Win-shift and win-stay learning in the short-beaked echidna (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tachyglossus aculeatus</Emphasis>)

Numerous previous investigators have explained species differences in spatial memory performance in terms of differences in foraging ecology. In three experiments we attempted to extend these findings by examining the extent to which the spatial memory performance of echidnas (or "spiny anteaters") can be understood in terms of the spatio-temporal distribution of their prey (ants and termites). This is a species and a foraging situation that have not been examined in this way before. Echidnas were better able to learn to avoid a previously rewarding location (to "win-shift") than to learn to return to a previously rewarding location (to "win-stay"), at short retention intervals, but were unable to learn either of these strategies at retention intervals of 90 min. The short retention interval results support the ecological hypothesis, but the long retention interval results do not. Electronic Publication     

Attachment Change in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy and Sexual Satisfaction Outcomes in a Two-year Follow-up Study

Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) is an empirically validated attachment based approach to couple therapy. From an EFT perspective, sexual functioning is viewed within the context of an attachment bond, but sexual satisfaction in EFT has not been empirically tested. We examined self-reported sexual satisfaction across 24?months in a sample of 32 couples who received an average of 21 EFT sessions. We found that sexual satisfaction increased across six time points from pre to post therapy and across follow-up (6, 12, 18, and 24?months), and that decreases in attachment avoidance from pre to post therapy predicted increases in sexual satisfaction across time. These findings provide evidence that EFT may help couples improve their sexual satisfaction by reducing attachment avoidance in therapy.     

Emotion and rationality: The characterisation and evaluation of opposition to renewable energy projects

Opposition to wind farm developments has been seen as a significant threat to climate change mitigation policies in the UK. This paper considers the complex of different factors that may lie behind such oppositional activism and the role of emotion within these. Drawing on a programme of interviews it then explores in detail the ways in which industry and policy actors construct the role of emotion in wind farm opposition and in decisions on planning permission, often as an unwelcome intrusion into a supposedly rational process. The consequences of such understandings of opposition for the shaping of public engagement practices and for the nature and quality of public debate are examined.     

Rapid recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony follows the physical—not the perceived—temporal order

In natural scenes, audiovisual events deriving from the same source are synchronized at their origin. However, from the perspective of the observer, there are likely to be significant multisensory delays due to physical and neural latencies. Fortunately, our brain appears to compensate for the resulting latency differences by rapidly adapting to asynchronous audiovisual events by shifting the point of subjective synchrony (PSS) in the direction of the leading modality of the most recent event. Here we examined whether it is the perceived modality order of this prior lag or its physical order that determines the direction of the subsequent rapid recalibration. On each experimental trial, a brief tone pip and flash were presented across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The participants’ task alternated over trials: On adaptor trials, audition either led or lagged vision with fixed SOAs, and participants judged the order of the audiovisual event; on test trials, the SOA as well as the modality order varied randomly, and participants judged whether or not the event was synchronized. For test trials, we showed that the PSS shifted in the direction of the physical rather than the perceived (reported) modality order of the preceding adaptor trial. These results suggest that rapid temporal recalibration is determined by the physical timing of the preceding events, not by one’s prior perceptual decisions.     

Moral heuristics

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics--mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too--moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the act/omission distinction. in all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed.     

College Student Perceptions of Criminal Justice System Responses to Stalking

In the current study, a survey was administered to 513 U.S. undergraduate college students from a large east coast university to examine whether extra-legal factors influenced their personal judgments of criminal justice system responsiveness to stalking. MANOVA results indicated that students believed police and prosecutors would not treat analogous cases similarly (this bias was not apparent with judges). College students perceived that prior relationship and target/offender gender would impact arrest decisions, and that target/offender gender would also impact police investigations and the filing of criminal charges. Potential explanations and practical implications of these findings are discussed, as well as directions for future research.     

Adolescent risk-taking and social meaning: A commentary

Adolescent risk-taking can be illuminated through an understanding of the development of the brain, of dual-processing theories, and of social norms and meanings. When adolescents take unjustified risks, it is often because of the weakness of their analytic systems, which provide an inadequate check on impulsive or ill-considered decisions. Social meaning plays a large role in increasing or decreasing adolescent risk-taking. For purposes of policy, one implication is that “meaning entrepreneurs,” in the private and public sectors, should be able to move behavior in better directions.     

Counseling Muslim Americans: Cultural and Spiritual Assessments

In this article, the authors identify the cultural and spiritual assessments needed to conduct counseling with Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants to the United States. Assessment processes are outlined that include cultural identity (which subsumes several variables); worldview; spiritual assessment along with acculturation level and migration concerns; impact of languages spoken; social, occupational, and educational status of the client in host culture and in home culture (if the client is an immigrant); and family composition and social supports.