: Tests and measures

In this article, some additive models of behavioral measures are defined, and distributional tests of them are proposed. Major theoretical results include (a) conditions for additivity of components to predict the highest level of dominance in a model-free stochastic dominance hierarchy, (b) methods of identifying the shape of the hazard rate function of an added component from certain relationships among the observable density and distribution functions, and (c) effects of stochastic dependence between components on the distributional tests. Feasibility and usefulness of the methods are demonstrated by application to choice RT and ratings experiments.The author was supported by grants MH44640 to Roger Ratcliff and AFOSR 90-0246 (jointly funded by NSF) to Gail McCoon. Parts of this work were presented at the European Mathematical Psychology meetings of 1991. My thanks to F. Gregory Ashby, Bruce Bloxom, Roger Ratcliff, W. Schwarz, Jim Townsend, and an anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions.     

Varieties of contrast: a review of incentive relativity by charles f. Flaherty

The phenomenon of contrast has been studied from two quite separate perspectives, one derived from the classic studies of incentive contrast such as Crespi (1942) and the other from the study of behavioral contrast within behavior analysis. This book reviews both of these types of contrast effects and finds both differences and similarities between them. Still at issue is the validity of the interpretation of contrast that assumes that the value of some target level of reward is modified in inverse relation to the level of reward from other sources in the same context. This concept works well for the classic studies of incentive contrast, but is challenged by the emerging importance of anticipatory contrast and the finding in both of the separate research traditions that anticipatory contrast is inversely related to other measures of reinforcement value.