Obsessional-compulsive checking

The relations between obsessional-compulsive checking and cleaning, and between phobias are discussed. Separate but related hypotheses are proposed to account for the genesis and the maintenance of compulsive checking and these are followed by 9 predictions. The identification of compulsive checking and active avoidance behaviour is discussed and some conclusions offered.     

Temperamental profiles and language development: a replication and an extension

Individual differences in child temperament are associated with individual differences in language development. The present study examined the relationship between temperament and language ability in 109 twenty-four- to 30-month-old children. Parents and day-care teachers completed two questionnaires: the Primo Vocabolario del Bambino (Caselli & Casadio, 1995) and the Questionari Italiani del Temperamento (Axia, 2002). Researchers administered the First Language Test (Axia, 1993) to assess productive and receptive language in each child. Replicating previous research (Usai, Garello, & Viterbori, 2009), day-care teachers identified three temperamental profiles: most of the children fit into the first profile, typical of the Italian population; another profile was made up of easily distractible and not very persistent children, with a poor capacity to modulate motor activity; and the third profile of children were inhibited in new situations. A relationship was found between temperament assessed by day-care teachers and different levels of linguistic competence. In particular, the groups of "inattentive" and "inhibited" children showed poorer lexical and morphological abilities and a more immature vocabulary, characterised by the presence of more primitive components of the lexical repertory compared to the group of "typical" children. Unlike the results from day-care teachers, temperament questionnaires completed by parents revealed a 4-cluster-solution. Also, for parents, the "typical" profile is characterised by the largest vocabulary (productive and receptive) and the most mature semantic production.     

Experimental analysis and treatment of multiply controlled problem behavior: a systematic replication and extension

We evaluated interventions designed to reduce multiply controlled problem behavior exhibited by a young boy with developmental disabilities, using a multiple baseline design. Each intervention was designed to address a specific social function of problem behavior. Results showed that the separate interventions were useful in reducing problem behavior, and terminal schedules were reached by way of schedule thinning (attention condition) and delays to reinforcement (tangible and escape conditions).     

Hassles and health: a replication

The main purpose of this study was to replicate previous research, which explored the relationship between hassles, uplifts, life experiences, and somatic health. Significant but low correlations were found between life experience scores and somatic symptoms and energy level. Hassles scores were significant predictors of overall health status when the effects due to life experiences were controlled. Implications of the findings for the field of behavioral health are discussed.     

Inflated responsibility and perseverative checking: the effect of negative mood

This article reports the results of 2 experiments designed to test predictions from the mood-as-input hypothesis on the role of inflated responsibility in perseverative checking. Through the use of an analog checking task in both experiments, the authors showed that perseveration, as indicated by a range of measures relevant to compulsive checking, was affected by a combination of the level of inflated responsibility and the valency of mood at the outset of checking. In particular, inflated responsibility significantly facilitated checking perseveration only in the context of a negative mood and was not a sufficient condition for checking perseveration to occur. These effects of the various configurations of inflated responsibility and mood valency are predicted by the mood-as-input hypothesis.     

A replication of the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales and development of facet subscales

McNulty, Harkness, Ben-Porath and Williams recently developed Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5) scales for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-A (MMPI-A). This study examined these new scales in a sample of 545 adolescents receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment. Item-level principal components analyses were employed to determine the internal structure of each PSY-5 scale and to aid in the creation of facet subscales for each PSY-5 scale. Results suggest that the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales display adequate internal consistency and our findings generally replicate the original work of McNulty et al. but also extend this work by showing that several of the PSY-5 scales may also be subdivided into meaningful lower level dimensions. These facet subscales for each of the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales are offered for further study.     

Temporal logics for concurrent recursive programs: Satisfiability and model checking

We develop a general framework for the design of temporal logics for concurrent recursive programs. A program execution is modeled as a partial order with multiple nesting relations. To specify properties of executions, we consider any temporal logic whose modalities are definable in monadic second-order logic and which, in addition, allows PDL-like path expressions. This captures, in a unifying framework, a wide range of logics defined for ranked and unranked trees, nested words, and Mazurkiewicz traces that have been studied separately. We show that satisfiability and model checking are decidable in EXPTIME and 2EXPTIME, depending on the precise path modalities.     

Digital daydreaming: Introducing the spontaneous smartphone checking scale

Smartphones are a ubiquitous part of many people's lives, but little is known about their impact on everyday thought processes. Here we introduce the spontaneous smartphone checking scale (SSCS)—which measures the tendency to direct attention toward one's smartphone, unpreceded by external prompts (e.g., notifications, or alerts) and with no specific conscious goal in mind, as a parallel to mind-wandering directed toward internal thoughts. The SSCS showed good psychometric properties and construct validity. It separated from measures of daydreaming and mind-wandering by not loading on dimensions related to self-consciousness, reflection, and rumination, but instead loading highly on a factor associated with other aspects of digital communication and concerns about public appearance on social media. This suggests that spontaneous smartphone checking serves different mental and social functions than internally generated spontaneous thought processes. We discuss possible long-term effects of spontaneous smartphone checking taking up time for internally generated spontaneous thoughts.     

Obsessional slowness: a replication and extension

The treatment of an obsessionally slow patient is described. A combination of pacing and self instruction was used in order to speed up behaviour. This method is adopted and extended from that reported by Rachman (1974). Suggestions as to the maintenance of the treatment effects are discussed.     

Fearlessness and courage: A replication experiment

An attempt was made to replicate the finding that decorated bomb-disposal operators show lower cardiac activity under stress than do comparable but non-decorated operators. The performance under stress of three groups of soldiers (decorated operators, non-decorated operators, less experienced soldiers) was assessed by behavioural, psychophysiological, and subjective measures. The original result, showing lower cardiac activity under stress among decorated operators, was reproduced. With minor exceptions, no group differences in behavioural performance or in subjective activity were found. The results strengthen the view that it is possible to identify physiological indices of fearlessness.     

Danger ideation reduction therapy for obsessive-compulsive checking: preliminary findings

Danger Ideation Reduction Therapy (DIRT) is a cognitive treatment package developed in the mid-1990s to treat obsessive-compulsive (OC) washing. DIRT is solely directed at decreasing threat expectancies and does not involve direct or indirect exposure. The effectiveness of the DIRT package for OC washers has been examined, and to date a number of publications, including two randomised controlled trials, support its efficacy. Recently, the DIRT package was modified to treat people with the OC checking subtype. In the current study, three adult OC checkers received DIRT in 12 to 14 individual 1-hr sessions conducted by a clinical psychologist. At posttreatment, substantial and clinically significant reductions in scores on a range of standardized outcome measures of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptom severity were apparent for all three participants. Crucially, these improvements were maintained at 4-month follow-up. Although further research is clearly warranted, these preliminary findings suggest that DIRT for checkers may prove as effective as DIRT for OC washers.     

The advice of the wise: afterthoughts about reality checking

One of the aims of this special issue on happiness advice was to assess the reality value of recommendations. All papers checked empirical indications for effectiveness, typically by inspecting whether the things advised have been found to be related to happiness in empirical research. Some limitations of this approach are that some advisers used a different definition of happiness than the papers, the papers checked the advice for present day readers, not for the contemporaries of advisers, the data that is used to check the advice is most often correlative in nature, and the papers ignored personality differences. Future research should focus on a wider range of happiness advisers, look at the interaction of the advice and individual readers and address the question of the usefulness of the advice experimentally.     

Believe in yourself: Manipulating beliefs about memory causes checking

One of the most common compulsions in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is repeated checking. Although individuals often report that they check to become more certain, checking has been shown to have the opposite effect – increased checking causes increased uncertainty. However, checking may also be thought of as beginning because of memory uncertainty. Beliefs about responsibility, over-estimation of threat, intolerance of uncertainty, perfectionism, and importance of and control of thoughts are already known to affect different aspects of OCD symptomatology. Beliefs about memory, however, are not currently considered to influence compulsive behaviour. In the current study, beliefs about memory were manipulated to test whether or not they affected urges to check. Ninety-one undergraduate participants received (positive or negative) false feedback about their performance on aspects of a standardized memory test, and then completed two additional memory tasks. Their urges to check following these tasks were assessed. Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals in the low memory confidence condition had greater urges to check following the memory tasks than those in the high memory confidence condition, demonstrating that manipulations of beliefs about memory can influence checking. Results and implications are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural models of and treatments for OCD.