Controlling spatiotemporal chaos in excitable media by applying low-amplitude perturbations locally is of immediate applicability, e.g., in treating ventricular fibrillation, a fatal disturbance in the normal rhythmic functioning of the heart. We look at a mechanism of control by the local application of a series of biphasic pulses, i.e., involving both positive and negative stimulation. This r...

The dual systems model posits that adolescent risk-taking results from an imbalance between a cognitive control system and an incentive processing system. Researchers interested in understanding the development of adolescent risk-taking use a diverse array of behavioral and self-report measures to index cognitive control and incentive processing. It is currently unclear whether different measur...

CONTEXT Women's behaviors before and during pregnancy can affect their infants' health. Particularly because many births in the United States are unintended, it is important to understand women's health behaviors and pregnancy planning status before they become pregnant. METHODS A telephone survey of nonpregnant women of childbearing age who belonged to a Southern California managed care plan...

The HIV/AIDS knowledge, attitudes, and sexual risk-taking behaviors of a sample of African-American and Caribbean college were investigated. The study also explored the relationship between the women’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, sexual communication, and religiosity and their HIV knowledge, attitudes, and risk behaviors. Findings revealed that while both groups of women were fairly knowledgeab...

The leading causes of mortality in adolescents continue to be accidents, homicide, suicide, sexually transmitted infections, teen pregnancy, eating disorders and drug abuse related mortality. All these causes are preventable and primarily due to risk taking behaviors related to the developmental stage of adolescents. The same risk taking behaviors are also leading causes of morbidity. In many i...

The present study (N = 86) sought to evaluate a laboratory-based behavioral measure of risk taking (the Balloon Analogue Risk Task; BART) and to test associations between this measure and self-report measures of risk-related constructs as well as self-reported real-world risk behaviors. The BART evidenced sound experimental properties, and riskiness on the BART was correlated with scores on mea...

In this article, an enactive architecture is described that allows a humanoid robot to learn to compose simple actions into turn-taking behaviors while playing interaction games with a human partner. The robot’s action choices are reinforced by social feedback from the human in the form of visual attention and measures of behavioral synchronization. We demonstrate that the system can acquire an...

Drugs of abuse dynamically regulate adult neurogenesis, which appears important for some types of learning and memory. Interestingly, a major site of adult neurogenesis, the hippocampus, is important in the formation of drug-context associations and in the mediation of drug-taking and drug-seeking behaviors in animal models of addiction. Correlative evidence suggests an inverse relationship bet...

Although a significant body of research has focused on understanding the effect of media differences on group behaviors and processes, little is known about how media differences influence groups' risk-taking behaviors. This study reports on a laboratory experiment designed to understand the effects of the group communication environment (face-to-face or computer-mediated) on group risk-taking ...