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It can be argued that the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most popular assessment of implicit bias available. The IAT in part owes its popularity to the IAT website, launched shortly after development of the test itself, which has accumulated millions of responses from self-enrolled participants. The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is an experimental preparation grounded in relational frame theory (RFT) devised to capture specific relations among stimuli. It provides a more granular analysis of bias, a distinct advantage over the IAT, and its internal reliability is among the best of all implicit measures and certainly comparable to the IAT. The present study attempted to develop and validate an IRAP website equivalent to the IAT website by replicating a foundational IRAP study. This study tasked participants with categorizing positively and negatively valenced words as either “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” A total of 31 out of 40 participants survived performance-related criteria at similar rates to previous IRAP studies, demonstrating the feasibility of web-delivered IRAP studies. The results successfully replicated the main effect, an overall preference toward positive words, as well as a pattern of specific trial-type scores commonly observed in IRAP studies. These results were internally consistent. The successful development of the web-IRAP offers the potential to leverage advantages typical of web-delivered research, including increased power, greater ecological validity, and inclusion of underrepresented demographic groups.

Spain, one of the European countries most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, underwent a strict lockdown between March and May 2020. This study examines longitudinally the evolution of both psychological inflexibility and mental health symptoms in a sample of college students from the beginning and throughout the end of the mandated lockdown period. We present the results from 197 participants who responded to an online survey at least at two of three data-collection waves scheduled at the beginning (N = 226), halfway (N = 172), and end (N = 188) of the lockdown. The analyses revealed that psychological inflexibility and symptomatology increased over time, and that inflexibility at the beginning of the lockdown indirectly predicted self-reported symptoms at the end of the lockdown via autoregressive parallel paths that also connected cross-sectionally to reveal that changes in inflexibility were predictive of changes in mental health. These results present a dynamic and robust relationship between psychological inflexibility and mental health symptoms throughout a relatively long and presumably stressful period of time.

How people become addicted to cigarette smoking and remain addicted despite repeated attempts to quit requires piecing together a rather complex puzzle. The present review contextualizes the role of nicotine and smoking sensory stimulation on maintaining smoking, describes nicotine’s effects on feeding behavior and body weight, and explores the impact of smoking outcome expectancies, including the belief that nicotine suppresses appetite and body weight, on the decision to smoke or vape (use of e-cigarettes). The analysis concludes with a review of rat models of human nicotine intake that attempt to isolate the effects of nicotine on appetite and weight gain. Animal research replicates with relative closeness phenomena observed in smokers, but the rat model falls short of replicating the long-term weight gain observed post-smoking cessation.

The purpose of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of a Spanish version of the Body Image Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (BI-AAQ) and its recently developed 5-item version, the BI-AAQ-5. The BI-AAQ measures psychological flexibility/inflexibility regarding body image. A sample of Spanish adults (n = 938) completed the BI-AAQ and a battery of measures (including body mass index, psychological flexibility, exposure to and internalization of sociocultural body image expectations, body dissatisfaction, and eating disorder symptoms). Measurement invariance was tested against a U.S. American adult sample (n = 866) that completed the English version of the BI-AAQ. The unidimensional factor structure of the BI-AAQ and BI-AAQ-5 was replicated in both samples using confirmatory factor analysis, with model fit indexes ranging from adequate (e.g., CFI = 0.95) to excellent (e.g., CFI = 0.99). Internal consistency was good for both instruments across samples (α = 0.90 to 0.97). Measurement invariance analyses confirmed full configural and metric invariance and scalar partial invariance. The Spanish BI-AAQ and BI-AAQ-5 showed clear evidence of convergent and incremental construct validity. Both instruments’ scores correlated substantively with theoretically related variables. In addition, the results of a conditional process analysis showed that body-image psychological flexibility measured with either instrument moderated the mediated effect of pressure to conform to cultural ideals of body image on disordered eating through internalization of body image ideals and body dissatisfaction. We concluded both instruments are likely suitable for conducting cross-cultural research with Spanish and English-speaking samples.

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The Body Image Assessment (BIA) is a simple measure of body image disturbance. However, it has currently only been used with an individual administration format and only to assess ratings of current body size, ideal body size, and body dissatisfaction. It has also only been validated for use with women. In the current two studies, the reliability and validity of a group-administered version of the BIA procedure for both men and women that also assessed ratings of the ideal opposite sex and predictions about what the opposite sex would prefer as most attractive was examined. In the first study, results indicated good test-retest reliability for the group version for current and ideal body size and good concurrent validity with the individual administration format of the BIA. The results of the second study supported the construct and predictive validity of the group administered BIA, suggesting that it is a time-efficient alternative to the original, individually administered assessment.

This research investigated the role of injection procedures as a potential confound in the study of associative and nonassociative morphine tolerance development. Rats administered a series of morphine injections paired with a distinctive context environment can develop tolerance controlled associatively by the context. However, rats given morphine unpaired with the context may also develop some degree of tolerance. This study examined whether this tolerance represents an associative effect with animals using the injection ritual as a cue predictive of morphine delivery. Following 14 days of habituation to handling and injection stimuli, rats were given eight morphine injections (20 mg/kg, IP) explicitly paired or unpaired with a distinctive context. Animals were then tested for morphine analgesia in the context after either a 30-day rest condition or a 30-day period of daily saline injections. Analgesia was assessed by the tail-flick method, and tolerance was defined as the shift to the right of the dose-response curve of morphine-experienced relative to saline control animals. Paired animals across both retention conditions displayed tolerance, whereas tolerance retention in unpaired animals was observed only in those animals not given saline injections over the 30-day interval. Results support an associative interpretation of tolerance observed in unpaired conditions and suggest that the injection ritual may provide highly salient cues for the support of associative tolerance effects.

The contribution of associative and nonassociative processes to the development of tolerance to the analgesic effects of morphine in rats was investigated in two experiments. Associative contingencies were manipulated by administering a series of moderately high morphine doses (20 mg/kg) either explicitly paired or explicitly unpaired with a distinctive context. During distinctive context exposures, animals were placed for 60 min in plastic boxes located in a room adjacent to the colony room. The distinctiveness of this environment was enhanced by the presence of white noise and a pine scent. Nonassociative processes were manipulated by administering the morphine at either a very short (6 h) or relatively long (96 h) interdose-interval (IDI). Analgesia was measured on a tail-flick test. At the 96 h IDI, tolerance, as indexed by shifts in dose-response curves, was controlled primarily by associative processes. Associative control over tolerance at the long IDI was evident at an immediate test (experiment 1) and was retained for a 30 day interval (experiment 2). In contrast, tolerance that developed at the 6 h IDI was not influenced by associative contingencies at the immediate test (experiment 1) and showed no retention over a 30 day interval (experiment 2). These data suggest that tolerance that developed at the short IDI was nonassociative. Overall, the results indicate that conditions conducive to the development of non-associative tolerance disrupt the acquisition of associative tolerance. Hypotheses regarding the absence of associative effects at the short IDI are reviewed. Methodological implications of these results for evaluations of associative and nonassociative morphine tolerance are also discussed.

The acquisition of associative tolerance to the analgesic effects of morphine was investigated by giving independent groups of rats 1, 3, 5, 8, 14, 20, or 30 administrations of drug either explicitly paired or unpaired with a distinctive context. Tolerance, assessed on a tail-flick device using dose-response curve (DRC) methodology, developed more rapidly and reached greater magnitude when morphine and the distinctive context were explicitly paired rather than explicitly unpaired. Tolerance magnitude in both conditions reached a maximum at eight conditioning sessions. It is argued that the tolerance found in both treatment groups was associatively controlled. The function of handling and injection cues as conditioned stimuli, and the deleterious effects of latent inhibition and partial reinforcement on conditioned excitation and conditioned inhibition are discussed.

Two experiments used a dual-task procedure to investigate Tiffany’s (1990) proposal that drug craving should disrupt activities that demand nonautomatic cognitive processing. The primary task required smokers to imagine sentences that incorporated urge or no-urge descriptors. During imagery, the subjects also responded to a secondary reaction time (RT) task. Additional dependent variables collected during the imagery manipulation included craving report, mood report, heart rate (HR), and skin conductance levels (SCL). In study 1, imagery of urge sentences produced slower probe RTs and increases in HR and SCL, greater urge and negative mood reports, and lower positive mood ratings. This same pattern of results was replicated in the second study, which utilized sentence types more closely matched on no-urge content. These results support Tiffany’s (1990) cognitive processing theory and suggest an innovative approach to the investigation of drug craving.