29,100 research outputs found
When All Is Still Concealed: Are We Closer to Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Evaluative Conditioning?
Fulcher and Hammerl's (2001) important exploration of the role of contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning (EC) raises a lot of issues for discussion: (1) what boundaries, if any, exist between EC and affective learning paradigms?; (2) if EC does occur without awareness does this mean it is nonpropositional learning?; (3) is EC driven by stimulus–response (S–R), rather than stimulus–stimulus (S–S), associations and if so should it then surprise us that contingency awareness is not important?; and (4) if S–R associations are at the heart of EC, should we automatically assume EC is part of a different learning mechanism to autonomic Pavlovian conditioning (Field, 2000a, 2000b)? This article, after a critical review of Fulcher and Hammerl's work, discusses these issues with reference to what can be realistically inferred about the mechanisms underlying EC
Can meta-analysis be trusted?
Until around 25 years ago the only way to assimilate and evaluate research evidence was through discursive literature reviews, in which someone with an interest in a given research topic would accumulate and subjectively evaluate the importance of research findings in that area. These reviews, although informative, are highly reliant on the discretion of the author who, with the best will in the world, could be unaware of important findings or could give particular importance to studies that others might believe to be relatively less important (see Wolf, 1986).
The failure of literature reviews to provide objective ways to assimilate scientific evidence led scientists to look a statistical solution. The groundbreaking work of Glass (1976) and Rosenthal and Rubin (1978) paved the way for what we now know as meta-analysis: a statistical technique by which findings from independent studies can be assimilated
The behavioral inhibition system and the verbal information pathway to children's fears
The behavioral inhibition system (BIS) is the neurological substrate of trait anxiety and is linked to the development of anxiety disorders. Three experiments are reported that investigate the moderating influence of the BIS on 1 pathway to fear: threat information. In all studies, children were given verbal information about a set of novel animals, and their BIS sensitivity was measured. The results suggest that BIS sensitivity (a) facilitates attentional biases to stimuli associated with threat information and (b) facilitates behavioral avoidance of novel stimuli associated with threat information. This suggests a possible mechanism through which the BIS may promote the acquisition of animal fears
Cross-sectional and prospective associations between cognitive appraisals and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms following stroke
This study examined cross-sectional and prospective associations between cognitive appraisals and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following stroke. While in hospital, stroke patients (n=81) completed questionnaires assessing cognitive appraisals (i.e., negative cognitions about the self, negative cognitions about the world, and self-blame) and PTSD symptoms. PTSD symptoms were assessed again 3 months later when all patients had been discharged from hospital (n=70). Significant correlations were found between the time 1 measures of negative cognitions about the self and the world, but not self-blame, and the severity of PTSD symptoms measured at time 1 and at time 2. Regression analyses revealed that cognitive appraisals explained a significant amount of variance in the severity of PTSD symptoms at time 1, with negative cognitions about the self-emerging as a significant predictor. In contrast, time 1 cognitive appraisals were unable to explain additional variance in time 2 PTSD severity over and above that explained by time 1 PTSD severity. The findings therefore provide only weak support for Ehlers and Clark's cognitive model of PTSD
I don’t like it because it eats sprouts: Conditioning preferences in children
Although little is known about how preferences develop in childhood, work in adults suggests that evaluative responses to stimuli can be acquired through classical conditioning. In two experiments children were exposed to novel cartoon characters, that were either consistently paired with a picture of a disliked food (Brussels sprouts) or a liked food (ice cream). Relative preferences for these stimuli (and others) were measured before and after these paired presentations (Experiment 1): preferences for the cartoon character paired with Brussels sprouts decreased, whereas preferences for the character paired with ice cream increased. These preferences persisted after 10 un-reinforced trials. Experiment 2 replicated this finding using affective priming as an index of preference for the cartoon characters. These findings demonstrate that preferences to novel stimuli can be conditioned in children and result from associations formed between the stimulus and a stimulus possessing positive or negative valence
On the zero set of G-equivariant maps
Let be a finite group acting on vector spaces and and consider a
smooth -equivariant mapping . This paper addresses the question of
the zero set near a zero of with isotropy subgroup . It is known
from results of Bierstone and Field on -transversality theory that the zero
set in a neighborhood of is a stratified set. The purpose of this paper is
to partially determine the structure of the stratified set near using only
information from the representations and . We define an index
for isotropy subgroups of which is the difference of
the dimension of the fixed point subspace of in and . Our main
result states that if contains a subspace -isomorphic to , then for
every maximal isotropy subgroup satisfying , the zero
set of near contains a smooth manifold of zeros with isotropy subgroup
of dimension . We also present a systematic method to study
the zero sets for group representations and which do not satisfy the
conditions of our main theorem. The paper contains many examples and raises
several questions concerning the computation of zero sets of equivariant maps.
These results have application to the bifurcation theory of -reversible
equivariant vector fields
Effect of vicarious fear learning on children's heart rate responses and attentional bias for novel animals
Research with children has shown that vicarious learning can result in changes to 2 of Lang's (1968) 3 anxiety response systems: subjective report and behavioral avoidance. The current study extended this research by exploring the effect of vicarious learning on physiological responses (Lang's final response system) and attentional bias. The study used Askew and Field's (2007) vicarious learning procedure and demonstrated fear-related increases in children's cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses. Cognitive and behavioral changes were retested 1 week and 1 month later, and remained elevated. In addition, a visual search task demonstrated that fear-related vicarious learning creates an attentional bias for novel animals, which is moderated by increases in fear beliefs during learning. The findings demonstrate that vicarious learning leads to lasting changes in all 3 of Lang's anxiety response systems and is sufficient to create attentional bias to threat in children
Reevaluating evaluative conditioning: A nonassociative explanation of conditioning effects in the visual evaluative conditioning paradigm
In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether evaluative conditioning (EC) is an associative phenomenon. Experiment 1 compared a standard EC paradigm with nonpaired and no-treatment control conditions. EC effects were obtained only when the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (UCS) were rated as perceptually similar. However, similar EC effects were obtained in both control groups. An earlier failure to obtain EC effects was reanalyzed in Experiment 2. Conditioning-like effects were found when comparing a CS with the most perceptually similar UCSs used in the procedure but not when analyzing a CS rating with respect to the UCS with which it was paired during conditioning. The implications are that EC effects found in many studies are not due to associative learning and that the special characteristics of EC (conditioning without awareness and resistance to extinction) are probably nonassociative artifacts of the EC paradigm
Preventing the development of observationally learnt fears in children by devaluing the model's negative response
Vicarious learning has become an established indirect pathway to fear acquisition. It is generally accepted that associative learning processes underlie vicarious learning; however, whether this association is a form of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) learning or stimulus-response (CS-CR) learning remains unclear. Traditionally, these types of learning can be dissociated in a US revaluation procedure. The current study explored the effects of post-vicarious learning US revaluation on acquired fear responses. Ninety-four children (46 males and 48 females) aged 6 to 10 years first viewed either a fear vicarious learning video or a neutral vicarious learning video followed by random allocation to one of three US revaluation conditions: inflation; deflation; or control. Inflation group children were presented with still images of the adults in the video and told that the accompanying sound and image of a very fast heart rate monitor belonged to the adult. The deflation group were shown the same images but with the sound and image of a normal heart rate. The control group received no US revaluation. Results indicated that inflating how scared the models appeared to be did not result in significant increases in children's fear beliefs, avoidance preferences, avoidance behavior or heart rate for animals above increases caused by vicarious learning. In contrast, US devaluation resulted in significant decreases in fear beliefs and avoidance preferences. Thus, the findings provide evidence that CS-US associations underpin vicarious learning and suggest that US devaluation may be a successful method for preventing children from developing fear beliefs following a traumatic vicarious learning episode with a stimulus
Resonance bifurcations from robust homoclinic cycles
We present two calculations for a class of robust homoclinic cycles with
symmetry Z_n x Z_2^n, for which the sufficient conditions for asymptotic
stability given by Krupa and Melbourne are not optimal.
Firstly, we compute optimal conditions for asymptotic stability using
transition matrix techniques which make explicit use of the geometry of the
group action.
Secondly, through an explicit computation of the global parts of the Poincare
map near the cycle we show that, generically, the resonance bifurcations from
the cycles are supercritical: a unique branch of asymptotically stable period
orbits emerges from the resonance bifurcation and exists for coefficient values
where the cycle has lost stability. This calculation is the first to explicitly
compute the criticality of a resonance bifurcation, and answers a conjecture of
Field and Swift in a particular limiting case. Moreover, we are able to obtain
an asymptotically-correct analytic expression for the period of the bifurcating
orbit, with no adjustable parameters, which has not proved possible previously.
We show that the asymptotic analysis compares very favourably with numerical
results.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Nonlinearit
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