Acquisition and discrimination of appetitively and aversively conditioned heart rate responses in rhesus monkeys

This report describes the acquisition of a conditional heart rate response to both classical aversive and appetitive conditioning in eight rhesus monkeys(Macaca mulatta). The behavioral paradigm consisted of two discrete one minute tones followed by the corresponding unconditional stimuli,i.e., electric shock or Purina monkey chow. A third tone followed by neither food nor shock served as a discriminative stimulus (DS). The conditional heart rate responses developed in two phases. The first phase was characterized by similar responses to both conditional stimuli and the DS. Control heart rate rose during this period. During the second phase, control heart rate decreased (five animals), the DS response disappeared, and different conditional heart rate patterns to food and shock emerged. The existence of distinct conditional response patterns indicates probable differences in the autonomic nervous regulation of the heart during aversive and appetitive conditioning.     

Personal Contact with Refugees is Key to Welcoming Them: An Analysis of Politicians' and Citizens' Attitudes Towards Refugee Integration

Politicians are influential both in directing policies about refugees and in framing public discourse about them. However, unlike other host country residents, politicians' attitudes towards refugees and integration are remarkably understudied. We therefore examine similarities and differences between politicians' attitudes towards refugee integration and those held by citizens. Based on the stereotype content model, we expect that political ideology informs stereotypes about refugees, which subsequently shape attitudes towards refugee integration. Based on the Contact Hypothesis, we further argue that personal contact with refugees reduces negative stereotypes about them—in particular for those endorsing a right-wing ideology. We draw on data collected via two surveys with 905 politicians and 8013 citizens in the Netherlands to show that (1) unlike those with a left-wing orientation, residents (i.e., both politicians and citizens) with a right-wing orientation hold more negative stereotypes about refugees, which in turn relate to more negative attitudes towards refugee integration; (2) personal contact with refugees is associated with less negative stereotypes among residents; and (3) politicians, compared to citizens, report less negative stereotypes and more positive attitudes towards refugee integration. The practical implication of fostering residents' contact with refugees as well as the implications for future research are discussed.     

The importance of being nonalignable: a critical test of the structural alignment theory of similarity

The structural alignment theory of similarity distinguishes 2 types of difference that may occur between stimuli: Alignable differences are those related to a commonality, whereas nonalignable differences are not related to a commonality. Alignment theory predicts that alignable differences should be more heavily weighted than nonalignable differences in similarity judgment. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that, contrary to this prediction, nonalignable differences exerted a greater impact than alignable differences in similarity and difference judgments of geometric stimuli. Experiment 3 revealed that the relative weight accorded a given difference was also affected by contextual constraints. Thus, although the experiments supported the validity of the distinction between alignable and nonalignable differences, results were discordant with the specific prediction of structural alignment theory.     

Partition priming in judgment under uncertainty

We show that likelihood judgments are biased toward an ignorance-prior probability that assigns equal credence to each mutually exclusive event considered by the judge. The value of the ignorance prior depends crucially on how the set of possibilities (i.e., the state space) is subjectively partitioned by the judge. For instance, asking "what is the probability that Sunday will be hotter than any other day next week?" facilitates a two-fold case partition, [Sunday hotter, Sunday not hotter], thus priming an ignorance prior of 1/2. In contrast, asking "what is the probability that the hottest day of the week will be Sunday?" facilitates a seven-fold class partition, [Sunday hottest, Monday hottest, etc.], priming an ignorance prior of 1/7. In four studies, we observed systematic partition dependence: Judgments made by participants presented with either case or class formulations of the same query were biased toward the corresponding ignorance prior.     

Obsessive-compulsive tendencies may be associated with attenuated access to internal states: Evidence from a biofeedback-aided muscle tensing task

The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that inputs from internal states in obsessive-compulsive (OC) individuals are attenuated, which could be one source of the pervasive doubting and checking in OCD. Participants who were high or low in OC tendencies were asked to produce specific levels of muscle tension with and without biofeedback, and their accuracy in producing the required muscle tension levels was assessed. As predicted, high OC participants performed more poorly than low OC participants on this task when biofeedback was not available. When biofeedback was provided, the difference between the groups was eliminated, and withdrawing the monitor again reversed this effect. Finally, when given the opportunity, high OC participants were more likely than low OC participants to request biofeedback. These results suggest that doubt in OCD may be grounded in a real and general deficiency in accessing internal states.     

Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening

The neural basis of syntax is a matter of substantial debate. In particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), or Broca’s area, has been prominently linked to syntactic processing, but the anterior temporal lobe has been reported to be activated instead of IFG when manipulating the presence of syntactic structure. These findings are difficult to reconcile because they rely on different laboratory tasks which tap into distinct computations, and may only indirectly relate to natural sentence processing. Here we assessed neural correlates of syntactic structure building in natural language comprehension, free from artificial task demands. Subjects passively listened to Alice in Wonderland during functional magnetic resonance imaging and we correlated brain activity with a word-by-word measure of the amount syntactic structure analyzed. Syntactic structure building correlated with activity in the left anterior temporal lobe, but there was no evidence for a correlation between syntactic structure building and activity in inferior frontal areas. Our results suggest that the anterior temporal lobe computes syntactic structure under natural conditions.     

“I Will Fear no Evil,for I Am with Me”: Mentalization-Oriented Intervention with PTSD Patients. A Case Study

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients are described as suffering from a collapse of mentalization—the inability to understand and interpret their own behavior and that of others as emanating from intentional mental states. The present paper proposes an integrative focused intervention, called “traumatic mentalization change”, to improve and strengthen the mentalization abilities of PTSD patients. With the assistance of the therapist, patients learn how to embed their present self-states within their retrieved memories of the traumatic event and thus to change their traumatic narrative. These present selfstate images enrich the patients’ narratives with the emotional needs that were missing during the traumatic event by addressing mistaken attributions regarding these memories. In this way, the traumatic narrative changes, and the devastating selffeelings experienced during the original traumatic event are reduced. We demonstrate this intervention with a case study of a veteran PTSD patient who suffered from PTSD for 10 years after being involved in a terrorist attack. The neuro-clinical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Between ignorance and truth: Partition dependence and learning in judgment under uncertainty

In 3 studies, participants viewed sequences of multiattribute objects (e.g., colored shapes) appearing with varying frequencies and judged the likelihood of the attributes of those objects. Judged probabilities reflected a compromise between (a) the frequency with which each attribute appeared and (b) the ignorance prior probability cued by the number of distinct values that the focal attribute could take on. Thus, judged probabilities were partition dependent, varying with the number of events into which the state space was subjectively divided. This bias was diminished among participants more confident in what they learned, was strong and insensitive to level of confidence when ignorance priors were especially salient, and required ignorance priors to be salient only when probabilities were elicited (not during encoding).