Psychology Commons^™

Trends. Terrorist Brains, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the construct of biological reductionism in the context of the case of Red Army Faction member Ulrike Meinhof. For the author, overly emphasizing the biological aspects of Ms. Meinhof’s case might obscure legitimate grievances, and ultimately, lead to more cases of violence associated with terrorism.

Training And Performance Self-Efficacy, Affect, And Performance In Wheelchair Road Racers, Jeffrey J. Martin

Kinesiology, Health and Sport Studies

In the current study, social cognitive theory was examined with athletes with disabilities. More specifically, hierarchical and self-regulatory performance self-efficacy, self-regulatory training self-efficacy, outcome confidence, and affect were examined with wheelchair road racers (N = 51). In accordance with social cognitive theory, moderate to strong significant relationships among 3 types of self-efficacy and outcome confidence were found (rs = .41 - .78). All forms of self-efficacy and positive affect (rs = .39 - .56) were also related providing additional support to social cognitive theory and the important relationships among training and performance related efficacy and affect in …

Do Female Rainbowfish (Melanotaenia Spp.) Prefer To Shoal With Familiar Individuals Under Predation Pressure?, Culum Brown

Sentience Collection

Shoaling with familiar individuals may have many benefits including enhanced escape responses or increased foraging efficiency. This study describes the results of two complimentary experiments. The first utilised a simple binary choice experiment to determine if rainbowfish (Melanotaenia spp.) preferred to shoal with familiar individuals or with strangers. The second experiment used a “free range” situation where familiar and unfamiliar individuals were free to intermingle and were then exposed to a predator threat. Like many other small species of fish, rainbowfish were capable of identifying and distinguishing between individuals and choose to preferentially associate with familiar individuals as opposed to …

Physiology And Behavior Of Dogs During Air Transport, Renée Bergeron, Shannon L. Scott, Jean-Pierre Émond, Florent Mercier, Nigel J. Cook, Al L. Schaefer

Stress Collection

Twenty-four beagles were used to measure physiological and behavioral reactions to air transport. Each of 3 groups of 4 sedated (with 0.5 mg/kg body weight of acepromazine maleate) and 4 non-sedated (control) dogs was flown on a separate flight between Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, Ontario, after being transported by road from Quebec City to Montreal. Saliva and blood samples were taken before ground and air transport and after air transport. The heart rate was monitored during the whole experiment except during ground transport, and behavior was monitored by video during air transport. Sedation did not affect any of the variables …

Social Learning Of A Novel Avoidance Task In The Guppy: Conformity And Social Release, Culum Brown, Kevin N. Laland

Sentience Collection

Studies of social learning suggest that many animals are disproportionately likely to adopt the behavior of the majority, and that this conformist transmission hinders the spread of novel behavioural variants. However, novel learned behaviour patterns regularly diffuse through animal populations. We propose a hypothesis, termed the ‘social release hypothesis’, that resolves these apparently conflicting findings by suggesting that animals are released from conforming to traditional behaviour in the absence of demonstrators. We investigated the role of pretrained, female demonstrator guppies, Poecilia reticulata, in influencing the escape response of untrained females to an artificial predator. Naïve ‘observer’ guppies were given the …

Vigilance And Predation Risk In Gunnison’S Prairie Dogs (Cynomys Gunnisoni), J. L. Verdolin, C. N. Slobodchikoff

Sentience Collection

Group living in animals is believed to confer advantages related to a decrease in predation risk and an energetic trade-off between vigilance and foraging efficiency. Eight Gunnison’s prairie dog, Cynomys gunnisoni, colonies in Flagstaff, Arizona (elevation 2300 m), were studied from April to August 2000 to examine the adaptive significance of colonial living in the context of predation risk and antipredator behavioral strategies. Each colony was sampled once every 10 days for a period of 3 h. Upright and quadrepedal vigilance was recorded using scan samples. All predation events were recorded. Results suggest that vigilant behavior in Gunnison’s prairie dogs …

Trends. Allies Of Terrorism In The Realm Of Biological Warfare?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses an increase in security regarding food shipment, manufacturing, and processing, as well as corporate lobbyists opposition to it.

Processing Picture–Word Stimuli: The Contingent Nature Of Picture And Of Word Superiority, Yoav Arieh, Daniel Algom

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

P participants named (Experiments 1–2) or categorized (Experiments 3–4) the picture or the word of the picture–word compounds that varied in the relative saliency of the 2 components and in the correlation between them over the experimental trials. Picture-word interference (PWI) was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects. PWI was found to be malleable; its magnitude and very presence depending lawfully on the contextual variations introduced. The contingent nature of PWI is a fact to be reckoned with by theorists of the picture–word processing.

Cognitive Ethology And The Cost Of Anthropomorphiphobia, Robert H.I. Dale

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Book review for the following titles:

Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. By Donald R. Griffin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376 pages. $27.50 softcover

The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions. Edited by Marc Bekoff, New York: Discovery Books, 2000, 240 pages. $35.00 hardcover

Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals. By Lesley J. Rogers, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, 224 pages. $19.00 softcover

Chimpanzee Signing: Darwinian Realities And Cartesian Delusions, Roger S. Fouts, Mary Lee A. Jensvold, Deborah Fouts

Anthropology and Museum Studies Faculty Scholarship

Truly discontinuous, all-or-none phenomena must be rare in nature. Historically, the great discontinuities have turned out to be conceptual barriers rather than natural phenomena. They have been passed by and abandoned rather than broken through in the course of scientific progress. The sign language studies in chimpanzees have neither sought nor discovered a means of breathing humanity into the soul of a beast. They have assumed instead that there is no discontinuity between verbal behavior and the rest of human behavior or between human behavior and the rest of animal behavior—no barrier to be broken, no chasm to be bridged, …

Convergence Of Complex Cognitive Abilities In Cetaceans And Primates, Lori Marino

Sentience Collection

What examples of convergence in higher-level complex cognitive characteristics exist in the animal kingdom? In this paper I will provide evidence that convergent intelligence has occurred in two distantly related mammalian taxa. One of these is the order Cetacea (dolphins, whales and porpoises) and the other is our own order Primates, and in particular the suborder anthropoid primates (monkeys, apes, and humans). Despite a deep evolutionary divergence, adaptation to physically dissimilar environments, and very different neuroanatomical organization, some primates and cetaceans show striking convergence in social behavior, artificial ‘language’ comprehension, and self-recognition ability. Taken together, these findings have important implications …

Cognitive And Communicative Abilities Of Grey Parrots, Irene M. Pepperberg

Sentience Collection

Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) solve various cognitive tasks and acquire and use English speech in ways that often resemble those of very young children. Given that the psittacine brain is organized very differently from that of mammals, these results have intriguing implications for the study and evolution of vocal learning, communication, and cognition.

Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes) Recognize Spatial And Object Correspondences Between A Scale Model And Its Referent, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Sarah T. Boysen

Sentience Collection

In the present study, the contributions of spatial and object features to chimpanzees’ comprehension of scale models were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously demonstrated the ability to use a scale model as an information source for the location of a hidden item were tested under conditions manipulating the feature correspondence and spatial-relational correspondence between objects in the model and an outdoor enclosure. In Experiment 1, subjects solved the task under two conditions in which one object cue (color or shape) was unavailable, but positional cues remained. Additionally, performance was above chance under a third condition in which both types of …

In Search Of King Solomon’S Ring: Cognitive And Communicative Studies Of Grey Parrots (Psittacus Erithacus), Irene M. Pepperberg

Sentience Collection

During the past 24 years, I have used a modeling technique (M/R procedure) to train Grey parrots to use an allospecific code (English speech) referentially; I then use the code to test their cognitive abilities. The oldest bird, Alex, labels more than 50 different objects, 7 colors, 5 shapes, quantities to 6, 3 categories (color, shape, material) and uses ‘no’, ‘come here’, wanna go X’ and ‘want Y’ (X and Y are appropriate location or item labels). He combines labels to identify, request, comment upon or refuse more than 100 items and to alter his environment. He processes queries to …

Athletes' Use Of Imagery In The Off-Season, Jennifer Cumming, Craig Hall

Jennifer Cumming

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of competitive level on an athletes’ use of imagery in the off-season, and to examine whether their use of imagery was related to their physical and technical preparation. Three hundred and twenty-four regional, provincial, and national level athletes were recruited to participate in this study from 10 different sports. Participants were asked to complete a modified version of the Sport Imagery Questionnaire (SIQ; Hall, Mack, Paivio, & Hausenblas, 1998) that was designed to reflect an athletes’ use of imagery in the off-season. MANOVAs indicated that competitive level differences existed in …

Ethological Causes And Consequences Of The Stress Response, Neil Greenberg, James A. Carr, Cliff H. Summers

Neil Greenberg

Stress involves real or perceived changes within an organism or in the environment that activate an organism’s attempts to cope by means of evolutionarily ancient neural and endocrine mechanisms. Responses to acute stressors involve catecholamines released in varying proportion at different sites in the sympathetic and central nervous systems. These responses may interact with and be complemented by intrinsic rhythms and responses to chronic or intermittent stressors involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Varying patterns of responses to stressors are also affected by an animal=s assessment of their prospects for successful coping. Subsequent central and systemic consequences of the stress response include …

Ethological Aspects Of Stress In A Model Lizard, Anolis Carolinensis, Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg

Research on the stress response in reptiles can provide a useful comparative perspective for understanding how the constituent elements of the response can be put into service of diverse behavioral adaptations. A summary of the neural and endocrine causes and consequences of specific behavioral patterns seen in the small diurnal lizard, Anolis carolinensis, has provided a model for the exploration of the dynamics of autonomic and neurohormonal contributions to adaptive behavior. In this species, changes in body color provide indices of the flux of circulating stress relevant hormones, and are seen in situations from spontaneous exploration through agonistic behavior. Furthermore, …

Adaptive Functions Of The Corpus Striatum: The Past And Future Of The R-Complex, Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg

The basal ganglia is emerging from the shadow cast by the most conspicuous clinical expression of its dysfunction: motor disorders.What is revealed is the nexus of a widely distributed system which functions in integrating action with cognition, motivation, and affect. Prominent among non-motor functions are striatal involvement in building up of sequences of behavior into meaningful, goal-directed patterns and repertoires and the selection of appropriate learned or innate sequences in concert with their possible predictive control. Further, striatum seems involved in declarative and strategic memory (involving intentional recollection and the management of retrieved memories, respectively). Findings from reptile experiments indicate …

Gender Differences In Gross And Fine Motor Abilities In Preschool Aged Children In West Virginia, Kelly R. Pennington

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this study was to investigate gender differences in gross and fine motor abilities in preschool aged children in West Virginia. Subjects consisted of 21 males and 16 females. Data was collected via the West Virginia Educare Initiative using the Carolina Curriculum for Preschoolers with Special Needs. Results of this study indicate that there are no significant gender differences in either gross motor or fine motor abilities in preschool aged children.

Enhanced Locomotor, Reinforcing, And Neurochemical Effects Of Cocaine In Serotonin 5-Hydroxytryptamine 2c Receptor Mutant Mice, Laura O'Dell

Laura Elena O'Dell

No abstract provided.

Adaptive Functions Of The Corpus Striatum: The Past And Future Of The R-Complex, Neil Greenberg

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The basal ganglia is emerging from the shadow cast by the most conspicuous clinical expression of its dysfunction: motor disorders.What is revealed is the nexus of a widely distributed system which functions in integrating action with cognition, motivation, and affect. Prominent among non-motor functions are striatal involvement in building up of sequences of behavior into meaningful, goal-directed patterns and repertoires and the selection of appropriate learned or innate sequences in concert with their possible predictive control. Further, striatum seems involved in declarative and strategic memory (involving intentional recollection and the management of retrieved memories, respectively). Findings from reptile experiments indicate …

Ethological Aspects Of Stress In A Model Lizard, Anolis Carolinensis, Neil Greenberg

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Research on the stress response in reptiles can provide a useful comparative perspective for understanding how the constituent elements of the response can be put into service of diverse behavioral adaptations. A summary of the neural and endocrine causes and consequences of specific behavioral patterns seen in the small diurnal lizard, Anolis carolinensis, has provided a model for the exploration of the dynamics of autonomic and neurohormonal contributions to adaptive behavior.

In this species, changes in body color provide indices of the flux of circulating stress relevant hormones, and are seen in situations from spontaneous exploration through agonistic behavior. Furthermore, …

Ethological Causes And Consequences Of The Stress Response, Neil Greenberg, James A. Carr, Cliff H. Summers

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Stress involves real or perceived changes within an organism or in the environment that activate an organism’s attempts to cope by means of evolutionarily ancient neural and endocrine mechanisms. Responses to acute stressors involve catecholamines released in varying proportion at different sites in the sympathetic and central nervous systems. These responses may interact with and be complemented by intrinsic rhythms and responses to chronic or intermittent stressors involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Varying patterns of responses to stressors are also affected by an animal=s assessment of their prospects for successful coping. Subsequent central and systemic consequences of the stress response include …

Discounting And Reciprocity In An Iterated Prisoner’S Dilemma, David W. Stephens, Colleen M. Mclinn, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) is a central paradigm in the study of animal cooperation. According to the IPD framework, repeated play (repetition) and reciprocity combine to maintain a cooperative equilibrium. However, experimental studies with animals suggest that cooperative behavior in IPDs is unstable, and some have suggested that strong preferences for immediate benefits (that is, temporal discounting) might explain the fragility of cooperative equilibria. We studied the effects of discounting and strategic reciprocity on cooperation in captive blue jays. Our results demonstrate an interaction between discounting and reciprocity. Blue jays show high stable levels of cooperation in treatments with …

Synchronization Of The Human Cortical Working Memory Network, Sharlene Newman, Marcel Just, Patricia Carpenter

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

An Fmri Study Of Bilingual Sentence Comprehension And Workload, Mihoko Hasegawa, Patricia A. Carpenter, Marcel Adam Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.