Health anxiety moderates the effects of distraction versus attention to pain

Little is known about the relationship between health anxiety and chronic pain. The present study explored whether individual differences in health anxiety would influence the response of chronic pain patients to physical therapy. Furthermore, the interaction of health anxiety with coping strategy usage (distraction versus attention) was studied. Participants were 81 chronic pain patients who were interviewed and completed measures of pain, anxiety and cognition following an active physiotherapy session in which they either: (1) attended to physical sensations; (2) distracted from physical sensations or (3) completed the session as usual. Health anxious, compared to non-health anxious, individuals worried more about their health and injury during the session and attended to and catastrophically misinterpreted sensations more frequently. A complex interaction between health anxiety and coping strategy emerged. Among health anxious patients, attention to sensations resulted in lower anxiety and pain than did distraction. It appears as though attention had a short-term anxiety reducing effect for health anxious patients. Among non-health anxious patients, attention resulted in greater worry about health than distraction. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Specification of movement amplitudes for the left and right hands: evidence for transient parametric coupling from overlapping-task performance

Bimanual coordination tasks suggest transient cross-talk between concurrent specification processes for movements of the left and right hand that vanishes as the time for specification increases. In 2 experiments with overlapping and successive unimanual tasks, the hypothesis of transient coupling was examined for a psychological-refractory-period paradigm. Time for specification was manipulated by varying the delay between first and second signal (Experiment 1) and by precuing the first response (Experiment 2). Participants performed rapid reversal movements of same or different amplitudes with the left and right hands. With different amplitudes, reaction times (RTs) of the second responses were longer than with same amplitudes at short delays, and this disappeared at longer delays in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, precuing also reduced the difference between RTs of second responses in same-amplitude and different-amplitude trials. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis of transient coupling during amplitude specification obtained with bimanual tasks.     

A sampling approach to biases in conditional probability judgments: beyond base rate neglect and statistical format

Conditional probability judgments of rare events are often inflated. Early accounts assumed a general deficit in using statistical base rates. More recent approaches predict improvement when problems are presented in frequency format or refer to natural categories. The present theory focuses on sampling processes. Experiment 1 showed that a seeming advantage of frequency over probability formats is due to a confounded factor, the need to mentally transform stimulus samples. An information search paradigm was used in Experiment 2. When sampling by the predictor, the probability to be estimated, p(criterion/predictor), was conserved in the samples and judgments were quite accurate. However, when sampling by the criterion, the low base-rate event was strongly overrepresented, accounting for the entire bias. Judgments were quite sensitive to the sampled data, but failed to take sampling constraints into account, as shown in Experiments 3 and 4.     

Selective preservation of naming from description and the "restricted preverbal message"

We report the case of a patient, LEW, who presents with modality-specific naming deficits. He is seriously impaired in naming pictures of both objects and actions. His naming to auditory verbal definitions and of actions carried out by the experimenter is, however, relatively well preserved. He has no visual perceptual deficits and his access to the semantics of pictures is as good as that to the semantics of spoken words. While LEW is not an optic aphasic patient, his pattern of performance is relevant to the debate that has taken place of the organization of the semantic system. We discuss his case from this perspective and argue that LEW's selective deficits support the multiple semantics position. We also argue that the "preverbal message" level in the speech production model of Levelt (1989) is the equivalent of "verbal semantics." We provide additional constraints and principles to the concept of the preverbal message and we term the system so constrained the "restricted preverbal message." Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Repetition priming for familiar and unfamiliar faces in a sex-judgment task: evidence for a common route for the processing of sex and identity

Repetition priming for faces was examined in a sex-judgment task given at test. Priming was found for edited, hair-removed photos of unfamiliar and familiar faces after a single presentation at study. Priming was also observed for the edited photos when study and test faces were different exemplars. Priming was not observed, however, when sex judgments were made at test to photos of complete, hair-included faces. These findings were interpreted by assuming that, for edited faces, internal features are attended, thereby activating face-recognition units that support performance. With complete faces, however, participants provided speeded judgments based primarily on the hairstyle. It is suggested that, for both familiar and unfamiliar faces, a common locus exists for the processing of the identity of a face and its sex. A single face-recognition model for the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces is advocated.     

Numerical competence in rats (Rattus norvegicus): Davis and Bradford (1986) extended

The task of rats (Rattus norvegicus) was to enter 1 box of a defined ordinal number among an array of boxes. In Experiments 1 and 2, the rats correctly chose the 4th box from arrays of 6 and 12 boxes, respectively. In Experiments 3 and 4, in which the ordinal number of the correct box was increased in a graduated fashion, they were able to select the correct box even when its position was higher than 10th among 12 and 18 boxes, respectively. In Experiment 5, the possibility that the rats had used cues to the openability of the box doors was ruled out. In Experiments 6 and 7, the rats succeeded in the task even when the total number of boxes was varied from trial to trial. In Experiment 8, both small- and large-sized boxes were used to control for the possibility of using the cumulative length of the boxes as a cue. Overall, the results suggest that performance was based on numerical cues. Intentional acts were occasionally observed but appeared not to be essential for solving the task.     

Longitudinal changes in the contribution of genetic and environmental influences to symptoms of depression in older male twins

Genetically informative longitudinal data on self-reported symptoms of depression allow for an investigation of the causes of stability and change in depression symptoms throughout adult life. In this report, the authors investigated the relative contribution of genetic and environmental influences to symptoms of depression in 83 monozygotic and 84 dizygotic male twin pairs from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Twin Study. Participants first completed the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale in 1985-1986 and again during 1995-1997. Mean age of twins at baseline was 63 years, range 59 to 70. From cross-sectional genetic analyses we estimated the heritability of CES-D to be 25% (95% confidence interval [CI], 11%-39%) at baseline and 55% (95% CI, 40%-71%) at follow-up. Fitting longitudinal genetic models to the two-wave data, we found that stability of symptoms over the 10-year follow-up was due primarily to continuity of genetic influences.