The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has contributed greatly to the study of affective decision making. However, researchers have observed high inter-study and inter-individual variability in IGT performance in healthy participants, and many are classified as impaired using standard criteria. Additionally, while decision-making deficits are often attributed to atypical sensitivity to reward and/or punishment, the IGT lacks an integrated sensitivity measure. Adopting an operant perspective, two experiments were conducted to explore these issues. In Experiment 1, 50 healthy participants completed a 200-trial version of the IGT which otherwise closely emulated Bechara et al.'s (1999) original computer task. Group data for Trials 1–100 closely replicated Bechara et al.'s original findings of high net scores and preferences for advantageous decks, suggesting that implementations that depart significantly from Bechara's standard IGT contribute to inter-study variability. During Trials 101–200, mean net scores improved significantly and the percentage of participants meeting the “impaired” criterion was halved. An operant-style stability criterion applied to individual data revealed this was likely related to individual differences in learning rate. Experiment 2 used a novel operant card task—the Auckland Card Task (ACT)—to derive quantitative estimates of sensitivity using the generalized matching law. Relative to individuals who mastered the IGT, persistent poor performers on the IGT exhibited significantly lower sensitivity to magnitudes (but not frequencies) of rewards and punishers on the ACT. Overall, our findings demonstrate the utility of operant-style analysis of IGT data and the potential of applying operant concurrent-schedule procedures to the study of human decision making.

Background: Tension-type headache is the most prevalent primary headache type worldwide and is associated with a wide spectrum of disability. Although progress has been made in understanding the complex mechanisms that lead to the pathogenesis of tension-type headache, to date there are no clear-cut markers of what makes tension-type headache unique. Due to a relative lack of research (compared to migraine), the pathophysiology of tension-type headache is not well understood and there are gaps in the epidemiological data, particularly from Australasia.

The purpose of this experiment was to develop a methodology to investigate the postural expression of different emotions and attitudes using a technique which avoided the artificiality implicit in the use of a role play design. Subjects were asked to categorize tape-recorded extracts as either funny, sad, interesting or boring and to rate them in order of intensity. The posture displayed when listening to the recordings were then analysed according to these ratings, the whole interview being recorded on videotape without the subject's knowledge. Results showed distinctive postures for all four categories, such as dropping the head for sadness and leaning the head on one hand for boredom, thus providing empirical support for the utility of this methodology as a way of obtaining observations of non-verbal cues under controlled conditions without inducing any artificial self-consciousness in the subjects.