Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Choice Behavior”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,549 records · Page 86Linked to original sources
PubMed2000

An evaluation of the effects of matched stimuli on behaviors maintained by automatic reinforcement.

The purpose of the current investigation was to extend the literature on matched stimuli to three dissimilar forms of aberrant behavior (dangerous climbing and jumping, saliva manipulation, and hand mouthing). The results of functional analyses suggested that each behavior was automatically reinforced. Preference assessments were used to identify two classes of stimuli: items that matched the hypothesized sensory consequences of aberrant behavior (matched stimuli) and items that produced sensory consequences that were not similar to those produced by the aberrant behavior (unmatched stimuli). The effects of providing continuous and noncontingent access to either the most highly preferred matched or the most highly preferred unmatched stimuli were assessed relative to a condition in which no stimuli were available. Overall results suggested that providing access to items that matched the hypothesized sensory consequences of aberrant behavior may be more effective than simply selecting stimuli either arbitrarily or based on the results of preference assessments alone.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Polydrug abuse in heroin addicts: a behavioral economic analysis.

AIM: To assess how price and income affect hypothetical drug-purchasing decisions of polydrug abusers undergoing treatment for heroin addiction. PARTICIPANTS, DESIGN AND SETTING: Forty subjects participated in experiments in which they hypothetically "purchased" drugs as price or income varied. INTERVENTION: Experiment 1 examined effects of heroin price on purchases of heroin, valium, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. Experiment 2 examined the effects of both heroin and valium prices on purchases of these drugs. In both these experiments, income remained constant. Experiment 3 examined the effects of increasing income on drug choices, with drug prices constant. FINDINGS: As price of heroin rose in Experiment 1, heroin purchases decreased. Reductions in heroin purchases were proportionally less than price increases, demonstrating inelastic demand for heroin. Valium and cocaine purchases increased as heroin price rose, and cross-price elasticity coefficients indicated that these drugs substituted for heroin. In Experiment 2, demand for both heroin and valium was inelastic. Valium substituted for heroin, but heroin purchases were independent of valium prices, suggesting an asymmetrical substitution effect. Marijuana and alcohol purchases were independent of valium price, but both these drugs substituted for heroin. In Experiment 3 demand for heroin and cocaine was income elastic, with purchases rising in greater proportion than income. Marijuana, alcohol and valium purchases did not vary with income, demonstrating that demand for these drugs was income inelastic. Hypothetical choices were reliable both between and within subjects. Moreover, drug choices in this hypothetical situation were correlated with urinalysis results, demonstrating initial validity of this methodology. CONCLUSIONS: This methodology may be useful for understanding the phenomenon of polydrug abuse.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Propranolol and skilled human performance.

In a double-blind crossover experiment 18 young men received on one occasion 6 doses of 40 mg propranolol and in the other placebo. Medication was given at 6 hour intervals. One hr after the last capsule was ingested subjects were measured with various physiological and behavioral tests. At the conclusion of testing mean plasma propranolol concentration was 67.6 ng/ml. Propranolol significantly reduced systolic blood pressure and heart rate. There was an increased variability on one behavioral measure but the results of other tests were not affected. The findings are discussed in terms of therapeutic use of this and other beta-adrenergic receptor blocking agents.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Prenatal exposure to cocaine disrupts cocaine-induced conditioned place preference in rats.

Cocaine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) was tested in adult offspring of Sprague-Dawley dams that had been injected subcutaneously with 40 mg/kg/3cc cocaine HCl (C40) daily from gestational days 8-20, pair-fed (PF) dams injected with saline, and nontreated control (LC) dams. C40 and PF dams gained significantly less weight than LC dams, although offspring body weights did not differ among the three prenatal treatment groups at birth or in adulthood. Significant place conditioning was obtained in LC and PF offspring when either 2.0 or 5.0 mg/kg of cocaine was paired with the designated place. In contrast, C40 offspring did not exhibit place conditioning at either training dose. Yet, all animals exposed to 5 mg/kg of cocaine during conditioning exhibited less activity during the test (when no cocaine was given) than controls given unpaired exposures to the apparatus and cocaine and C40 offspring did not differ from LC and PF offspring in this respect. Therefore, despite their lack of a conditioned place preference for cocaine, rats that had been exposed gestationally to cocaine nevertheless revealed an effect of cocaine during conditioning in one aspect of their test behavior. Possible explanations for the lack of cocaine-induced place preference in these animals include a learning deficit or a change in cocaine's effectiveness as a reward.

Animals↗
PubMed1997

Discriminated approach-avoidance task--a new paradigm for measuring both appetitive and aversive memory processes under identical test conditions.

Research on mnemonic processes in rats has predominantly made use of either appetitively or aversively motivated tasks. These behavioral paradigms are popular because rats are easily trained and a range of stimuli and response alternatives are available. Also, these paradigms have been generally found to be sensitive to pre- and post-trial manipulations with a variety of drugs having hypo- and hypermnesic effects. However, the available procedures do not permit a qualitative analysis of the memory changes, namely, a dissociation between the effect of a compound under study on the memory for pleasant versus unpleasant events, under the same experimental conditions. The discriminated approach-avoidance paradigm presented here is a novel method that enables this to be investigated quite easily, in rats. This behavioral paradigm was developed originally to assess the retrieval bias in the learned helplessness condition, and subsequently has been employed in studies of the pharmacological effects of several stress-related neuropeptides on appetitive and aversive memory processes.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Organic cation transporter 3 (Slc22a3) is implicated in salt-intake regulation.

Organic cation transporters (OCTs) are carrier-type permeases known to participate in general detoxification functions in peripheral tissues. Previous in vitro studies have suggested that OCTs ensure Uptake2, a low-affinity, corticosteroid-sensitive catecholamine removal system, which was characterized initially in sympathetically innervated tissues. Although the presence of both Uptake(2)-like transport and most OCT subtypes has also been demonstrated in the brain, the physiological role of this family of transporters in CNS remained totally unknown. In the present work, we show that the OCT3 transporter is found throughout the brain and highly expressed in regions regulating fluid exchange, including circumventricular organs such as area postrema and subfornical organ (SFO), and in other structures implicated in the sensing of changes in blood osmolarity and regulation of salt and water ingestion. OCT3/Slc22a3-deficient mice show an increase in the level of ingestion of hypertonic saline under thirst and salt appetite conditions, as well as alterations of the neural response in the SFO after sodium deprivation, as monitored by Fos immunoreactivity. This work demonstrates that the presence of OCT3 is critical for the balanced neural and behavioral responses to environmentally induced variations in osmolarity and provides for the first time physiological evidence of the importance of OCTs for CNS function.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Health care consumerism: engaging the real buyers--employees.

Many employers have begun moving toward health care consumerism strategies designed to encourage employees to take more responsibility for their health care and the cost of that care. Recent surveys suggest ways employers can ensure their consumerism strategies succeed in engaging employees and, ultimately, encourage employees to change their behavior. This article describes what those surveys reveal about employer and employee perspectives on consumerism and suggests steps employers can take to align their interests with those of their employees in order to manage the demand for and use of health care.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMed2006

Seeing the forest when entry is unlikely: probability and the mental representation of events.

Conceptualizing probability as psychological distance, the authors draw on construal level theory (Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003) to propose that decreasing an event's probability leads individuals to represent the event by its central, abstract, general features (high-level construal) rather than by its peripheral, concrete, specific features (low-level construal). Results indicated that when reported probabilities of events were low rather than high, participants were more broad (Study 1) and inclusive (Study 2) in their categorization of objects, increased their preference for general rather than specific activity descriptions (Study 3), segmented ongoing behavior into fewer units (Study 4), were more successful at abstracting visual information (Study 5), and were less successful at identifying details missing within a coherent visual whole (Study 6). Further, after exposure to low-probability as opposed to high-probability phrases, participants increasingly preferred to identify actions in ends-related rather than means-related terms (Study 7). Implications for probability assessment and choice under uncertainty are discussed.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMed2005

Attentional inhibition has social-emotional consequences for unfamiliar faces.

Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as "more trustworthy" and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as "less trustworthy." For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is "on a lighter background" vs. "on a darker background"). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.

Attention↗
PubMed2006

Prevalence and correlates of substance use among young Asian Pacific Islander men who have sex with men.

We examined patterns of substance use among young Asian Pacific Islander (API) men who have sex with men (MSM). Participants (N = 496) were recruited from sampled venues and were interviewed on substance use, sexual behaviors, and attendance at MSM social venues. Substance use prevalence was highest for alcohol (94% lifetime, 89% past 6 months), marijuana (61% lifetime, 44% past 6 months), and methylenedioxymethamphetamine or ecstasy (58% lifetime, 47% past 6 months). During the past 6 months, 24% used an illicit substance weekly or more often, 51% used club drugs, and 44% used 3 or more illicit substances. Multivariate models identified common and unique correlates of frequent drug use, club drug use, and polydrug use. Associations between substance use and sexual risk behaviors also emerged. These findings suggest a need to improve substance use and HIV prevention intervention efforts for young API MSM.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Circumstances surrounding the first injection experience and their association with future syringe sharing behaviors in young urban injection drug users.

Young injection drug users are at heightened risk for acquisition of blood-borne infections because of their high rates of unsafe injection behaviors, yet there has been little research examining the circumstances surrounding injection drug users' first injection experience ('hit'). We examined the relationship between factors associated with young drug users' first hit and their future syringe sharing behaviors among 420 new initiates to injection drug use (less than 5 years), aged 15-30 years old in urban Baltimore, Maryland. Contingency table analysis and logistic regression were used to determine the association between circumstances surrounding the first hit and recent receptive syringe sharing. Participants were primarily male (58.8%), White (71.2%), and were a median age of 24 years (interquartile range [IQR]: 21-27 years). Adjusting for race, gender, and homelessness, the following variables were independently associated with recent receptive syringe sharing: age at first hit (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 0.92 per year increase; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.87-0.98), self-injection at initiation (AOR = 0.55; 95% CI: 0.32-0.97) and using a syringe that had previously been used by someone else at first hit (AOR = 2.81; 95% CI: 1.70-4.64). These data suggest that injection-related risk behaviors may be established as early as the onset of injection initiation, supporting the need to educate non-injectors of the harms associated with unsafe injection practices.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Fetal rate of behavioral inhibition and preference for novelty during infancy.

BACKGROUND: Correlations between infant measures of information processing and later IQ have been established, and a few studies have extended this continuum by examining links between various fetal measures and cognitive measures during infancy. AIMS: This study compared fetal rate of behavioral habituation among infants identified as at high or low cognitive risk. STUDY DESIGN: This study was a retrospective examination of differences in fetal rate of behavioral habituation as a function of cognitive risk status at 6.5 and 9 months postpartum, using an independent two-group design. SUBJECTS: Participants were 32 infants who were born between 36 and 42 weeks gestational age at normal birth weight and had normal APGAR scores. OUTCOME MEASURES: The Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (FTII) was used to obtain a measure of preference for novelty, which served as the basis for identification of infants at high or low risk for cognitive difficulty. These infants had undergone up to three habituation trials using a vibroacoustic stimulus during fetal development. RESULTS: Infants who were classified as being at high cognitive risk at 6 months had required more trials to habituation as fetuses. CONCLUSIONS: Fetal rate of behavioral habituation is associated with information processing during the first 6 months of infancy. We suggest that fetal habituation may be influenced by early cognitive mechanisms and therefore represents an immature but real form of information processing.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2003

Establishment of a preference by the newborn lamb for its mother: the role of opioids.

Mother-young relationships in sheep are characterized by individual recognition and a rapidly developing exclusive bond. The authors examined the role of opioids in establishment of the lamb's preference for its mother. Newborn lambs received the opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone (0.0, 1.5, or 3.0 mg/kg i.p.), and lambs were tested at 24 hr and 48 hr of age. At 24 hr, controls spent significantly more time near the mother than near an alien ewe; no significant difference was obtained for the naltrexone-treated groups. The effect of naltrexone persisted at 48 hr. No other significant behavioral difference was observed. Results support the hypothesis that opioids mediate the establishment of mother preference and the view that positive affect associated with social attachment and maternal care may be modulated by opioids.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Voluntary selection of task sets revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

In everyday life, we have to selectively adapt our behavior to different situations and tasks. In cognitive psychology, such adaptive behavior can be investigated with the task-switching paradigm. However, in contrast to everyday life, in experiments participants are unequivocally told which task to perform. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was set out to investigate processes that are relevant when participants can decide by their own which task to perform. The number of tasks to choose from was varied between a forced condition (no choice) and two voluntary selection conditions (two or three choices). We expected to find prolonged reaction times as well as higher activations within the midcingulate cortex for the choice conditions compared to the no-choice condition. The fMRI results revealed a significant activation difference for the choice conditions versus the no-choice condition. For the choice contrast, activation was found in the rostral cingulate zone (RCZ) as well as the superior parietal lobule and the posterior part of the intraparietal sulcus. These activations revealed no selection-specific difference between three and two choices. Finally, a post hoc analysis showed that the activation in the RCZ is not associated with higher task-dependent response conflict when participants can select a task set. Taken together, these findings indicate that distinct brain areas are involved in the voluntary selection of abstract task set information.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Nematode behavior: the taste of success, the smell of danger!

Through experience, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans learns to distinguish high quality bacteria--food--from low quality or toxic bacteria. Increased release of the neurotransmitter serotonin onto identified interneurons determines whether C. elegans chooses to feed or leave.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Assessing the initiation of cocaine self-administration in humans during abstinence: effects of dose, alternative reinforcement, and priming.

RATIONALE: Impaired ability to refrain from initiating cocaine-taking is a central feature of cocaine dependence and an important target for behavioral and pharmacological interventions. One potential trigger of cocaine-taking is exposure to cocaine (i.e. priming). OBJECTIVE: Here, we report a model of human cocaine self-administration that quantifies the ability to refrain from initiating cocaine self-administration during abstinence and after cocaine administration. METHODS: In a double-blind, within-subject, residential laboratory study, we assessed cocaine-taking as a function of the choice dose, priming dose, and the magnitude of alternative reinforcement. During each of 3 weeks, cocaine-dependent volunteers participated in one sample and three choice sessions. During sample sessions, participants were administered the dose of cocaine (0, 15 or 30 mg/70 kg i.v.) available during subsequent choice sessions that week. During choice sessions, participants chose between cocaine and decreasing amounts of money ($19, $16, $13, $10, $7, $4, $1). A priming dose of cocaine (0, 15 or 30 mg/70 kg) was administered 30 min prior to the first choice trial during each of three choice sessions each week. RESULTS: Cocaine-taking was moderate, dose-dependent, and negatively related to the monetary alternative. An active priming injection of cocaine compared to placebo shifted choice to cocaine over money earlier in the session. CONCLUSIONS: A descending schedule of alternative reinforcement provided a measure of cocaine-taking during abstinence that was sensitive to cocaine choice dose, magnitude of alternative reinforcement, and priming. This procedure may be a useful tool for assessing potential therapies for cocaine dependence.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Effects of paced mating and intromissive stimulation on feminine sexual behavior and estrus termination in the cycling rat.

The effects of differential mating stimulation on sexual behavior and estrus length were examined in cycling rats that could or could not self-regulate, or pace, the timing of sexual contact. Female rats (Rattus norvegicus) received 30 paced, 30 nonpaced, or 15 nonpaced followed by 15 paced intromissions during mating tests. Decreases in sexual responsiveness were seen during the second half of testing; pacing was associated with greater inter-intromission intervals, decreased proceptivity, and increased rejection behavior at this time. Female rats pacing during the second test half behaved similarly, regardless of prior treatment, showing that the number rather than the timing of prior intromissions affected subsequent behavior. However, estrus length was decreased by prior paced mating. These data suggest that changes in sexual responsivity occur throughout estrus and that the nature of these changes is differentially dependent on the type of mating stimulation received.

Animals↗
PubMed1986

Self-monitoring of attentional behavior versus self-monitoring of productivity: effects on on-task behavior and academic response rate among learning disabled children.

I investigated the differential effects of self-monitoring of attentional behavior and self-monitoring of productivity on on-task behavior and academic response rate. Subjects were four learning disabled children with significant attentional problems. Results indicated relatively equivalent increases in on-task behavior over baseline during all treatment phases. Academic response rate also improved under both interventions, with self-monitoring of productivity showing a superior effect for one subject, an equivalent effect for one subject, and less clear results for two subjects.

Attention↗