Testing the Validity of a Matching Law-Based Estimation of Punishment Sensitivity Público

Abstract

An individual's sensitivity to punishing stimuli has the potential to be used as an objective assessment of his or her level of depressive symptomology. Quantification of loss aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984) was the leading approach to ascertaining this estimation. However, violations of the gain-loss separability (GLS; Kahneman & Tversky, 1992) axiom of Prospect Theory have arisen in the literature, leading to an opening for other approaches to take hold as the best approach to estimating punishment sensitivity. A matching law-based (Hernnstein, 1970) approach to punishment sensitivity estimation was developed by Rasmussen & Newland (2008). However, fits of the generalized matching law (GML; Baum, 1974b) to data acquired from their "punished" conditions were below the field's customary 85% variance accounted for (%VAF) threshold for good fits. Methodological alterations to the study design were employed in the present project in an attempt to obtain better fits using Rasmussen & Newland's approach. None of these manipulations resulted in fits of the GML to the punished conditions that consistently exceeded the %VAF threshold, and hence their method is not likely to be useful. A general increase in our foundational knowledge about contingent punishment may be necessary before a valid idiographic approach to estimating one's punishment sensitivity can be developed.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction 1

II. General Method 11

III. Experiment 1 13

IV. Experiment 2 15

V. Experiment 3 18

VI. General Discussion 21

VII. References 27

VIII. Appendices 38

IX. Tables 42

X. Figure Captions 53

XI. Figures 55

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Degree	MA
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Experimental
Palavra-chave	matching law loss aversion punishment
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	McDowell, Jack J, Emory University
Committee Members	Neill, Darryl B, Emory University Treadway, Michael T, Emory University

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