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This qualitative study investigated how alcohol policy education and enforcement influenced student drinking behavior and norms at a large state university. Data collection consisted of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with sixteen traditional-age freshmen and sophomores who lived in two different campus residential areas. One purpose of this study was to gain insight into the actual drinking practices of students who reside in campus residence halls while another focus was to determine how policy education and enforcement influenced students' decisions to drink. The study participants, who served as "informants" for the purpose of the research, were also asked how they made sense of the situation. The findings suggest emergent themes related to the high incidence of student drinking in the residence halls, the lack of University-sponsored education and enforcement of the alcohol policy, and the manner in which the students' developmental stage influenced their drinking behaviors. In their observations, students talked about a "If we don't see it, hear it, or smell it" enforcement policy and openly criticized the University for its hypocritical stance. Students also revealed strong feelings of disappointment and remorse because their residence hall drinking had negatively impacted their academic standings and their overall well-being. The data suggest that the lack of policy education and enforcement creates an environmental press that encourages student drinking and actually impedes student development. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.

A rat model was used to determine whether prenatal cocaine exposure results in long-term changes in hippocampal-dependent contextual fear conditioning. Pregnant dams received either 40 mg/kg cocaine HCl SC (COC), an equal volume of 0.9% saline (SAL), or received no injections (UT) from gestational day 8 through 20. SAL animals were also pair-fed to COC subjects. Experiment 1 tested one-trial contextual fear conditioning in adult male offspring. Freezing and defecation were measures of fear. Prenatal cocaine exposure did not affect context conditioning, but there was an overall increase in SAL and COC defecation, indicating an increased generalized fear in these subjects. To better mimic binge cocaine use, COC dams in Experiment 2 and 3 received 20 mg/kg cocaine HCl SC, b.i.d. A preliminary open field task revealed that SAL offspring were more exploratory than UT controls and that females were more active than males. In Experiment 2, adult male and female offspring received 4 days of context conditioning and 3 days of no-shock extinction. During extinction, access to an adjacent chamber enabled the observation of four additional measures of fear: side crossing, latency, nose crossing, and side-differential. Experiment 2 repeated previous reports of gender-specific contextual fear. Males showed a greater level of freezing and defecation, higher latencies and side-differentials, and a lower level of side crossings and nose crossings than females. Prenatal cocaine exposure resulted in exaggerated gender-specific fear conditioning as measured by nose-crossing and side differential during extinction. Experiment 3 tested the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on latent inhibition (LI) of contextual fear in year-old females. Vertical nose crossing (VNC), freezing, and defecation were measures of fear. LI was evidenced as an attenuation of freezing and VNC in pre-exposed (PE) animals compared to non-pre-exposed subjects. Prenatal cocaine exposure resulted in an enhanced LI effect. COC females showed a low level of baseline VNC, but COC-PE subjects showed a greater level of VNC than controls following the first shock during conditioning. The results of these experiments suggest that the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on hippocampal-dependent learning are subtle, selective, and gender specific.

Adolescents exposed to violence and life threat often experience symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One would think that adolescent males are exposed to more violence and therefore would demonstrate higher rates of PTSD, however, higher rates of PTSD and distress symptoms have been found in females. Rates of exposure, psychological factors and cognitive style may mediate the experience of violence in children and adolescents. Attention to these variables might help to clarify whether there is a difference across sex in the experience of PTSD. This study examined a sample of male and female adolescents who reported exposure to community violence, in order to determine whether the males in the sample report more exposure to violence and less PTSD symptomatology, and to explore the contribution of coping strategies, cognitive developmental style, and type of victimization to differential experience of PTSD symptoms. Results indicate that male adolescents may not experience greater exposure to violence, and they meet criteria for PTSD less often than female adolescents. Differences across sex in coping strategies appear to be related to this phenomenon. The data failed to support the idea that differential experience of sexual victimization across sex is related to the difference in PTSD diagnostic status; however, this area deserves further study. Support for a relationship between cognitive style and sex as a factor in differential experience of PTSD was neither supported nor invalidated. Initial data indicate a range of cognitive styles. more sophisticated research regarding trauma recovery process is required to further explore these phenomena.

Some of the adverse effects associated with abstinence from chronic cocaine usage are similar to the psychiatric symptoms of affective illness. Some of these symptoms include dysphoria, agitation, anxiety and alterations in sleep and appetite (Gawin and Kleber, 1986, 1988). Since in the treatment of affective illness these symptoms are responsive to medications which regulate specific receptors in the serotonergic system, I studied the influence chronic cocaine exposure and abstinence has on the expression and behavioral responses of the 5-HT2A receptor. First, the specific binding parameters of [3H]ketanserin were assessed in the hippocampus and frontal cortex of rat brain tissue. These studies revealed relatively high affinity binding in both areas. The dissociation constants averaged 1.40 +/− 0.05 nM for the frontal cortex and 2.88 +/− 0.22 nM for the hippocampus. The density of the binding sites for the frontal cortex and hippocampus averaged 567 +/− 35 and 233 +/− 53 f moles/mg protein respectively. Additional receptor binding experiments conducted at various time points during and following cocaine exposure via subcutaneously implanted cocaine- or vehicle-containing Silastic capsules revealed no treatment-related differences in receptor density. Since previous studies have reported that various stressors (chronic forced swim test, restraint stress, or food restriction) may increase either the level of 5-HT in various brain areas, 5-HT2A receptor density, or behavioral responses to 5-HT2A receptor agonists. I also examined the interaction between the stress of minor surgery (associated with the capsule implantation), food restriction, and chronic cocaine treatment on head-twitch responses (HTRs) to the 5-HT2A agonist, 1-(2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenyl)-2-aminopropane (DOI), in rats. Circulating cocaine concentrations were 116 +/− 11 ng/ml (low dose) and 330 +/− 75 ng/ml (high dose) at the end of the 3-day treatment period. Food restriction occurred through pair-feeding of control animals to high-dose cocaine-treated subjects that showed a transient drug-induced anorexia. Untreated rats subjected to surgery and food restriction exhibited a significantly elevated HTR at 3 days post-surgery compared to untreated animals given the same dose of DOI. This enhanced sensitivity to DOI subsequently declined in a time-dependent manner. High- but not low-dose cocaine treatment unexpectedly attenuated the stress-induced increase in DOI-elicited HTRs. Since the 5HT2A binding data revealed no treatment-related differences in receptor density, the result suggest that these alterations in behavioral responsiveness may reflect changes in 5-HT2A signal transduction mechanisms.

This dissertation investigated the allocation of visuo-spatial attention during dynamic viewing. The hypothesis of an attentional focus that is initially centered at fixation and then shifts to the location of a forthcoming eye fixation prior to the overt eye movement was tested. Participants performed three different dual tasks while their eye movements and manual responses were recorded. The primary tasks all required sequential left-to-right eye movements; they were silent reading (Experiment 1), oculomotor scanning of text without vowels (Experiment 2), and visual search for a target letter (Experiment 3). A speeded manual response was made to an asterisk that appeared early or late after the onset of a critical fixation (25 or 170 ms probe delay), and either to the left of, or directly above, or to the right of the currently fixated character ($-$10, $-$5, 0, +5, or +10 characters probe eccentricity). It was predicted that early probes should be detected equally fast in the left and right hemifield, while responses to late probes should be faster when they appeared in the right than in the left visual hemifield. Selective facilitation of manual probe detection latencies near the location of the forthcoming eye fixation was found in the visual search task, but not during reading or scanning. Fixation times increased and saccade lengths decreased as a consequence of probing in all three tasks. Fixation durations were less prolonged when the probe appeared in the right than in the left hemifield; the critical saccades were largest when the probe appeared at +10 characters and smallest when it appeared at +5 characters eccentricity. In summary, detection latencies in the search task supported the attentional predictions, and the eye movement data provided consistent indirect support for the notion of attention shifts prior to eye movements. Task-specific processing demands may have diluted further evidence in the probe detection times from reading and scanning. Individual reaction times further revealed considerable intra- and interindividual differences. It is concluded that the present dual task combination with its dual motor response requirements may not be adequate to assess visuo-spatial attention allocation during sequential eye movement tasks.

Despite evidence of the effectiveness of applied behavior analysis (ABA) for treating behavior problems in elderly nursing home residents, staff responsible for the development of behavioral care plans may have little knowledge of ABA. Providing nursing staff with in-service training during working hours can be overly disruptive to the functioning of the nursing unit, and paying for nurses to attend training outside of regularly scheduled hours is cost-prohibitive to many geriatric care facilities. To examine a more cost effective alternative to traditional in-service training, a self-instructional training program was implemented with six nursing staff. A multiple baseline across subjects design was used to examine the effects of the training program on subjects' ability to identify information important for the development of behavioral interventions, their general knowledge of behavior management, their self-reported attitudes towards elderly nursing home residents, and the frequency and type of their interactions with the residents of their unit. Findings revealed no practically significant changes in any of the dependent measures as a result of the self-instructional training program. The results indicated ways in which the training program could be improved.