Association of fake-good MMPI-2 profiles with low Beck Depression Inventory scores

Seventy-nine adolescent mothers (mean age = 18.1 years) were administered the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and three validity scales (L, F, and K) of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2 (MMPI-2). The aim was to determine whether low-BDI mothers were "faking good," or denying their depression. The adolescent mothers were assigned to a low-BDI group (scores = 0, 1, 2), a nondepressed group (scores = 3-9), or a depressed group (scores > or = 13). The depressed group had higher F (Symptom) scale scores than did the nondepressed group, which in turn had higher scores than did the low-BDI group. The low-BDI group, in contrast, had more fake-good profiles than did the two other groups. Discriminant analyses indicated that 90% of the fake-good profiles could be classified correctly based on BDI and K (Defensiveness) scale scores. These data suggest the need for further assessment when individuals have extremely low BDI scores.     

The teaching and learning of psychoanalytic developmental psychology

I have described three areas in psychoanalytic education where I believe greater attention to existing methods is necessary so as to facilitate the learning of certain principles of development. Explanations might be enhanced by including constructivist with reductionist elements; metapsychology might be clarified in a way that would make the "developmental" more available to analytic scaffolding; and finally, the technical precepts that help focus on the emergence of regressive trends should be broadened to permit enhanced awareness of the progressive trends as well.     

Altered vision near the hands

The present study explored the manner in which hand position may affect visual processing. We studied three classic visual attention tasks (visual search, inhibition of return, and attentional blink) during which the participants held their hands either near the stimulus display, or far from the display. Remarkably, the hands altered visual processing: people shifted their attention between items more slowly when their hands were near the display. The same results were observed for both visible and invisible hands. This enhancement in vision for objects near the hands reveals a mechanism that could facilitate the detailed evaluation of objects for potential manipulation, or the assessment of potentially dangerous objects for a defensive response.     

Using movement and intentions to understand human activity

During perception, people segment continuous activity into discrete events. They do so in part by monitoring changes in features of an ongoing activity. Characterizing these features is important for theories of event perception and may be helpful for designing information systems. The three experiments reported here asked whether the body movements of an actor predict when viewers will perceive event boundaries. Body movements were recorded using a magnetic motion tracking system and compared with viewers’ segmentation of his activity into events. Changes in movement features were strongly associated with segmentation. This was more true for fine-grained than for coarse-grained boundaries, and was strengthened when the stimulus displays were reduced from live-action movies to simplified animations. These results suggest that movement variables play an important role in the process of segmenting activity into meaningful events, and that the influence of movement on segmentation depends on the availability of other information sources.     

Voluntary Attention Enhances Contrast Appearance

ABSTRACT— Voluntary (endogenous, sustained) covert spatial attention selects relevant sensory information for prioritized processing. The behavioral and neural consequences of such selection have been extensively documented, but its phenomenology has received little empirical investigation. We asked whether voluntary attention affects the subjective appearance of contrast—a fundamental dimension of visual perception. We used a demanding rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task to direct endogenous attention to a given location and measured perceived contrast at the attended and unattended locations. Attention increased perceived contrast of suprathreshold stimuli and also improved performance on a concurrent orientation discrimination task at the cued location. We ruled out response bias as an alternative account of the pattern of results. Thus, this study establishes that voluntary attention enhances perceived contrast. This phenomenological consequence links behavioral and neurophysiological studies on the effects of attention.     

Without mercy: the immediate impact of group size on lynch mob atrocity

Two independent research traditions have focused on social contributions to lynching. The sociological power threat hypothesis has argued that lynching atrocity will increase as a function of the relative number of African Americans. The psychological self-attention theory has argued that lynching atrocity will increase as a function of the relative number of mob members. Two series of analyses (one using newspaper reports and the second using photographic records) using different and nonoverlapping samples of lynching events rendered a consistent pattern of results: Lynch mob atrocity did not increase as a function of the relative numbers of African Americans in the county population but it did increase as a function of the relative numbers of mob members in the lynch mob. Discussion considers the implications of these results.     

Jealousy,Infidelity, and the Difficulty of Diagnosing Pathology: A CBT Approach to Coping with Sexual Betrayal and the Green-Eyed Monster

Humans have evolved adaptations for infidelity, as well defenses against a partner’s betrayal—centrally the emotion of jealousy. Both create problems that bring couples to therapy. Diagnosing jealousy as pathological versus normal turns out to be difficult, in part because infidelity has evolved to be concealed from the betrayed mate, which creates a signal detection problem. Because missing an infidelity committed by a mate has been more costly in evolutionary currencies than falsely suspecting a partner of cheating, selection has created an error management cognitive bias to over-infer a partner’s betrayal. Moreover, adaptations for jealousy become activated by predictors of infidelity, such as mate value discrepancies, when no actual infidelities have occurred. Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) offers several ways to deal with these complexities. One way is to highlight potential mismatches, distinguishing between jealous emotions that were functional in ancestral environments but are less so in modern environments. A second is to distinguish between the goal of personal well-being and reproductive outcomes. Understanding the evolutionary logic of jealousy, in short, provides patients with conceptual tools for cognitively reframing jealousy and infidelity.     

Relations between emotion,memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop,lexical decision,and immediate memory tasks

This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition. The second effect is superior recall of taboo words in surprise memory tests following color naming. The third effect is better recognition memory for colors consistently associated with taboo words rather than with neutral words. None of these effects was due to retrieval factors, attentional disengagement processes, response inhibition, or strategic attention shifts. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that taboo words impair immediate recall of the preceding and succeeding words in rapidly presented lists but do not impair lexical decision times. We argue that taboo words trigger specific emotional reactions that facilitate the binding of taboo word meaning to salient contextual aspects, such as occurrence in a task and font color in taboo Stroop tasks.