Association of mindfulness with psychological distress and life satisfaction in Western and Eastern meditators

Objective: This study investigated if meditators living in India (Eastern Meditators: EMs) differed from those living in Western countries (WMs) in self-reported levels of mindfulness, depression, anxiety, stress, and life satisfaction and the association between these variables. Method: The 229 participants (18–81 years, M = 34.7 years, SD = 13.3; 52% EMs) completed scales measuring depression, anxiety, stress, life satisfaction, and mindfulness and its components. Results: WMs indicated significantly higher levels of acceptance and non-judging than EMs, but similar levels of mindful attention. For EMs, mindful attention was negatively associated with acceptance and non-judging, while for WMs these variables were not associated. WMs reported lower levels of depression, anxiety and stress than EMs but the groups did not differ in levels of life satisfaction. Multiple regression analyses showed that, for both WMs and EMs, acceptance explained significant proportions of the variance in depression, anxiety, and stress. Acceptance and non-judging explained significant proportions of the variance in life satisfaction for WMs, but only mindful attention did so for EMs. Conclusions: Results suggest that Western and Eastern conceptualisations of mindfulness and associated meditation practices may differ in critical ways. There is a need to develop valid mindfulness scales for use in Eastern collectivist cultures

Discrimination of Food Amounts by the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris)

The current research examined the ability of dogs to discriminate between different amounts of food. Using a two-alternative-forced-choice procedure, dogs were required to discriminate between a constant amount of 4 pieces of food and another amount that varied across a range from 1 to 7 pieces. The dogs reliably selected the larger of the two alternatives. Discrimination was better when there were fewer than rather than more than 4 pieces of food available on the varying alternative. Specifically, 1 piece was discriminated from 4 pieces more easily than 4 pieces were discriminated from 7 pieces of food. These results confirmed the ability of dogs to discriminate food amount on a psychophysical choice procedure. This research addresses a question fundamental to theories of reinforcement of why reinforcer magnitude does not always control behavior in an intuitive way. We argue that the relative difficulty of discriminating smaller from larger amounts of food is an important factor in understanding the impact of reinforcer magnitude in the development of reinforcer control over behavio

Differences between meditators and non-meditators in mindfulness, its components and related qualities

Objectives: The study investigated (1) if meditators and non-meditators differ in their levels of mindfulness, attention, acceptance, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, and empathy; and (2) whether and how mindfulness practice affected the above qualities. Methods: The 241 participants (18–81 years, M = 40.3, SD = 14.8; 64% female) completed an online questionnaire consisting of scales measuring mindfulness components (mindful attention, acceptance, non-judging), and mindfulness related qualities, including loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, and empathy. The participants who reported being meditators (N = 122; 50.4%) were also asked questions about their meditation practice. Results: Meditators differed significantly from non-meditators in relation to their levels of mindful attention (t(239) = 4.80, p <.001, d =.63) and empathy (t(239) = 2.80, p <.01, d =.37) but not for the other mindfulness components or related qualities. Multiple regression analyses indicated that practice variables (years of practice, frequency of practice, and length of session) explained a significant proportion of variance in mindful attention (R2 =.27, p <.001) and empathy (R2 =.15, p <.05). Conclusions: The present findings are consistent with conceptualizations of mindfulness that focus on the centrality of mindful attention over acceptance and non-judging components, which is consistent with several Buddhist mindfulness traditions. Present findings also demonstrate the importance of practice for the cultivation of mindful attention. Future studies are required to increase our understanding of effects relating to the type of mindfulness undertaken and the influence of practice factors

Food Preference Predicts Speed of Approach on a Runway Task by Dogs

The effective and quick assessment of food preference is important when attempting to identify foods that might function as effective reinforcers in dogs. In the current experiment a food preference assessment was conducted where more highly preferred foods were expected to be associated with faster approaches in a subsequent runway task. Eight dogs were tested in a paired preference assessment offering combinations of two of six types of raw food, including the dog’s staple diet, to identify a rank order of preference for the foods. A different raw food was offered as the staple in two preference tests. The results showed that the staple foods were not preferred as highly as the other foods and that each dog displayed unique and stable preferences for the different foods. In the runway task the dogs were required to walk five metres to obtain a small amount of their most preferred, least preferred or staple foods and latency of approach to the foods was recorded. The approach latencies were faster for their most preferred food compared to their least preferred and the staple foods. The use of a runway to assess reinforcer effectiveness combined an effortful behaviour to obtain food while also requiring the dogs to make a choice, thus precluding the need for more complicated and time-consuming methods of preference assessment. The application of this method for fast and effective identification of preferred reinforcers is currently being investigating further to inform pet owners of simple methods to increase their training successes. Owners of raw food fed dogs are advised to conduct a preference assessment to identify their dogs most preferred food for use as a reinforcer during training.</jats:p

Bumblebees exhibit the memory spacing effect

Associative learning is key to how bees recognize and return to rewarding floral resources. It thus plays a major role in pollinator floral constancy and plant gene flow. Honeybees are the primary model for pollinator associative learning, but bumblebees play an important ecological role in a wider range of habitats, and their associative learning abilities are less well understood. We assayed learning with the proboscis extension reflex (PER), using a novel method for restraining bees (capsules) designed to improve bumblebee learning. We present the first results demonstrating that bumblebees exhibit the memory spacing effect. They improve their associative learning of odor and nectar reward by exhibiting increased memory acquisition, a component of long-term memory formation, when the time interval between rewarding trials is increased. Bombus impatiens forager memory acquisition (average discrimination index values) improved by 129% and 65% at inter-trial intervals (ITI) of 5 and 3 min, respectively, as compared to an ITI of 1 min. Memory acquisition rate also increased with increasing ITI. Encapsulation significantly increases olfactory memory acquisition. Ten times more foragers exhibited at least one PER response during training in capsules as compared to traditional PER harnesses. Thus, a novel conditioning assay, encapsulation, enabled us to improve bumblebee-learning acquisition and demonstrate that spaced learning results in better memory consolidation. Such spaced learning likely plays a role in forming long-term memories of rewarding floral resources

The role of Weber's law in human time perception.

Weber's law predicts that stimulus sensitivity will increase proportionally with increases in stimulus intensity. Does this hold for the stimulus of time - specifically, duration in the milliseconds to seconds range? There is conflicting evidence on the relationship between temporal sensitivity and duration. Weber's law predicts a linear relationship between sensitivity and duration on interval timing tasks, while two alternative models predict a reverse J-shaped and a U-shaped relationship. Based on previous research, we hypothesised that temporal sensitivity in humans would follow a U-shaped function, increasing and then decreasing with increases in duration, and that this model would provide a better statistical fit to the data than the reverse-J or the simple Weber's Law model. In a two-alternative forced-choice interval comparison task, 24 participants made duration judgements about six groups of auditory intervals between 100 and 3,200 ms. Weber fractions were generated for each group of intervals and plotted against time to generate a function describing sensitivity to the stimulus of duration. Although the sensitivity function was slightly concave, and the model describing a U-shaped function gave the best fit to the data, the increase in the model fit was not sufficient to warrant the extra free parameter in the chosen model. Further analysis demonstrated that Weber's law itself provided a better description of sensitivity to changes in duration than either of the two models tested

A jump to the left and a step to the right: A test of two accounts of peak shift

© 2019, The Author(s). “Peak Shift” usually occurs following intradimensional-discrimination training and involves a shift of the peak of the generalization gradient away from the original discriminative stimulus (S+) in a direction away from an S-. Two theoretical accounts of peak shift, the gradient interaction theory (GIT) and adaptation level theory (ALT), were compared. The effects of asymmetric test stimuli and the impact of instructions to participants for them to treat stimuli as members of categories on generalization gradients were investigated. In Experiment 1, the relation between peak shifts obtained when an extended asymmetric set of test stimuli was employed and the occurrence of categorization of the stimuli involved was investigated in four separate conditions. Two involved temporal discrimination, one involved line-angle discrimination, and one involved a compound line-angle and temporal cue discrimination. If participants treated the stimuli as belonging to discrete categories, such as hands-on a clock, rather than as being on continuous dimensions then responding to the compound cue was expected to result in attenuation of blocking of a peak shift. However, the peak shift obtained to the three cue types were the same. In Experiment 2, an independent group of participants was given explicit instructions to treat the line angles as if they were the hands of a clock face and this eliminated peak shift. The results from the present experiments support an ALT interpretation, although the peak shifts were significantly smaller in magnitude than predicted by this account