Search

The antidiuretic-hormone (a.d.h.) controlled water-excretion subsystem of an earlier computer simulation is critically examined in the light of other studies in the area of fluid balance, circulatory control and a.d.h. secretion rate etc. The model forms a convenient framework for the interpretation of a number of studies in terms of a theory of a.d.h. control, and modifications to the earlier model are proposed. It is argued that the concept of an a.d.h. threshold needs clarification, and reasons are suggested as to why nature has placed water excretion under the control of an antidiuretic rather than a diuretic hormone.

It is important in psychoanalysis to retain Popper's emphasis on theories that can be mistaken, and which therefore can be improved. This idea about the value of mistakes should not be rejected, as Will has done in his recent article. The main problem about the status of psychoanalysis is not, as Will argues, to understand science in such a way that psychoanalytic theories will be seen to be scientific. A prior question is whether the implicit personal theories of clients in therapy, the practical theories by which they live, can be effectively tested and improved in the psychoanalytic setting. The value of bringing to bear ideas from the philosophy and sociology of science is that they provide us with metaphors for the growth and change of theories in general. So if the psychoanalytic session has value, it is as a setting in which we can learn from mistakes, just as the experiment is a setting in which theories of natural science can be improved by refutations. Therapists' theories describe the implicit personal theories of their clients, rather as metatheories in the philosophy and sociology of science describe theories in physics and other sciences. Making these distinctions allows the question of the status of psychoanalytic theory and practice to be seen more clearly.

A theory is proposed that emotions are cognitively based states which co-ordinate quasi-autonomous processes in the nervous system. Emotions provide a biological solution to certain problems of transition between plans, in systems with multiple goals. Their function is to accomplish and maintain these transitions, and to communicate them to ourselves and others. Transitions occur at significant junctures of plans when the evaluation of success in a plan changes. Complex emotions are derived from a small number of basic emotions and arise at junctures of social plans.

In two experiments subjects viewed versions of Heider & Simmel's (1944) cartoon film in which two triangles and a circle move in and round a diagram of a house. The film was shown in stages. After each stage subjects wrote accounts of what had happened and what they thought might happen next. Accounts were analysed by assigning each verb phrase to one of four categories ranging from impersonal description of movement, to personal description of human emotion and dramatic interaction. Subjects used progressively more personal descriptions as the film proceeded, implying assimilation of events of the film by social schemata. In a second experiment, giving the film the title of ‘The jealous lover’ encouraged earlier use of verbs in the more personal categories. Summaries written after the stage-by-stage accounts showed elaboration on the original perceptions.

Within cognitive science emotions are likely to become increasingly important as we begin to understand more about systems with multiple goals that operate in imperfectly known environments. Whether cognitive science has insights into emotional processes to offer to people outside the discipline is a separate matter, but here too there are indications that the exploration of schemata, plans, and goals will give insights into the psychology of human emotions.

This paper uses a theory of the emotions to motivate a semantic analysis of English words referring to emotions. The theory assumes that emotions have a two-fold communicative function, both externally amongst members of the species, and internally within the brain so as to bypass complex inferences. It implies that there is a small number of basic signals that can set up characteristic emotional modes within the organism, roughly corresponding to happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. In human beings, these modes can be modulated by the propositional content of the cognitive evaluation that caused the emotion signal, or else, if this content fails to impinge on consciousness, these modes can be experienced as emotions that have occurred for no apparent reason. According to this “communicative” theory, there should be a set of terms that refer to basic emotions, and these terms should have no internal semantics, since they cannot be analysed into anything more basic, such as a prototype or...

Inhibition of ad libitum feeding in rats was induced by hypertonic NaCl injections. Though osmotic loads of sufficient size were capable of abolishing feeding completely for a time, the effect was not as large as had been predicted from a hypothesis of strictly linear subtractive inhibition. Feeding at a low level of hunger seems to be somewhat less affected by osmotic inhibition than feeding on a deprivation schedule. Inhibition of feeding was also produced by deprivation of water, and both the inhibition of food intake during deprivation, and the disinhibition by subsequent drinking indicated that the amount of inhibition of food intake is a non-linear (accelerating) function of water deficit. A model of the process indicating that the thirst signal undergoes a non-linear transformation before being subtracted from the signal corresponding to food demand is proposed.

Summary 1. Rats drinking air after deprivation of water show a similar pattern of performance to rats drinking water. Like the number of licks taken at a water spout in 1 hr, the number of air licks for both high and low pressure air streams was a nearly linear function of the length of deprivation. 2. Histograms of intervals between licks are also similar for water and air. Variation of motivation or incentive did not substantially affect the pattern of licking. Only rats drinking water in response to concentrated NaCl injections showed any change from normal in their local rate of licking. 3. Rats took more licks to air than to water, and the cumulative licking curves showed that the rate of drinking air did not diminish nearly as much as it did for water. This would be expected if air has its mildly satiating effect by providing decaying short-term feedback. 4. Part of the satiating effect of air may be due to simple gut distension. Rats swallowed a substantial quantity of air which was found in their stomachs and intestines after air drinking. There was no evidence that distension by air was aversive. 5. Air drinking, though it does not remove all feedback from drinking, provides a useful consummatory measure of thirst which is free of the absorptive effects of drinking water.

The body water, alimentary exchange, renal control, and drinking sub-systems involved in water regulation in the rat were simulated using a digital computer. For each subsystem, coefficients and time constants were fitted to published data, and the calculations closely followed a physiological understanding of the mechanisms in question. Experimental data were then obtained for the drinking and renal response to injections and continuous infusions of hypertonic saline in rats, and the overall performance of the model was tested by comparing its response to these experimental results. Agreement was good for these and other results, indicating that the model adquately takes account of the major variables in the regulation of body water. Manipulations of the model and comparisons with rats indicate the necessity for short term oral and gastric feedback, and for a thirst threshold.

Although reciprocal inhibition between eating and drinking has been postulated, the commonly observed reduction of water intake by hungry rats may not be due to any direct inhibitory mechanism. In one experiment rats deprived of food for 24 hr. and then injected with 2 ml. of NaCl drank the same as rats that had received food ad lib. In the second experiment a stomach load of 10 ml. of water 3 hr. before the salt injection was designed to abolish any water deficit that might have occurred during food deprivation had there been inhibition of drinking by hunger. Here again rats deprived of food did not drink less than undeprived animals. In fact the hungry rats drank slightly but significantly more. This phenomenon may be related to the observation confirmed here that during food deprivation rats excrete about twice as much rather dilute urine as during ad lib food intake. This seems to indicate that though in general food deprived rats drink less than normal they actually drink more than they need. Schedule induced polydipsia also occurs during food deprivation and this too makes it unlikely that water-intake is actually inhibited during hunger.

RATS allowed food and water ad lib. show a circadian rhythm of drinking and a close association of water intake with eating. One estimate of the proportion of total water taken at night is 78%1. Meals apparently influence the timing and the amount of water drunk. About 57% of the total drinking occurs within 20 min of meals2. A meal introduces solutes into the blood and shifts water from the body fluids into the gut. To compensate for this, between 1 and 1.5 ml. of water would need to be drunk for each gram of food eaten3. Water requirements over a longer term are also determined by the diet4, because of obligatory renal water losses occasioned by solutes from the food.

In everyday life, the existence of personal goals is indicated by the activities in which people are engaged, such as leisure interests, occupation and relationships. Incompatibility between goals was predicted to be one source of conflict associated with poor mental health symptoms. A series of studies using different methods (interviews and questionnaires) to measure the degree of perceived conflict in the daily activities of young and mature students and non-student adults is reported. Two forms of conflict are described - explict (between two or more activities) and implicit (the importance of the activity to the individual). The results show that younger and mature students (particularly women) show correlations between their conflict and symptom scores, unlike other survey groups. The transitional nature of the student role may create a situation where the conflict experienced by many in their everyday activities is aggravated, and which is more readily expressed by psychiatric symptoms than in other ways.

Of 30 agoraphobic married women undertaking home-based behaviour therapy, 15 each had a female friend as co-therapist and 15 had their own husband as co-therapist. At 12 months follow-up, women spent a mean of approximately 40 minutes a day more outside the home alone than at baseline. Women assisted by female friends made somewhat more behavioural gains than those assisted by husbands. Women in both groups whose husbands had been more depressed 2 months after the beginning of therapy did less well at 6 months. Husbands who become more depressed may retard their wives' progress in therapy, but the effect was small, and was outweighed by other considerations.

“A group is the beginning of everything,” wrote Peter Uspenskii, “one man can do nothing, attain nothing… a group of people can do what one man can never do” (Uspenskii, 1950).

SynopsisInterviews were conducted with 49 men just after they had become unemployed, and with a matched sample of 49 employed men. Follow-up interviews took place 6–8 months later. At follow-up 20 originally unemployed men were still without work, and were significantly more depressed than the employed. Five of these 20, but no employed men, had become clinically depressed. In a multiple regression analysis there was a significant employment × social support interaction which indicated that depression scores at follow-up were higher in those who remained unemployed and who had little social contact with others in the month before losing their jobs. Depression becomes likely when people lose a source of social interaction that is important to their sense of worth, and have no alternative means of experiencing this worth in other relationships.

WHEN animals are deprived of water a progressive dehydration takes place due to water losses via the kidneys and other emunctories. Two basic types of change occur during this dehydration. One is due to the fact that water is lost faster than electrolytes. This causes an increase in the osmotic pressure of the body fluids. Secondly, due to the loss of water, a reduction in the total volume of the body fluid ensues.

Normal and adrenally demedullated rats injected with approximately 200 mg per kg of 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2-DG) ate just over 1 g more food than controls in 3-hr eating tests. This eating response was unaffected by delaying access to food by 30 min. Injections of 6-deoxy-D-glucose also increased eating, but less than 2-DG. Rats deprived of food for 24 hr ate about twice as much food as those injected with 2-DG. Drinking was increased following 2-DG in some but not all the experiments. Ether anaesthesia at the time of the injection depressed subsequent drinking but not eating. Arteriovenous differences of blood glucose (measured between carotid artery and jugular vein, and between carotid artery and femoral vein) were decreased after 24 hr deprivation of food, but slightly increased after injections of 2-DG. 2-DG stimulates eating without decreasing the rate of uptake of glucose from the blood.

Rats undergoing extinction of instrumental behaviour previouly rewarded by food in Skinner boxes and consummatory behaviour in the home cage showed increased drinking compared with control animals. Also during extinction the number of bouts of licking increased above the levels observed before extinction of the food acquiring response. Increased drinking in extinction depended on a certain level of food deprivation, and did not occur substantially in only slightly hungry rats. It did occur in rats not allowed water while working for food and thus it could not be attributed principally to perseveration of drinking behaviour acquired while eating. These phenomena appear to be displacement activities by hungry rats whose expectations of receiving food are not fulfilled. The explanation of the behaviour observed as frustration induced displacement activity may be applicable both to starvation polydipsia and to schedule induced polydipsia.

Psychometric functions obtained for judgements of the order of two long duration light flashes were about half as steep as those previously obtained for short flashes. The range from 50 to 75 per cent correct judgements corresponded to interstimulus intervals from 36 to 98 msec. in the 6 subjects tested. Stimuli ½ degree above and below the fixation point produced slightly more accurate judgements than pairs of stimuli 2 degrees above and below this point. The shape of the curves did not conform to a normal ogive of the kind normally expected in threshold determinations. These data may be explicable in terms of a visual sampling mechanism capable of being triggered by incoming stimuli. Committee on Mathematical Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., U.S.A.

Conducted 2 experiments in which 28 male hooded Listar strain rats maintained on food-deprivation schedules received 2-ml intraperitoneal injections of hypertonic (6%) or isotonic (.9%) NaCl. Hypertonic injections produced inhibition of eating. Allowing Ss to drink water ad lib completely canceled the inhibition, but for Ss without water each milliliter of water deficit produced had the effect of subtracting approximately 1/3 gm. of food from the amount eaten. The size of this effect was entirely independent of the level of food deprivation. Allowing an inhibited S to drink measured quantities of water produced disinhibition at the same rate (i.e., approximately .33 gm. of food/1 ml. of water). Changes in body fluid composition induced by food eaten also inhibited intake in exactly the same fashion. Results indicate that states of the body fluids that produce thirst inhibit feeding, and for lower levels of hypertonicity this inhibition is approximately constantly proportional to the water deficit. A direct subtractive neural inhibition arising from the system controlling drinking upon the system controlling eating adequately explains these results. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Mechanisms in the brain generate specific patterns of motivated behaviour concerned with such matters as hunger, thirst and sex. These mechanisms contain models of relevant aspects of the internal and external environment which enable an animal to direct its behaviour appropriately and purposefully.

DRINKING is essential for the homeostasis of body fluids, and a theoretical structure which makes the principles and details of homeostasis explicit is provided by control theory. A control model of thirst has been described by Oatley1,2 and simulated on a digital computer3.

Pulse rates of 30 women attending an antenatal clinic were measured near the beginning and end of their visit. Mean pulse rate declined during the visit, and the difference was used as an index of autonomic arousal. Higher arousal was associated with poorer recall of information and advice about pregnancy.

We, the Navigators : The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. By David Lewis. Pp. xviii + 346 (13 plates). Published by (Australian National University: Canberra; Angus and Robertson: United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East and Africa, January 1973.) £5.

Stomachs and small intestines were examined and weighed up to 6 h after rats had been allowed to eat for 30 min without water available. A meal of commercial rat food left the stomach with a time constant of about 4 h. Each gram of food eaten attracted approximately 1 ml of additional fluid into the gut. The time course of this fluid movement and of electrolyte absorption is such that much of the drinking associated with meals in conditions of ad lib intake of food and water seems to be in anticipation of changes in the body fluids, rather than in response to them.

The Conscious Brain. By Steven Rose. Pp. 351. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, May 1973.) £4.95.

Introducing Psychology An Experimental Approach. By D. S. Wright, Ann Taylor, D. Roy Davies, W. Sluckin, S. G. M. Lee and J. T. Reason. (Penguin Modern Psychology Series.) Pp. 736. (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, March 1970.) 20s.

Physiological Psychology . By Peter M. Milner. Pp. x + 531. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York and London, 1970.)

Drinking tests were carried out on rats at four times of day after NaCl injections of six concentrations. Contrary to what would be expected if a diurnal influence directly modulates the brain mechanisms cantrolling drinking, there was no potentiation or inhibition of drinking at any of the times when tests were made.

The Settlement of Polynesia: A Computer Simulation. By M. Levison, R. Gerard Ward and J. W. Webb. Pp. vi+137. (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1973.) £5.50.

Human Vigilance Performance By D. R. Davies and G. S. Tune. Pp. 291. (Staples Press: London, February 1970.) 85s.