Effects of Instructions and Contingency of Reinforcement on the Operant Conditioning of Human Phasic Heart Rate Change

The aim of these studies was to determine the effects of instructions and reinforcement contingency on phasic heart rate (HR) change. In Exp. I, 36 human subjects were given 20 conditioning trials with a muscletensing task which produced a phasic HR acceleration. The experimental manipulation produced an elevated baseline and allowed for the observation of instructed HR change during exercise. A 2 × 2 between subject design varied instructions (to increase or decrease the phasic tension-induced HR acceleration) and contingency (whether the verbal reinforcement was contingent on or unrelated to HR change) as factors. There was a significant instructional effect at the end of conditioning, with increase subjects producing more HR acceleration and decrease subjects less acceleration relative to pretrials. The instructional effect developed over trials and decrease subjects significantly improved with practice. There was no difference between contingent and non-contingent groups in either of the two conditions in ability to change HR in the instructed direction. This study shows the usefulness of the elevated baseline technique for cardiac research. A second experiment demonstrated that, in subjects not instructed to attempt HR change, the phasic HR response did not change in magnitude over conditioning. The results of these studies indicate that subjects are able to control phasic HR during physical-stress induced tension but biofeedback is not relevant for the production of such HR changes.     

Sexually dimorphic cognitive style, female sex hormones, and cortical nitric oxide

Recent studies using the water maze (WM) found marked sex differences in behavioral strategy employed in place learning tasks in adult rats. When a change in the platform position is introduced following learning the place of a platform (visible or hidden) in a different position, female rats escape to the newly positioned visible platform faster than males. Nitric oxide (NO) is implicated in place learning, and there are regional sex differences in its stable metabolites, NO(2)(-)+NO(3)(-), in rat brain. Furthermore, NO(2)(-)+NO(3)(-) levels are sensitive to ovariectomy in female rats. The effect of sex hormones on brain development and function is well documented. The present study was undertaken to study the effects of ovariectomy and hormonal manipulations on cognitive performance in a WM task designed to test differences in behavioral strategy in Sprague-Dawley rats (n=48) of both sexes. Some of the females rats were ovariectomised and received either hormone replacement (estrogen or progesterone alone or in combination) or the vehicle. Cortical and hippocampal NO(2)(-)+NO(3)(-) levels were determined after behavioral testing. There were no group differences in cognitive ability or non-cognitive factors such as motivation or swim speed. Males and intact females differed in their cognitive style, but hormonal manipulations in female rats did not affect this relative use of behavioral strategy. There was a correlation between performance on the trial where sex differences were most prominent and NO(2)(-)+NO(3)(-) levels in the cortex. Our results suggest that the activational effects of circulating gonadal hormones do not play a major role in sexually dimorphic cognitive styles.     

Operational, analogical and genuine definitions of psychophysiology

The reason for considering definitional issues is not that of arriving at a universally agreed-to definition, but rather that of illuminating scientific disagreements. From this viewpoint it will be argued that operational and analogical definitions which have been offered by psychophysiology are not useful, because they do not permit the settling of disputes on objective grounds. Those grounds are relevant only for genuine definitions, which can be tested in terms of the counter-example argument in general, and in particular in terms of whether they adequately differentiate psychophysiology from the closely related but diffent area of physiological psychology. One such genuine but inadequate definition is that offered by Stern (1964), which differentiates the two areas in terms of the dependent and independent variables being, respectively, manipulated and measured. The definition offered here is in terms of the interests of the investigator, and is that psychophysiology is the study of psychological processes in the intact organism as a whole by means of unobtrusively measured physiological processes. I shall argue that this definition more adequately differentiates psychophysiology from physiological psychology than does Stern's definition. In addition, I shall suggest that adopting this definition does not isolate the two areas from one another, but rather brings them into a more scientifically meaningful relationship. Finally, I shall illustrate, with some examples, how (implicity adopted) definitions that are different from the proposed one here lead to substantive differences in both the conduct and evaluation of research in psychophysiology. Definitional issues, in other words, are not only of relevance for ivory-tower, armchair philosophers. They affect not only the practice of empirical basic research, but also applied practice.     

Transitional care: a new approach to aftercare.

The transitional-care program incorporates the principles of behavior modification and group and family therapy in order to help recently discharged psychiatric patients maintain the positive changes that occurred in the hospital. Patients meet for approximately three hours a week, for up to 12 weeks, with nursing staff who worked with them while they were hospitalized. Each patient has an individual treatment program and goals, and during meetings with his team he discusses his progress and problems in meeting those goals. Staff members encourage patients to accept responsibility for each other and not to become too dependent on them. The program has been successful in preventing rehospitalization.     

Sexually dimorphic cognitive style in rats emerges after puberty

In a water maze (WM), rats employ different and sexually dimorphic behavioral strategies to solve a place-learning task, a test of cognitive/propositional ability. Puberty is the last step in brain development and marks an important phase with regard to sexually dimorphic cognitive performance and behavior. The present study assessed possible sex differences in cognitive style before and after puberty in a WM place-learning task. Since nitric oxide (NO) is implicated in spatial learning and hippocampal function, and since brain NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels (stable metabolites of NO) display region-specific sex differences in rat brain, NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels were determined after behavioral testing. The sex-related style difference emerged very clearly but only in the adult rats, which suggests that the female behavioral strategy in the WM place-learning task requires the presence of female sex hormones at puberty. Although NO(-)(2) + NO(-)(3) levels were higher in the adult rats and males compared to prepubertal and female rats, respectively, no significant correlations emerged between brain NO and behavior. The fact that the behavioral sexually dimorphic cognitive-style effect observed here and in previous studies appears to emerge only after puberty suggests that awareness of such postpubertal sex differences may also be important in human educational and therapeutic contexts.     

Heart Rate Deceleration in REM Sleep: An Orienting Reaction Interpretation

Eye-bursts (EBs) in REM sleep are associated with “active'’dream reports. Heart rate (HR) and T-wave amplitude (TWA) were studied during EBs, quiescent intervals (Q), and pre-EBs in REM sleep of 18 normal subjects. A clear and significant HR deceleration (HRD) emerged, which began 3 seconds before eye-bursts, but there were no coincident changes in TWA. Assuming EBs to be an instance of stimulus intake, the psychological interpretation of these phasic HRDs is that they are attentional orienting responses. Moreover, if TWA reflects predominantly sympathetic myocardial influence, then the absence of EB-asssociated TWA changes may suggest a vagal rather than sympathetic physiological mechanism.     

On Evaluating Autonomic and Verbal Indices of Negative Preception

Negative preception (NP) has been defined as the attenuation of a noxious stimulus by a signal which precedes it. Explanatory theories to account for the NP phenomenon are available, but the concern of this paper is with the methodological and empirical basis for the existence of the NP phenomenon itself. It is argued that autonomic indices based on shock-elicited responding cannot provide unconfounded evidence for NP because of insurmountable methodological problems associated with response-interference and perceptual-disparity (or orienting-reaction) effects. Furthermore, it is noted that when modified unconfounded autonomic indices have been used, the results failed to support the NP notion. A challenge to the validity of the verbal index of rated intensity is then considered, but it is argued that this verbal index is a valid measure of shock aversiveness. Since the rated-intensity evidence is also generally against the NP notion, it is concluded that both autonomic and verbal indices, when properly evaluated, do not support the view that signaling attenuates shock aversiveness.     

Effects of Varying Signaling and Intensity of Shock on an Unconfounded and Novel Electrodermal Autonomic Index in a Variable and Long-Interval Classical Trace Conditioning Paradigm

After a review of the evidence against the role of autonomic responses in the mediation of informational cognitive control, which occurs when merely signaling an inescapable shock reduces perceived aversiveness, it was noted that verbal indices of aversiveness had yielded results which were contrary to the informational control notion itelf. On the other hand, the fact that signaled shocks elicit smaller autonomic responding than unsignaled shocks still does not support the notion, because of confounding through response interference. In the present experiment with 48 Ss, electrodermal recovery time was examined as an unconfounded and novel autonomic index of the relative aversiveness of signaled and unsignaled shocks in a specially adapted form of the differential conditioning paradigm. This autonomic index was sensitive to the UCS-intensity manipulation, but despite this sensitivity, both this autonomic index and other verbal indices showed that, contrary to the informational-control notion, signaling does not reduce shock aversiveness.     

Electrodermal differentiation of deception: perceived accuracy and perceived memorial content manipulations.

The demonstration of deception as a psychophysiological phenomenon requires a comparison of physiological responses to two conditions (experimental and control) which differ only with respect to deception. Such electrodermal (skin conductance response) differentiation was recently reported in the Differentiation of Deception paradigm, which controls for two potentially important sources of confounding in polygraph (often referred to as the Detection of Deception): differential question significance and differential frequency of question occurrence. The present study manipulated (between 32 subjects in a 2 x 2 design) two two-level, subjective factors in the paradigm: Perceived Accuracy of polygraphy (written and oral instructions characterising accuracy as high vs low) and Perceived Memorial Content (20 more complex, less personal, and less meaningful questions vs 6 less complex, more personal, and more meaningful questions). Significant differentiation of deception was again obtained, as was evidence for the effectiveness of the manipulations. However, the deception phenomenon was not clearly affected by either of the two subjective factors. In addition, one post-hoc test showed significantly increased differentiation under the low Perceived Accuracy condition, which is contrary to the widespread belief of polygraphers that high perceived accuracy is not only important but even essential for the detection of deception. However, the applied, polygraphic aim of detecting guilt in individuals is quite different from the scientific, psychophysiological aim of differentiating deception as a psychological process, and the phenomena involved probably have different causes.