No description available.

Parent psychopathology, including parental depression, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorders, and ADHD, has been shown to be related to children's behavior development (Chronis et al., 2003). However, much of the research on the relationship between parent psychopathology and children's behavior problems has not considered children with different subtypes of behavior problems (e.g., those with hyperactivity versus those with oppositional-defiance), has focused on children of elementary school-age and older, and has focused on maternal psychopathology. The present study examined how mothers' and fathers' psychopathology is related to subtypes of behavior problems among preschool-aged children. Participants included 215 children, who were between 38 and 50 months, and their mothers and fathers, who were participating in a longitudinal study of young children with behavior problems. Children's behavior problems and parent psychopathology were measured using parental questionnaires and interviews. A series of ANOVAs and Chi-square analyses were run. As expected, parents of comorbid behavior problem children reported greater levels of psychopathology, alcohol abuse, and personality disorders than did parents of nonproblem children, and parents of both purely hyperactive children and comorbid behavior problem children reported greater levels of their own history of childhood ADHD than did parents of non-problem children. Exploratory analyses examined the moderating effects of child gender, child ethnicity, and parent education. This study has implications for understanding the importance of studying subtypes of preschool children's behavior problems, as well as the contribution of parent psychopathology to the maintenance and exacerbation of behavior problems from preschool age to elementary school age.

A large number of studies on both animals and humans have demonstrated that learning is influenced by context, or secondary cues that are present when an association is formed. The mechanistic aspects of context-dependent memory retrieval, or the context shift effect, have been well studied in strictly controlled laboratory settings. However, the adaptive value of attending to contextual cues in ecologically relevant situations has received considerably less attention. The goal of this dissertation is to examine the functional value of attending to context during learning. The jumping spider Phidippus princeps is capable of learning the ecologically relevant task of avoiding aposematic prey. However, when spiders were tested in an environment different from the one in which they were trained, attack rates increased and spiders no longer demonstrated retention of the association. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that spiders can use contextual cues to inform adaptive decisions about patch selection based on experience with prey of varying palatability or electric shock. Lastly, learning to avoid prey across a consistent contextual background versus a variable background produces initial differences in rates of learned avoidance, while ultimately learning performance between the groups is similar. Thus, contextual information (either in its constancy or variability) is an important component of avoidance learning in jumping spiders and can be valuable information in adaptive decision-making.

No description available.

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251799."

Decision making in an uncertain environment is a formidable task. Input cues are weighted according to a decision rule and applied to an event to produce a judgment. Research into the quality of such decisions has provided mixed evidence. Psychology research suggests that decision makers employ heuristics (simplifying strategies) in arriving at judgments, and that their use may result in biased judgments. Such biases include underweighting of disconfirming information, insufficient adjustment from an initial anchor, overestimation of conjunctive probabilities, and neglect of base rates. However, these psychology studies typically examined the judgments of student subjects performing relatively unfamiliar, generic tasks. Some researchers question whether these observed biases may have resulted from an experimental mismatch between tasks and subjects. In particular, Edwards (1983) argued that different patterns of heuristic use might be evident when experienced decision makers perform familiar tasks. Also, Klayman and Ha (1987) suggest that decision makers may make use of specialized, "task-specific" heuristics in familiar contexts. Smith and Kida (1991)'s review of audit research on heuristics and biases indicates that the presence and extent of the aforementioned biases are often mitigated or modified when auditors perform familiar, job-related tasks. The central hypothesis of this study was that experience differences would affect auditors' heuristic use in audit tasks, but not in relatively unfamiliar, generic tasks. Results of the confirmatory decision strategy and anchoring and adjustment experiments supported this hypothesis. Although both experienced and inexperienced auditors' audit task judgments indicated the use of conservatism (preferential attention to negative information), inexperienced auditors' judgments were more negative than those of experienced auditors. There were no significant experience-related differences in either of these settings' generic tasks. The conjunctive probability judgment experiment also provided evidence of task-specific heuristic use, as experienced auditors produced significantly greater conjunction effects in the audit task than in the corresponding generic task. Overall, results provided some evidence suggesting that decision makers' heuristic use is affected by both individual and task differences. Additional research examining the effects of these differences on heuristic use should provide further insight into the strategies decision makers use in making judgments under uncertainty.

There is a need for an objective measure for matching psychiatric patients with outpatient community settings. The Current Behavior Inventory has been developed to meet this need. This study uses data from 50 patients at two outpatient settings in New York State to examine the reliability and validity of the CBI. The effect of a measure of likeability is also examined. Four measures were used: the Current Behavior Inventory-Clinician Form, to identify the skills demonstrated by the patients in the study; the Current Behavior Inventory-Provider Form, to identify the skills required by the settings and those skills that enhance success at the settings; Level of Success-Ranking, a forced ranking of the 25 patients from each setting used in the study; and Likeability, a 5 point Likert-type scale. Ten patients were rated by independent raters to examine interrater reliability. The percent of the skills identified as required by the settings that were demonstrated by each patient was calculated and the percent of the skills identified as enhancing success by the settings demonstrated by each patient was calculated. Significant correlations were found between the percent of the required skills demonstrated by patients and Level of Success-Ranking, and the percent of enhancing skills demonstrated and Level of Success-Ranking. There was no significant correlation between Likeability and Level of Success-Ranking. There was a significant correlation between the skill measures and Likeability. The findings suggest that the CBI is useful in predicting success for patients in these settings. The interrater reliability was shown to be good.

Ovarian steroid hormones influence both behavior and physiology in a variety of species by binding to intracellular steroid receptors. Recent studies suggest that steroid receptors (e.g., estrogen and progestin receptors) may also be activated in the absence of steroid. Infusion of dopamine agonists into the third ventricle of estradiol-primed female rats can increase estrous behavior, and this increase can be blocked by prior treatment with progestin antagonists even in the absence of progesterone. However, it is not known if progestin receptors in rat brain are activated in the absence of circulating progesterone under physiological conditions affecting neuronal responses and behavior. This dissertation attempts to determine if somatosensory cues that are normally experienced by females, such as stimuli associated with sexual contact with males, activate progestin receptors to influence both neuronal response and estrous behavior in the absence of circulating progesterone. Using immunocytochemistry, it is possible to determine the expression of immediate early gene products that suggest neuronal response to particular stimuli. It was found that either progesterone or stimuli associated with mating can increase immunostaining of the immediate early gene product, Fos, within cells that contain progestin receptors. Thus, some neurons in female rat brain are capable of integrating somatosensory information provided by the male and information relating to serum progesterone levels. In addition, increases in Fos expression in female rat brain following stimuli associated with mating can be blocked by prior treatment with progestin antagonists even in the absence of circulating progesterone. This suggests that the response of some neurons to mating-related stimuli are mediated via progestin receptors. It was also found that a component of estrous behavior (e.g., lordosis) in female rats can be facilitated by repeated exposure to males in the absence of progesterone, and this facilitation can be blocked by prior treatment with progestin antagonists. The present results suggest that progestin receptors in some neurons in rat brain are activated by mating related stimuli in a progesterone-independent manner. These data suggest a pathway by which mating-related stimuli or other environmental influences could activate steroid receptors influencing neuronal response and behavior in the absence of circulating progesterone.

In a set of 7 experiments, the author examined if cue-competition effects such as blocking and overshadowing reflect deficits in learning (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) or deficits in performance (Miller & Schachtman, 1985). To this end, the author tested if the ability of a blocked and/or overshadowed stimulus was weakened in its ability to serve as a blocker or second-order reinforcer for a novel stimulus. It was assumed that the ability of a stimulus to serve as a blocker or second-order reinforcer depended on its associative status, and not on the performance it evoked. CS-evoked suppression of appetitively-motivated barpressing served as the dependent measure of conditioned performance. Experiment 1 found that an overshadowed CS was weakened in its ability to serve as a blocker. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and further showed that a blocked stimulus was also weakened in its ability to serve as a blocker. Experiment 3 showed that a blocked and overshadowed stimulus was weakened in its ability to serve as a second-order reinforcer. The results of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 were construed as supporting a learning-deficit as opposed to a performance-deficit interpretation of cue-competition effects. Performance-deficit theorists, however, might claim that the weakened ability of a blocked and/or overshadowed CS to serve as a blocker or second-order reinforcer was due to the presence of an intact A-US association (the association produced by the blocking and/or overshadowing CS). Experiments 4 to 7 addressed this issue, using various techniques, which might weaken the allegedly interfering A-US association. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that extinguishing the blocking and/or overshadowing stimulus did not facilitate performance to and blocking ability of a blocked and/or overshadowed stimulus (Experiment 4) or overshadowed stimulus (Experiment 5). Experiment 6 further showed that subjecting the blocking and/or overshadowing cue to a Pavlovian conditioned inhibition procedure also did not enhance performance to the blocked and/or overshadowed stimulus. Finally, Experiment 7 showed that extinguishing the overshadowing stimulus weakened performance to the overshadowed stimulus. Collectively, the results of Experiments 1 to 7 are consistent with learning-deficit interpretations of cue-competition effects (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972; Mackintosh, 1975).

The phenomenology of self-injury in a non-clinical undergraduate population was investigated in two studies. In Study 1, 244 undergraduate men and women completed measures of demographic information, trauma history, posttraumatic symptomatology, and history of self-injury. High rates of overt and indirect self-injury were found in this non-clinical sample. The variety of self-injurious behaviors increased as severity of trauma history and posttraumatic symptomatology increased. Reasons typically identified by clinical populations for engaging in self-injury were also seen in this sample across a wide range of self-injurious behaviors. Study 2 was a replication and extension of Study 1. In Study 2, 214 undergraduate men and women completed measures of demographic information, trauma history, and posttraumatic symptomatology as well as a revised version of the self-injury questionnaire. High rates of indirect and overt self-injurious behaviors were again found in a non-clinical sample. For indirect self-injury, trauma history and posttraumatic symptomatology interacted to predict variety and frequency of indirect self-injury. That is, for participants experiencing relatively low levels of posttraumatic symptomatology, variety and frequency of indirect self-injury were positively associated with more severe trauma history; however, for participants experiencing higher levels of posttraumatic symptomatology, there were no systematic relations between variety and frequency of indirect self-injury and trauma history. In contrast, for overt self-injury, more severe trauma history and posttraumatic symptomatology positively predicted variety and frequency of overt self-injury without an interaction effect. Reasons typically identified by clinical populations for engaging in self-injury were associated with both indirect and overt self-injurious behaviors. The findings from these two studies serve as a starting point for further exploration of the phenomenology of self-injury and its link to traumatic events in non-clinical populations. Given that indirect self-injury appears to serve more serious functions in non-clinical populations than previously thought, a better understanding of its functions and psychological sequelae will enable mental health professionals to approach these issues more effectively. If overt self-injury is, in fact, reaching epidemic proportions in non-clinical populations as has been suggested, then more information is needed to understand how best to conceptualize and address self-injury in the general population.