Predation, aggression, and activation levels in food-deprived sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus and L. gibbosus): Motivational interactions.

Three experiments investigated the effects of food deprivation on several behavioral categories in a total of 56 bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish ( Lepomis macrochirus and L. gibbosus, respectively). In Exp I, predatory behavior and general activity were observed under 5 levels of deprivation. For both species, predation measures increased in a similar negatively accelerating manner with increasing deprivation, while activity changed in a more complex fashion. Exp II examined the effects of deprivation on activity in a novel environment and showed that the deprivation effects of Exp I were masked by the response to the new setting. In Exp III, measures of aggression toward intruders of each species were recorded from resident fish of both species under 3 levels of food deprivation. Both species were more aggressive toward conspecifics, and bluegills were more aggressive overall. Aggression was significantly affected by food deprivation, with the effects dependent on the species making up the pair. Theories of motivational summation, generalized drive, and activity-mediated aggression are seen as inadequate to explain the differential effects of hunger on the 3 behavioral categories observed. A dynamic boundary-state model of behavior was, however, found to predict the motivational interactions observed between distinct behavioral control systems. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Object permanence in cats (Felis catus): An ecological approach to the study of invisible displacements.

A single invisible displacement object permanence task was administered to 19 cats. In this task, cats watched a target object from behind a transparent panel. However, cats had to walk around an opaque panel to reach the object. While cats were behind the opaque panel, the object was hidden behind 1 of 2 screens. As cats did not perceive the disappearance of the object behind the target screen, the object was invisibly hidden. Results showed that cats solved this task with great flexibility, which markedly contrasts with what has been observed in previous research. The discussion emphasizes the difference between the typical Piagetian task in which the information necessary to succeed must be dealt with in a retrospective way, whereas in this task cats had to anticipate a new position of the object. The ecological relevance of this new task is also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Understanding psychological research: An introduction to methods.

Reviews the book, Understanding psychological research: An introduction to methods by Richard St. Jean (2001). Richard St. Jean's book has the stated goal to be a brief text that presents essential concepts in a concise but interesting format. In this the author succeeds admirably. The nine short chapters and three appendices present the basic content that any method course needs to cover. The chapters are centred around lively research examples, often from the author's own work. Each chapter is followed by a brief summary and a glossary of key terms. The examples are used to introduce the methodological question and to illustrate various solutions. If the book suffers from a drawback, it is that it is too good at what it wants to be: an easily accessible, succinct introduction. The author visibly aims to make the issues as clear and understandable as possible, even if this implies glossing over details and leaving out more difficult aspects. The book does not want to be, nor is it, a manual for people who actual want to do research. In sum, this book will be most useful for those who teach introductory methods courses aimed at students who want to "consume" research rather than pursue it themselves. For these students, the book will be a valuable resource to better understand pertinent issues and to be alert towards methodological problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mechanisms of call note-type perception in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus): Peak shift in a note-type continuum.

We report on operant conditioning and artificial neural network (ANN) simulations aimed at further elucidating mechanisms of black-capped chickadee chick-a-dee call note category perception. Specifically, we tested for differences in the speed of acquisition among different discrimination tasks and, in two selected discrimination groups, searched for evidence of peak shift. Earlier, unreported ANN data were instrumental in providing the motivation for the current set of studies with chickadees and are provided here. The ANNs revealed differences in the speed of learning among note-type discrimination groups that is related to the degree of perceptual similarity among the three note types tested (i.e., A, B, and C notes). In many respects, bird and network results were in agreement (i.e., in the observation of peak shift in the same group), but they also differed in important ways (i.e., all discrimination groups showed differences in speed of learning in simulations but not in chickadees). We suggest that the start, peak and end frequency of the chick-a portion of chick-a-dee call notes, which form a graded but overlapping continuum, may drive the peak shift observed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential sensitivity of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) and humans (Homo sapiens) to peak position along a synthetic coo call continuum.

Difference limens (DLs) for changes in the temporal position of a pitch peak along a synthetic early-high to late-high coo continuum were measured in 2 Japanese macaques and 2 humans in a low-uncertainty, repeating standard discrimination procedure. Lowest DLs (19–32 msec for monkeys;     

Review of Pain: psychological perspectives.

Reviews the book, Pain: psychological perspectives edited by S. Rachman and Jack D. Maser (see record 1988-97293-000). The success of this book lies in its focus on the symptom of panic rather than on the diagnosis of panic disorder. The three main psychological theories discussed in the book are: (a) Clark's cognitive theory of panic, which postulates that panic attacks result from the catastrophic misinterpretations of bodily sensations; (b) van den Hout's Pavlovian theory of panic, which postulates that bodily sensations such as heart palpitations become conditioned stimuli for panic attacks through the temporal contiguity of these stimuli with the first spontaneous panic attack; and (c) Lang's information processing theory, which Lang discusses in relation to phobias but, unfortunately, not to any appreciable extent in relation to panic. Each theory is clearly presented in one of three chapters, each of which is written by the originator of the theory. I hope that this book will get a wide readership. It would act as a stimulant in senior undergraduate and graduate courses. I hope also that it will convince psychopathologists of the value of the symptom-approach in research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in psychological testing.

Reviews the book, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in psychological testing by Henry L. Minton (see record 1988-98726-000). Lewis Terman was one of the leading pioneers in the development of clinical tools and studies of individual differences. In the Preface to his book, Minton acknowledges that Terman was as controversial as he was influential and states that his biography seeks to provide a balanced view of Terman's life and works. As readers of this comprehensive volume will quickly find, Minton has been eminently successful in achieving this goal: His book not only highlights Terman's accomplishments, which were many, but also describes his shortcomings which, though fewer, were not nonexistent. Overall, Minton provides an extremely interesting, well-written, and probing account of the positive and the less-positive facets of his subject, both as a scientist and as a man. The book contains 11 chapters, describing Terman's life from his early years through his illustrious career at Stanford, up to his death in 1956, a month short of his 80th birthday. Throughout, Minton shows how Terman's upbringing, education, and the times and society in which he was raised contributed to shaping the person he was to become. Minton's biography of Terman, based primarily on an exhaustive reading of Terman's professional and personal papers and supplemented with interviews with former students and colleagues such as Nancy Bayley, Lee Cronback, Ernest Hilgard, and Robert Sears, and with members of Terman's family, provides a detailed and fascinating portrait of one of the major figures in psychology. The book's strengths are its consistently objective appraisal of its sometimes controversial subject, the scope of its coverage, the extensive documentation of its sources, and Minton's ability to set or to describe each of Terman's activities and the events in his life in their appropriate professional or social context. Readers from many walks will find this book interesting, informative, and well worth reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Transfer along a continuum in the discriminative learning of honeybees (Apis mellifera).

In each of 2 experiments on discriminative learning in free-flying honeybees (Apis mellifera), performance in a difficult problem was found to be facilitated by prior training in an easier problem. In Experiment 1, animals that were trained to detect a strong anomaly in the ambient geomagnetic field performed better when the intensity of the anomaly was reduced than did control animals that were trained from the onset with the weaker anomaly. In Experiment 2, animals that were trained to detect a 20-μl drop of sucrose solution and then a 10-μl drop of the same solution performed better when the size of the drop was reduced to 5 μl than did control animals trained from the onset with the 5-μl drop. These results are of interest because they add transfer along a continuum to a growing list of vertebrate learning phenomena found in honeybees and because of their bearing on a developing theory of discriminative learning in honeybees. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Handbook of psychological assessment.

Reviews the Handbook of Psychological Assessment (1984) by G. Goldstein and M. Hersen. The editors have put together and edited a compendium on psychological assessment that is well-balanced, up-to-date, and extremely informative. This book provides very broad coverage of psychological assessment and is a noteworthy contribution to the field of assessment. One must give the editors due credit for bringing together some excellent people in their respective fields and especially for their attention to the breadth of domains subsumed by psychological assessment and for incorporating these diverse fields into a meaningful whole. The Handbook consists of 21 chapters grouped into nine sections: introduction; psychometric foundations; assessment of intelligence; achievement, aptitude, and interest; neuropsychological assessment; interviewing; personality assessment; behavioral assessment; and assessment and intervention. By chapters, there is an equal balance of content specific to children as well as adults. This book is an excellent text for a graduate course in psychological assessment and is equally valuable and informative for psychologists, both academic and in practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Time and psychological explanation.

Reviews the book Time and psychological explanation by Brent D. Slife (see record 1993-98071-000). In this book Prof. Slife has taken on the task of showing how the Western conception of time is a construct whose use in psychology is in need of just such a review. The object of Slife's critique is the modern Western tradition which takes time to be an objective and linear entity. This perspective, of course, derives from the work and thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, and it is an orientation which has been fundamental to the development of Western science and culture since the period of the Enlightenment. Prof. Slife argues that the Newtonian time paradigm rests on five somewhat overlapping conceptual elements which are basic to traditional scientific explanation. These are the notions of "objectivity," "continuity," "linearity," "universality," and "reductionism." Some of these characteristics can be seen to be features of the way Newton envisioned time itself and some are aspects of events to be accounted for, because they exist in absolute time. In sum Prof. Slife has made a philosophically literate case for the need to analyze the limiting effects of Newtonian notions of time on psychology's theory and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Heritability of hand preference in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Evidence from a partial interspecies cross-fostering study.

Heritability of hand preference was tested in a sample of 188 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Hand preference was measured by coordinated bimanual actions, and concordance percentages were compared between parents and offspring and siblings. Among siblings, concordance percentages were compared for dyads in which both individuals were raised by chimpanzees, both were raised by humans, or 1 was raised in each environment. The results indicated population-level right hand preferences for coordinated bimanual actions. There were no significant associations in hand preference between parents and offspring. In full and maternal half siblings, concordance in hand preference was significantly greater than chance in mother and human-reared individuals but not in cross-fostered dyads. The cumulative results suggest that the direction of hand preference is heritable in chimpanzees but the mechanism of transmission is not genetic. Several environmental explanations are proposed to explain the findings, including the potential role of maternal cradling bias and in utero fetal position. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Blade runner: An interpretation.

Reviews the film, Blade runner directed by Ridley Scott (1982). This movie was the forerunner of more recent film treatments of the relations between humans and androids such as A.I. Artificial intelligence (S. Spielberg, 2001) and Minority report (S. Spielberg, 2002). This juxtaposition is of particular interest to psychoanalysts because it stimulates thinking about what qualities are quintessentially human. By means of its rich symbolism and allusive cinematic vocabulary, the film explores such questions as the nature of the superego, the Oedipus complex, identity formation, and the eternal struggle between eros and thanatos. The author uses the material of the film to comment on some of the fundamental differences between Freud's worldview and that of the neo-Freudians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A personality trait model for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): The challenges ahead.

Replies to comments (see record 2010-13810-004), (see record 2010-13810-005), (see record 2010-13810-006), (see record 2010-13810-007) on the original article Personality traits and the classification of mental Disorders: Toward a more complete integration in DSM–5 and an empirical model of psychopathology by Robert F. Krueger and Nicholas R. Eaton (see record 2010-13810-003). We were sincerely flattered to discover that John Gunderson, Michael First, Paul Costa, Robert McCrae, Michael Hallquist, and Paul Pilkonis provided commentaries on our target article. In this brief response, we cannot hope to discuss the myriad points raised by this august group. Such a task would be particularly daunting given the diversity of the commentaries. Indeed, the diversity of the commentaries provides a kind of “metacommentary” on the state of personality and psychopathology research. That is, the intellectual diversity contained in the commentaries underlines the substantial challenges that lie ahead of us, in terms of articulating a model of personality and psychopathology with both scientific validity and clinical applicability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive development in kittens (Felis catus): A cross-sectional study of object permanence.

Administered tests of object permanence to 28-, 35-, 48-, and 150-day-old kittens (Felis catus) in order to assess as accurately as possible the developmental level reached at each age group in this Piagetian cognitive capacity. The results indicate that 28-day-old-kittens visually tracked a moving object in their perceptual field (Stage 2); 35-day-olds recovered a hidden object only if they had initiated a search movement at the time of disappearance (Stage 4a); 48- and 150-day-olds mastered multiple visible displacements (Stage 5b). The study showed that the upper limit, Stage 5b, observed in adult cats was reached by Day 48, which indicates a rapid development of object permanence in this species. Results are discussed in relation to object permanence in human babies and in terms of the relevance of object permanence to predatory behavior in the domestic cat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive decline and human (Homo sapiens) aging: An investigation using a comparative neuropsychological approach.

Using a comparative neuropsychological approach, the authors compared performance of younger and healthy older adults ages 65 and over on tasks originally developed to measure cognition in animals. A battery of 6 tasks was used to evaluate object discrimination, egocentric spatial abilities, visual and spatial working memory, and response shifting. Older adults performed more poorly than younger adults on tasks that evaluate egocentric spatial abilities, response shifting, and to a lesser extent object recognition. The two groups did not differ for tasks that evaluate spatial working memory and object discrimination. The impairments the authors observed in tasks that evaluate response shifting and object recognition are consistent with those found in canines and primates as well as those found in Alzheimer's disease. The results are consistent with the notion that cognitive processes supported by the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are among the first to decline with increasing age in both humans and animals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Sell decision: Implications for psychological assessment and treatment.

This article describes 2 important practice considerations affirmed in the U.S. Supreme Court's Sell v. United States (2002) decision: (a) the importance of providing least restrictive services prior to interventions that violate patients' liberty interests, and (b) contextual and environmental factors may be considered in clinical determinations of dangerousness. The psychological treatment of behavior disorders fall within the purview of least restrictive or intrusive interventions compared with the involuntary administration of psychoactive medications. To legitimately comply with the least restrictive criterion, the provision of psychological services is essential. This long-held criterion is rarely acknowledged today as providers use restricted service arrays and attempt to resolve complex and co-occurring behavior problems with medications and restraints. Less restrictive psychological interventions are required for effective treatment of challenging behaviors. A 2nd significant implication lies in the court's affirmation that it is legitimate to consider contextual factors such as history and current environmental conditions in determining dangerousness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The forked tongue and edge detection in snakes (Crotalus oreganus): An experimental test.

Many stimulus-detection systems are lateralized to allow for simultaneous comparison of paired stimuli. It has been hypothesized that the deeply forked tongue of snakes and some derived lizards functions as a chemical edge detector where cues gathered by each tine are kept separate to provide two points of lateral odor assessment by the central nervous system via vomeronasal input. While following a chemical trail, one time can be on the trail, the other off, and such differential information prompts the snake to turn back to the trail. The authors tested this hypothesis in rattlesnakes within a predatory context by unilaterally severing the vomeronasal nerves. If edge detection is used by snakes during prey trailing, then unilateral denervation should disrupt trailing ability. The authors found no change in the seven separate trailing parameters measured. Therefore, they found no support for the edge detection hypothesis as it applies to prey trailing behavior. Instead, the deeply forked tongue may represent a chemosensory specialization to increase odor-sampling area, with snakes and derived lizards detecting only the concentration of chemical trails. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research.

Reviews the book, Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research by Kurt Danziger (1990). Kurt Danziger's Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research is a book of singular importance because it provides such a penetrating analysis, and does so in a manner that is cause for considerable reflection. In brief, Danziger provides a history lesson that not only situates the names and the projects of experimental psychology in the first part of this century, but also aims to clarify the project of knowledge generation both past and present. Indeed, shades of Quine, Kuhn, and Hesse permeate this book in a way that demands psychologists examine their own investigative practices and logics of justification. Through Wundt, through Galton, through Ebbinghaus and others, Danziger illuminates the development of experimental psychology along with the historical and philosophical vicissitudes that have given rise to numerous psychological knowledge claims. If it is true that we must understand our history in order to understand our present, then Danziger's book should be required reading in all research laboratories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing the continuum of delusional beliefs: An experimental study using virtual reality.

A key problem in studying a hypothesized spectrum of severity of delusional ideation is determining that ideas are unfounded. The first objective was to use virtual reality to validate groups of individuals with low, moderate, and high levels of unfounded persecutory ideation. The second objective was to investigate, drawing upon a cognitive model of persecutory delusions, whether clinical and nonclinical paranoia are associated with similar causal factors. Three groups (low paranoia, high nonclinical paranoia, persecutory delusions) of 30 participants were recruited. Levels of paranoia were tested using virtual reality. The groups were compared on assessments of anxiety, worry, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anomalous perceptual experiences, reasoning, and history of traumatic events. Virtual reality was found to cause no side effects. Persecutory ideation in virtual reality significantly differed across the groups. For the clear majority of the theoretical factors there were dose–response relationships with levels of paranoia. This is consistent with the idea of a spectrum of paranoia in the general population. Persecutory ideation is clearly present outside of clinical groups and there is consistency across the paranoia spectrum in associations with important theoretical variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)