There’s More Than Catastrophizing in Chronic Pain: Low Frustration Tolerance and Self-Downing Also Predict Mental Health in Chronic Pain Patients

Among the potential range of irrational beliefs that could be used as predictors of physical and mental health, catastrophizing is the process that has received most attention in chronic pain research. Other irrational processes such as demandingness, low frustration tolerance, and self-downing have rarely been studied. The goal of this study was to explore whether this wider range of beliefs is associated with health in chronic pain patients beyond catastrophizing. A total of 492 chronic pain patients completed a measure of irrational beliefs, a measure of physical and mental health, and a numerical rating scale designed to assess pain intensity and interference. Irrational processes were more strongly associated with mental than with physical health. Low frustration tolerance and self-downing were found to be significantly related to mental health even after controlling for the effect of catastrophizing. Processes other than catastrophizing appear to have potentially important relationships with the mental health of people with chronic pain. These results may offer new intervention targets for practitioners.     

The Correlation Between Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation: The Moderating Effects of Political and Religious Identity

In a secondary analysis performed on a representative sample of the Italian population (N = 887), we examined the correlation between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), analyzing the moderating effect exerted on such correlation by political interest and religion importance. RWA and SDO showed a positive, significant correlation (r = .38), moderated by political interest (which heightened it) and religion importance (which lowered it). Limits, implications, and possible developments of the research are discussed.     

Imágenes mentales y desarrollo cognitivo en ciegos totales de nacimiento

Resumen

El objetivo perseguido en este trabajo fue el estudiar las peculiaridades del desarrollo de la imagen mental enlos niños ciegos totales de nacimiento en la edad de adquisición de las operaciones concretas. Para ello se adaptaron algunas pruebas de las utilizadas por Piaget e Inhelder (1966) en su obra sobre la imagen mental, y se aplicaron a 29 ninos ciegos totales de nacimiento entre los 7 y los 15 años de edad, clasificados en 4 niveles de edad. Sus resultados se compararon con los de dos grupos de control de niños videntes, uno de ellos trabajando con los ojos vendados.

Los resultados muestran un retraso importante de los ciegos respecto a los videntes en uso de la visión en las pruebas que se refieren a la evocación de imágenes de configuraciones estáticas complejas, de objetos en movimiento, y de objetos que se transforman. Este retraso se achaca al de la misma cuantía observado en la adquisición de las operaciones concretas. Este desarrollo cognitivo más lento parece deberse únicamente a la modalidad sensorial utilizada, y no a un daño producido por la ceguera congénita, pues los videntes tapados obtienen resultados comparables a los ciegos.     

Processing Italian Relative Clauses: Working Memory Span and Word Order Effects on RTs

In this study, the authors aim to clarify whether the subject–object asymmetry in relative clause comprehension is due to the use of parsing strategies (Active Filler Theory) or to a greater memory load generated by object sentences. Two experiments investigate how individual differences in working memory span may influence the reading times of relative sentences in Italian, a language characterized by a flexible structure. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that object extraction is more complex than subject extraction when sentences have a canonical structure. Furthermore, low-span participants have particular difficulties with object relative sentence comprehension. The results of Experiment 2 show that subject-relative clauses with uncanonical structures are more complex to understand than object-relative clauses, and low-span participants have more difficulties than high-span participants in elaborating both subject and object relative clauses. These data seem to be coherent with the Active Filler Theory.     

Affective mediators of intergroup contact: a three-wave longitudinal study in South Africa

Intergroup contact (especially cross-group friendship) is firmly established as a powerful strategy for combating group-based prejudice (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Great advances have been made in understanding how contact reduces prejudice (Brown & Hewstone, 2005), highlighting the importance of affective mediators (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008). The present study, a 3-wave longitudinal study undertaken among minority-status Colored high school children in South Africa (N = 465), explored the full mediation of the effects of cross-group friendships on positive outgroup attitudes, perceived outgroup variability, and negative action tendencies via positive (affective empathy) and negative (intergroup anxiety) affective mediators simultaneously. The target group was the majority-status White South African outgroup. As predicted, a bidirectional model described the relationship between contact, mediators, and prejudice significantly better over time than either autoregressive or unidirectional longitudinal models. However, full longitudinal mediation was only found in the direction from Time 1 contact to Time 3 prejudice (via Time 2 mediators), supporting the underlying tenet of the contact hypothesis. Specifically, cross-group friendships were positively associated with positive outgroup attitudes (via affective empathy) and perceived outgroup variability (via intergroup anxiety and affective empathy) and were negatively associated with negative action tendencies (via affective empathy). Following Pettigrew and Tropp (2008), we compared two alternative hypotheses regarding the relationship between intergroup anxiety and affective empathy over time. Time 1 intergroup anxiety was indirectly negatively associated with Time 3 affective empathy, via Time 2 cross-group friendships. We discuss the theoretical and empirical contributions of this study and make suggestions for future research.     

The Processing of Grammatical Gender and Number in Spanish

The aim of the present study is to explore the representation and processing of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Experiment 1 compared the access time for words from the same base morpheme contrasted by the surface frequency of the masculine and feminine form, i.e., masculine-dominant items and feminine-dominant items. The results showed a surface frequency effect in both types of items. Experiment 2 compared the access time for masculine words having the same surface frequency but differing in their summed frequency (masculine plus feminine forms), the results showing no significant effect of this parameter. Finally, experiment 3 compared the access time for words from the same stem and contrasting by the surface frequencies for the singular and plural forms, i.e., singular-dominant and plural-dominant words. A clear frequency effect was observed for the singular-dominant words but not for plural-dominant ones. These results suggest that gender information is stored in the corresponding lexical entry and accessed from the full word form whereas the information about number is accessed from the stem corresponding to the singular form.     

The impact of training on interpersonal influence

Contemporary research on interpersonal influence has shown that individuals scoring high in Need for Cognition (NC) are able to generate a large number of arguments in order to convince other people. However, research has also shown that such an effort does not necessarily lead them to be more persuasive or more efficient in their group performance. The present research analysed this state of affairs, replicating and extending previous research by showing that appropriate training in socio-emotional group dimensions can increase group performance for individuals high in NC. Potential underlying mechanisms for such an effect are discussed.     

Developmental changes in the linguistic brain after puberty

The development of reading skills is a complex and very long-lasting process. In an influential study Booth et al. demonstrated age-related changes in the activation of a network of left hemisphere regions, including the inferior frontal area, the superior temporal gyrus, and the angular gyrus. Interestingly, they found that the angular gyrus, which is involved in the mapping between phonological and orthographic representation, is automatically activated in adults during visual orthographic tasks not requiring this operation.