Rapid acquisition of emotional information andattentional bias in anxious children

This study reports on the relationship between evaluative learning (EL) and attentional preference in children with varying degrees of anxiety, as measured by the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, and varying degrees of parental anxiety, as measured by scores on the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). In the first experiment, 3 age groups (7–8, 10–11 and adults with mean age 26.8years) were compared on a novel EL method, in which neutral images ‘‘morphed’’ over 1 s into either smiling or angry adult faces. There were no differences in EL between the age groups—each showing a strong EL effect. In 2 subsequent experiments, we examined learning and attention to stimulifollowing EL trials in 7- to 8-year olds. In Experiment 2, panic/separation anxiety (PSA) and the mothers’ BAI predicted the overall magnitude of EL. In addition, high PSA children were more likely to attend to a neutral stimulus previously paired with a negative stimulus than were low PSA children. In Experiment 3, only PSA was positively associated with the magnitude of EL. In theattention trials, high PSA children had longer fixation times on frowning faces than did low PSA children but unlike Experiment 2 PSA was not associated with preferential attention towards stimuli with acquired negative valence. These results indicate that associations between learning, attention and emotional information can be influenced by separation anxiety and maternal anxiety

Managing social affiliation: a psycho-evolutionary theory of interpersonal balance

A new psycho-evolutionary approach to human affiliation behavior, the so called theory of interpersonal balance, is presented. This theory integrates aspects of several existing affiliation theories into a broader evolutionary framework, thus revealing some facets of the affiliation motive that are neglected by other affiliation theories. Mainly, the theory points to the existence of a number of psychological mechanisms that could lead to the avoidance of social contacts. The theory of interpersonal balance is evaluated in the light of the strength and weaknesses of other conceptual approaches to social affiliation. It is shown that the theory is consistent with the main empirical findings in the domain. In addition, an empirical a priori test of the theory of interpersonal balance supports its main assumptions and clearly demonstrates that the theory makes testable predictions

Transfer effects as a function of sequential and quantitative schedule constraints

Schwartz (1982, 1988) found that a pretraining of contingent reinforcement interferes with subsequent rule discovery. The present study investigated the effects of schedule imposed sequential and quantitative constraints (Timberlake & Allison, 1974) on task performance in a subsequent test phase. Sixty-four Ss, students of the University of Duesseldorf, were assigned at random to one of four experimental conditions, differing according to the presence vs. absence of sequential and quantitative constraints, respectively. Discrimination-learning performance and variability during test phase were significantly better for Ss experiencing sequential constraint during treatment. In contrast, the introduction of a quantitative restriction during treatment had no statistically significant effects on test phase performance

Blocking Observed in Human Instrumental Conditioning

In animal research, blocking of instrumental responding is a well-known phenomenon, whereas no study has been reported that investigated blocking in human instrumental conditioning. Following the standard method used in nonhuman subjects, 48 students randomly assigned to one of three groups were exposed to a variable interval schedule (VI 10 s) in which reinforcement was delivered with a brief delay (500 ms). In the blocking condition, subjects experienced a tone stimulus during the delay (correlated group). In the two control conditions, subjects received either no tone (no-tone group) or the same number of tones as subjects of the correlated group, but the tones were independent of their behavior and reward (random group). As expected, instrumental responding was significantly lower in the correlated group than in either the no-tone or the random group. In a subsequent extinction phase, no difference in resistance was observed. A postexperimental interview revealed that subjects of the correlated group were more likely to detect the temporal nature of the reinforcement schedule than subjects of the other groups, but there was no relation to response rate. The data provide only little support for a notion of signal-induced enhanced learning, but do not challenge an interpretation in terms of associative competition between the response and the signal