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.     

Assessment of normal values in 5- to 9-year-old children with the Kurth motometric Rostock-Oseretzky Scale

197 children, from 5.0 to 9.0, were subjected to testing by the Rostock-Oseretzki scale. By calculation in the customary manner, the age-group 5.0 to 7.0 was found to achieve an MQ result of 115, the age-group 7.1 to 9.0 one of 130. Furthermore, an association between individual motometric tests and findings in the area of child neurology and function was established.     

An experiment on obsessional checking

An experiment was carried out on 12 patients complaining of obsessional checking rituals in order to determine whether: (a) the execution of potentially ‘harmful’ acts produces discomfort and (b) whether the act of checking produces relief. With some exceptions and reservations, it was concluded that execution of the act does produce discomfort and completing a check does bring relief. The results are seen as providing some support for theories which depend on the concept of anxiety reduction/avoidance.     

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.     

The impact of gender on the assessment of body checking behavior

Body checking includes any behavior aimed at global or specific evaluations of appearance characteristics. Men and women are believed to express these behaviors differently, possibly reflecting different socialization. However, there has been no empirical test of the impact of gender on body checking. A total of 1024 male and female college students completed two measures of body checking, the Body Checking Questionnaire and the Male Body Checking Questionnaire. Using multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, differential item functioning (DIF) was explored in a composite of these measures. Two global latent factors were identified (female and male body checking severity), and there were expected gender differences in these factors even after controlling for DIF. Ten items were found to be unbiased by gender and provide a suitable brief measure of body checking for mixed gender research. Practical applications for body checking assessment and theoretical implications are discussed.     

A cognitive theory of compulsive checking

It is proposed that compulsive checking occurs when people who believe that they have a special, elevated responsibility for preventing harm, mainly to others, are unsure that the perceived threat has been reduced or removed. The intensity and duration of this checking is determined by three "multipliers": increased responsibility, probability of harm and anticipated seriousness of harm. The recurrency of the checking is promoted by a self-perpetuating mechanism, comprising four elements: paradoxical increases in responsibility and in perceived probability of harm, reduced confidence in memory and the absence of a certain end to the threat. The relation between compulsive checking and other anxiety disorders is examined and the successes and failures of past or present treatments re-considered. Experimental predictions are set out and the therapeutic implications of the construal are discussed.     

An experimental analysis of body checking

The relationship between repeated body checking and its impact on body size estimation and body dissatisfaction is of interest for two reasons. First, it has importance in theoretical accounts of the maintenance of eating disorders and, second, body checking is targeted in cognitive-behavioural treatment. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of manipulating body checking on body size estimation and body dissatisfaction. Sixty women were randomly assigned either to repeatedly scrutinize their bodies in a critical way in the mirror ("high body checking") or to refrain from body checking but to examine the whole of their bodies in a neutral way ("low body checking"). Body dissatisfaction, feelings of fatness and the strength of a particular self-critical thought increased immediately after the manipulation among those in the high body checking condition. Feelings of fatness decreased among those in the low body checking condition. These changes were short-lived. The manipulation did not effect estimations of body size or the discrepancy between estimations of body size and desired body size. The implications of these findings for understanding the influence of body checking on the maintenance of body dissatisfaction are considered.     

Level of agency in sub-clinical checking

This study examined cognitive representations of routine action, through the assessment of level of agency, in individuals with sub-clinical checking. The level of agency stems from Action Identification Theory [Vallacher, R. R., Wegner, D. M. (1989). Levels of personal agency: Individual variation in action identification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57, 660-671], which states that how actions are usually identified (based on instrumental aspects or purpose) reflects the predominant accessibility of internal representation (movements executed vs. goal pursued). Furthermore, this framework proposed that altered action regulation is related to low-level of agency (i.e., action identification at an instrumental level). In the current study, the main result indicated that checking symptoms were related to a low-level of agency, that is, individuals with sub-clinical checking identified habitual actions on the basis of instrumental aspects. This seems to indicate that checkers may act with a lack of goal representations. The results are discussed in terms of the role of low-level of agency in checking phenomena and related cognitive dysfunction.     

Body checking behaviors in men

Males have been facing increasing pressure from the media to attain a lean, muscular physique, and are at risk for body dissatisfaction, disturbed eating and exercise behaviors, and abuse of appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs (APEDs). The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between body checking and mood, symptoms of muscle dysmorphia, importance of shape and weight, and APED use in undergraduate males. Body checking in males was correlated with weight and shape concern, symptoms of muscle dysmorphia, depression, negative affect, and APED use. Body checking predicted APED use and uniquely accounted for the largest amount of variance in Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory (MDDI) scores (16%). Findings support the view that body checking is an important construct in male body image, muscle dysmorphia, and body change strategies and suggest a need for further research.     

The influence of social anxiety on the body checking behaviors of female college students

Social anxiety and eating pathology frequently co-occur. However, there is limited research examining the relationship between anxiety and body checking, aside from one study in which social physique anxiety partially mediated the relationship between body checking cognitions and body checking behavior (Haase, Mountford, & Waller, 2007). In an independent sample of 567 college women, we tested the fit of Haase and colleagues’ foundational model but did not find evidence of mediation. Thus we tested the fit of an expanded path model that included eating pathology and clinical impairment. In the best-fitting path model (CFI = .991; RMSEA = .083) eating pathology and social physique anxiety positively predicted body checking, and body checking positively predicted clinical impairment. Therefore, women who endorse social physique anxiety may be more likely to engage in body checking behaviors and experience impaired psychosocial functioning.     

No evidence of attentional bias in obsessive compulsive checking on the dot probe paradigm

Attentional biases have been proposed as maintaining and causal factors in anxiety, and it has been suggested that training attentional bias can impact on emotional responding. Given the severity of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and the considerable number of clients who do not respond to traditional therapies, understanding the factors that maintain anxiety in OCD is critical for the development of effective treatments. This study investigated attentional biases in a homogenous group of OCD patients whose primary concern was checking (OCD-Check; n = 18) compared to a Control group individually matched for age, gender and level of education (Control; n = 18) using a dot probe task. No evidence of attentional bias, or of differences in orienting to or disengaging from checking-relevant stimuli, was found in the OCD group compared to the matched Control group. From this data, it would appear that attentional bias may not be a feature of obsessive compulsive checking. The limitations of the present study and future research directions are discussed.     

Some Results on the Limits of Thought

Generalizing on some arguments due to Arthur Prior and Dmitry Mirimanoff, we provide some further limitative results on what can be thought.     

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.     

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.     

Modeling developmental transitions on the balance scale task

Periods of relatively stable, rule‐like behavior alternated with short transition periods characterize cognitive development on reasoning tasks like the balance scale task. Each transition gives rise to an improvement in behavior, until a phase is reached in which performance is flawless or improvement is not worthwhile given the necessary extra effort. Several computational models have been developed to capture the developmental phenomena associated with the balance scale task. These models, which originate from different computational traditions, explain the main phenomena of development. Recently, empirical phenomena have been reported that these models cannot easily accommodate. We propose a computational model that is implemented in ACT‐R and that is based on the evaluation of success of applied knowledge, combined with a mechanism to construct newknowledge by searching for differences between the left‐ and right‐hand sides of presented balance scale problems. This model accounts for the main empirical phenomena as well as for the recently reported empirical phenomena such as learning without feedback.     

Approximating the conditional distribution of person FIT indexes for checking the rasch model

We present a simple approximation to the conditional distribution of goodness-of-fit statistics for the Rasch model, assuming that the item difficulties are known. The approximation is easily programmed, and gives relatively accurate assessments of conditionalp-values for tests of length 10 or more. A few generalizations are discussed.