The Psychological Record最新文献

Abstract

The current study evaluated the effects of two different styles of discussion board assignments on weekly and cumulative final exam scores in an online asynchronous undergraduate psychology of learning class. In particular, this study used an alternating treatments design to compare three different discussion conditions: (1) interteaching-style discussion, in which students discussed all prep guide questions; (2) essay-style discussion, in which students posted a short essay and discussed essays written by other students; and (3) no discussion. No significant differences were found on weekly or cumulative final exam scores between these three discussion conditions. However, students reported that they preferred and learned more from interteaching-style discussions. It is unclear if the lack of effect on exam scores resulted from the alternating treatments design, which only exposed students to each discussion condition twice during the term. Future researchers could utilize alternate research designs to explore the effects of exposing students to a greater number of asynchronous interteaching discussions throughout the semester. An alternative explanation is that it may be that when prep guides are assigned and graded with detailed feedback, this mitigates the effect of the discussion component. Follow-up studies could investigate the impact of alternative methods for structuring the asynchronous interteaching discussion, and also the effects of adding quality points contingent on the discussion.

We present the core principles of a behavioral systems theory (BST) that incorporates dynamical systems concepts and applies them to a behavior analysis of early language development. The tenets of BST include multiple determinism, coalescent organization, nonlinearity, emergence, phase shifts, and developmental cusps. Developmental changes are marked by the transactions between genetic inheritance, interactional history, current physiological and environmental conditions, and behavior dynamics. Certain key emergent behaviors, known as cusps, enable further cascading development. Contingencies operating in the young child’s current social environment are the catalysts for the coalescence of conditions into the early learning of precursors to communication cusps in early childhood including orienting responses, eye contact, joint attention, and social referencing. In turn these social interaction cusps enable the development of organized patterns of verbal behavior that include imitation, mands, tacts, intraverbals, autoclitics, and naming. Some of these emergent patterns are the product of derived relational responding that enable further verbal behavioral cusps to develop. Early language results from an intensive, naturally occurring, skills learning process consisting of a massive number of contingent interactions between the child and the caregivers. This naturally occurring process resembles the use of multiple exemplars procedures employed by experimental researchers in training language skills to children but are employed intuitively by caregivers. These skills facilitate the emergence of new and more advanced sociocognitive skills later in childhood such as perspective taking, the self, and complex rule-following. We recommend further collaborations with other behavioral and developmental scientists.

Carrigan and Sidman Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 58, 183-204, (1992) proposed that select and reject arbitrary conditional relations are equivalence relations, each resulting in the emergence of alternative stimulus equivalence classes. The standard matching to sample (MTS) procedure can potentially teach both select and reject conditional relations, which apparently would prevent the emergence of equivalence relations, although there is extensive evidence for the emergence of equivalence with the standard MTS procedure. One possibility is that participants trained with the standard MTS procedure predominantly learn one type of control over the other. Experiment 1 explores the implementation of a Detached-MTS procedure, which separately trains the select and reject conditional relations involved in the Standard-MTS procedure. The results suggest that the emergence of equivalence relations may be compatible with conjoint select and reject conditional control. In Experiment 2, the Detached-MTS procedure succeeds in replicating the emergence of equivalence under exclusive select control but not under exclusive reject control, which conditions the findings of Experiment 1. The sources of control associated with the emergence of equivalence in the standard MTS procedure and some methodological issues of the Detached-MTS procedure are discussed.

A review of recent applied research in observation suggests researchers could profit from a new account of observational learning. Current research in the identification and establishment of verbal developmental cusps demonstrates the importance of the range of observational cusps necessary for the acquisition of language. These cusps encompass learning through imitation, duplication of outcomes, understanding consequences of observed behaviors, acquiring new reinforcers, incidental unidirectional and bidirectional naming, and more. This account offers solutions to bridge gaps in the literature and complements related research, providing a comprehensive understanding of observational learning processes. This updated account of observational learning is especially relevant when we consider its implications for human language acquisition. In this article, we emphasize that language acquisition is not solely an individual cognitive development, but a socially mediated process, where observation plays a fundamental role in linguistic growth and development.

In order to introduce a new way of understanding human speech, the article connects two independent lines of Skinner’s research: his work on verbal behavior and on connecting behavior analysis to evolution. The article discusses an empirical study as an example motivated by this connection. Similar to biologists’ suggestion that natural selection can operate on multiple nested levels, Baum (The Behavior Analyst, 36(2), 283–293, 2013) argues that operant behavior is best understood in terms of nested units. Because verbal behavior is operant behavior, Baum’s view should apply to verbal behavior. We conducted the first experiment designed to explore empirical implications of applying this framework. Six pairs of native Norwegian speaking participants communicated verbally while solving a puzzle task together. We investigated if verbal signals occurred to aid navigation between nested levels of the task. 25,191 words were transcribed, revealing that “Ok” was most frequently spoken at the start of the whole activity with a decreasing trend when starting the description of lower-level units, whereas “Også” / “Og så” (“and” / “and well”) became more frequent as the level of activity decreased. “Ja” (“yes”) most frequently concluded all activity levels. These findings can benefit future studies aiming at experimentally manipulating the verbal stimuli found to guide movement between activity levels. The conceptual argument and empirical example are spelled out to inspire further refinements of the connection between verbal behavior and evolution.

Delay discounting is the tendency for individuals to devalue a reward as time to receipt of the reward increases. Rates of delay discounting describe to what extent one prefers smaller rewards delivered immediately over larger rewards delivered at a delay. Discount rates vary among individuals, and authors have suggested that abnormal discount rate may represent a transdiagnostic process implicated in multiple psychiatric disorders. However, further research is needed on how discount rate may relate to anxiety symptomatology and formally diagnosed anxiety disorders. Thus, the present study, in a sample of individuals with heterogeneous anxiety disorders and healthy controls, examined how monetary discount rate related to dimensional measures of anxiety symptomatology as well as diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), and panic disorder (PD). In addition, we examined how discount rate related to physiological startle response (i.e., fear-potentiated and anxiety-potentiated startle). From 2019 to 2022, adults with a formal diagnosis of GAD, SAD, and/or PD (N = 89) and healthy controls (N = 66) completed dimensional measures of anxiety symptomatology; a hypothetical monetary delay discounting task that followed an adjusting titration procedure; and the neutral, predictable, and unpredictable (NPU) threat test. Correlational analyses revealed that discount rate was not significantly associated with any dimensional measure of anxiety (ps ≥ .31); logistic regressions controlling for appropriate covariates indicated that discount rate was not significantly associated with any anxiety disorder diagnosis (ps ≥ .14). In addition, discount rate was not significantly correlated with any measure of physiological startle (ps ≥ .22). We did find that completion of the delay discounting task during the pandemic was significantly associated with shallower (lower) discount rate. Overall, results suggest that monetary delay discounting paradigms might not represent a highly useful tool within the anxiety disorders field in particular, and the potential transdiagnostic role of abnormal discount rate, at least as measured with monetary discounting paradigms, might not extend to anxiety disorders. However, results should be interpreted cautiously given limitations such as the relatively small sample size, which precluded adequate statistical power to detect effects of small sizes.

Abstract

Extinction of a response in the presence of one stimulus in an equivalence class can transfer to other related stimuli, but difficulties in establishing extinction can compromise analyses. The present study evaluated the transfer of avoidance extinction with two extinction procedures. In particular, avoidance or nonavoidance was always (Experiment 1) and never (Experiment 2) followed by point loss in the crucial extinction test phase. Both experiments began with the establishment of two equivalence classes with four abstract figures in each (A1-B1-C1-D1 and A2-B2-C2-D2). Clicking a button to avoid loss of points was trained with B1 and subsequently observed without direct training in the presence of C1 and D1. Extinction was then conducted with one group of participants with stimuli that underwent avoidance training (direct extinction with B1 and B2) and with another group with stimuli who did not undergo avoidance training (derived extinction with C1 and C2). Finally, the transfer of extinction was evaluated with stimuli from both classes. In Experiment 1, 10 of 14 participants met the avoidance extinction criteria, and the transfer of extinction occurred for 2 (1 in the direct and 1 in the derived extinction group). In Experiment 2, 10 of 13 participants met the avoidance extinction criteria, and the transfer of extinction occurred for 6 (5 in the direct and 1 in the derived extinction group). Overall, the transfer of extinction occurred only with the combination of an extinction procedure without aversive events and direct extinction.

Behavior analysis in Brazil started with Keller’s visit in 1961 and has since grown steadily. Brazilian research on the last decades has been relevant to modern behavior analysis of language and cognition, mostly due to a network including researchers from several universities, the National Institute for Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition, and Teaching (INCT-ECCE). This article attempts to picture the contribution of Brazilian research to modern behavior analysis of language and cognition, highlighting some of the lines of research conducted in INCT-ECCE with potential to impact on the field.

Competition is said to be arranged when reinforcers are distributed unequally based on the participants’ performances. Responses that produce access to the participants’ score and/or the score of their competitor(s) are commonly referred to as audits and are analogous to observing responses in the experimental literature. The current study sought to bridge the experimental and dyadic competition literatures by extending previous research on observing (i.e., audit) responses in a human operant arrangement. Ten undergraduate students participated in dyadic competitive arrangements in Minecraft Education on a desktop computer. A single participant competed in successive 3-min contests against one of two automated confederates that differed in their rate of competitive responding. Participants’ rate of competitive, audit, and contest termination responses were measured. Differentiated performances were only observed when participants audited during contests. Implications for experimental research on competitive contingencies are discussed.

Abstract

Excessive choice of smaller-immediate rewards has been positively correlated with a host of negative health outcomes such as addiction, gambling, and overeating. Meta-analytic research suggests that stress is a contextual variable that can contribute to impulsive choice. The strength of the relationship between stress and impulsive decision making may be largely moderated by how these variables are measured. Despite clinical relevance, the relationship between daily stress and decision making is not well understood. The current investigation sought to further characterize the relationship between acute stress and impulsive decision making using the Daily Stress Inventory and the 27-item Monetary Choice Questionnaire. Results from 69 adults revealed a positive correlation between daily stressors and impulsive decision making. Future directions are discussed aimed at experimental evaluations of the effects of stress on impulsive decision making.