Cognitive-behavioural therapy for young children with anxiety disorders: Comparison of a Child + Parent condition versus a Parent Only condition

The present study compared the efficacy of a group-based cognitive-behavioural treatment (GCBT) delivered exclusively to parents of young anxious children (between 4 and 8 years of age) with the same intervention delivered to both children and parents, relative to a Wait-list Control condition. Parents of children in the Parent Only condition (N = 25) received 10 weekly sessions of GCBT whereas children and parents in the Parent + Child condition (N = 24) each received 10 weekly sessions of GCBT. Intent-to-treat analyses indicated that both active treatment conditions were superior to the Wait-list condition (N = 11), with 55.3% of children in the Parent Only condition and 54.8% of children in the Parent + Child condition no longer meeting criteria for their principal diagnosis at post-treatment. These treatment gains were maintained in both treatment conditions at six-month and 12-month follow-up assessments. There were no significant differences between the two active conditions on other outcome measures including parental psychopathology and parenting style. However, an unexpected finding was that parenting satisfaction and to some extent parenting competence reduced significantly from pre- to post-treatment regardless of the active treatment condition. The present results suggest that GCBT delivered exclusively to parents of young anxious children may be a viable treatment alternative for improving accessibility to efficacious treatments for children with anxiety disorders and for reducing costs associated with mental health care delivery.     

Reflective and ruminative processing of positive emotional memories in bipolar disorder and healthy controls

Recent evidence suggests that reflective (i.e., distanced-why), as compared to ruminative (i.e., immersed-why), processing of negative memories is associated with reductions in negative affect. The present study extended this line of work by examining the effect of these two processing conditions on positive memories among persons with bipolar disorder (BD; n = 27) and a healthy control group (CT; n = 27). After a resting baseline period, participants were instructed to recall a happy autobiographical memory. Using a within-subjects design, participants were asked to process the happy memory in two different experimental conditions (reflective, ruminative) while their experiential, behavioral, and autonomic responses were measured. Consistent with hypotheses, reflective processing was associated with lower self-reported positive affect, positive thoughts, and heart rate compared to ruminative processing for all participants. When current symptoms were controlled for, BD participants reported greater positive affect across both conditions relative to CT participants. Prospective studies are needed to test the extent to which processing of positive emotion contributes to the course of symptoms in bipolar disorder.     

The Art of Living by Dispositionally Happy People

The cognitive and motivational processes by which happy people are able to artfully sustain their happiness are examined within a subjectivist construal approach. Individuals who perceive themselves as happy respond to ordinary experiences differently than their less happy peers. Research from our laboratory has revealed these differences in a variety of contexts, including people's responses to decisions, their reactions to social comparisons, and their interpretations of life events. Our research has also shown that, after experiencing failure, happy people tend not to engage in negative self-reflection and are able to perform subsequent tasks without dwelling. Although happy people experience negative moods and negative life events similar to those of less happy people, they evaluate these events less negatively and respond to them in more positive, affirming ways. These group differences suggest a number of possible ways to sustainably enhance happiness, and current experimental interventions designed to test the effectiveness of several intentional happiness-increasing strategies are discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Persuasive Impact of Organizational Value Statements in a Recruitment Context1

Two experiments were conducted to examine the persuasive impact of different types of evidence supporting an organizational recruitment message. In the first experiment, information on organizational values, presented in a recruitment brochure, was supported using statistical, anecdotal, or no evidence. Graduating university students who were attending a job fair (N = 69) were most attracted to the company as an employer when statistical evidence was presented. In the second study, an employed sample (N= 172) received organizational value evidence in the context of either a recruitment brochure or a community newspaper article. Whereas we replicated the findings of the first study in the brochure condition, we found that anecdotal information was most persuasive in the newspaper condition. We conclude that predicting the persuasive impact of evidence for organizational values requires knowledge of both the type of evidence to be employed and the medium in which that evidence is conveyed.     

The Relational Health Indices: A Study of Women's Relationships

A new measure of women's relationships, the Relational Health Indices (RHI), comprises three scales that assess growth-fostering connections with peers, mentors, and communities. The RHI was developed using the Relational Model (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, Surrey, 1991; Miller & Stiver, 1997), a theory of women's psychological development. The 37-item measure assesses three conceptual dimensions of growth-fostering relationships: engagement, authenticity, and empowerment/zest. This study examined the psychometric properties of the RHI with a group of 450 students at a women's liberal arts college, providing evidence for the reliability, validity, and utility of the new measure. The factor analyses confirmed a three-subscale structure: engagement, authenticity, empowerment/zest. The RHI's components generally demonstrate good overall internal consistency. Furthermore, associations between RHI scales and convergent validation scales were significant and in the direction hypothesized. Correlations with adjustment scales varied across the RHI components. The RHI has potential for enriching our understanding of important, subtle qualities and complex dynamics of both dyadic and group relationships, especially among women. The instrument is available for use by researchers interested in continuing the scale and theory development.     

Predicting Adolescent Self-Esteem From Participation in School Sports Among Latino Subgroups

Data from the in-school survey of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health on girls and boys who claim a Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban heritage were employed to test two hypotheses: (1) Participating in a school-based sport is associated with self-esteem, and (2) school attachment and a sense of physical well-being mediate this relationship. The first hypothesis was partially confirmed in that participation in school sports was associated with self-esteem among Mexican American adolescent girls and boys, Puerto Rican girls, and Cuban American boys, but not among Cuban American girls nor Puerto Rican boys. The second hypothesis was confirmed in that, where there was a significant relationship between participating in a school sport and self-esteem, school attachment and physical well-being mediated this relationship. The results underscore the need to study psychosocial processes separately among Latino subgroups and to examine gender within each subgroup.     

Active gaze, visual look-ahead, and locomotor control

The authors examined observers steering through a series of obstacles to determine the role of active gaze in shaping locomotor trajectories. Participants sat on a bicycle trainer integrated with a large field-of-view simulator and steered through a series of slalom gates. Steering behavior was determined by examining the passing distance through gates and the smoothness of trajectory. Gaze monitoring revealed which slalom targets were fixated and for how long. Participants tended to track the most immediate gate until it was about 1.5 s away, at which point gaze switched to the next slalom gate. To probe this gaze pattern, the authors then introduced a number of experimental conditions that placed spatial or temporal constraints on where participants could look and when. These manipulations resulted in systematic steering errors when observers were forced to use unnatural looking patterns, but errors were reduced when peripheral monitoring of obstacles was allowed. A steering model based on active gaze sampling is proposed, informed by the experimental conditions and consistent with observations in free-gaze experiments and with recommendations from real-world high-speed steering.     

The Implicit Motives of Terrorist Groups: How the Needs for Affiliation and Power Translate into Death and Destruction

This study explored the dynamics of terrorism through a quantitative content analysis of documents issued by terrorist groups and nonterrorist comparison groups. Thirteen terrorist groups were matched with comparison groups that shared the same ideologies, and their documents were coded for ingroup affiliation, outgroup affiliation, and power motive imagery. As hypothesized, compared with nonterrorist groups, terrorist groups were significantly higher in ingroup affiliation motive imagery and significantly lower in outgroup affiliation motive imagery in the full sample of documents and in an indicator sample that included only terrorist groups' preterrorism documents. Terrorist groups were significantly higher than comparison groups in power motive imagery in the full sample and marginally significantly higher in power motive imagery in the indicator sample. These results highlight the important role that group dynamics play in terrorist groups.     

Development and initial validation of brief public domain RIASEC marker scales

Although commercially developed interest measures based on Holland’s RIASEC types are effectively used in a variety of applied settings, these measures have somewhat limited research utility due to their length and copyright restrictions placed by the test publishers. In the present study, two sets of 8-item RIASEC scales were developed using activity-based items selected from the 30-item RIASEC scales of the Interest Profiler, and two sets of 8-item RIASEC scales were developed using sets of 30 occupational job titles selected from the O∗NET database representing each Holland type. Responses to the items were obtained from three samples of college students with a total of 1024 female and 639 male participants. Results obtained in the initial development and validation process suggest that the sets of brief activity- and occupational-based RIASEC scales developed in the current study retain acceptable levels of reliability and convergent validity. The development of these brief public domain RIASEC interest measures addresses the copyright and length limitations of current scales and may be useful when conducting integrative research examining the inter-relations between Holland’s types and other individual differences measures.     

The influence of animal fear on attentional capture by fear-relevant animal stimuli in children

The present study demonstrated that pictures of fear-relevant animals, snakes and spiders, presented among backgrounds of other animal stimuli captured attention and interfered in the detection of a neutral target to the same extent in a large sample of unselected children (N=81). Moreover, detection of a neutral target animal was slowed more in the presence of a feared fear-relevant distracter, e.g., a snake for snake fearful children, than in the presence of a not feared fear-relevant distracter, e.g., a spider for snake fearful children. These results indicate attentional capture by phylogenetically fear-relevant animal stimuli in children and the selective enhancement of this effect by fear of these animals. These findings are consistent with current models of preferential processing of phylogenetically prepared threat stimuli and with cognitive models of anxiety that propose an enhancing effect of fear in the processing of fear-related stimuli.