Emergent verbal behavior and analogy: skinnerian and linguistic approaches

The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call analogy, a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on which a speaker might emit new linguistic forms. Analogy appears in linguistics as a regularity principle that characterizes language and has been related to how languages change and also to creativity. The approaches of neogrammarians like Hermann Paul, as well as those of Jespersen and Bloomfield, appear to have influenced Skinner's understanding of verbal creativity. Generalization and stimulus equivalence are behavioral processes related to the generative grammatical behavior described in the analogy model. Linguistic forms and grammatical patterns described in analogy are part of the contingencies of reinforcement that produce generalization and stimulus equivalence. The analysis of verbal behavior needs linguistic analyses of the constituents of linguistic forms and their combination patterns.     

Specificity of cognitive emotion regulation strategies: A transdiagnostic examination

Despite growing interest in the role of regulatory processes in clinical disorders, it is not clear whether certain cognitive emotion regulation strategies play a more central role in psychopathology than others. Similarly, little is known about whether these strategies have effects transdiagnostically. We examined the relationship between four cognitive emotion regulation strategies (rumination, thought suppression, reappraisal, and problem-solving) and symptoms of three psychopathologies (depression, anxiety, and eating disorders) in an undergraduate sample (N = 252). Maladaptive strategies (rumination, suppression), compared to adaptive strategies (reappraisal, problem-solving), were more strongly associated with psychopathology and loaded more highly on a latent factor of cognitive emotion regulation. In addition, this latent factor of cognitive emotion regulation was significantly associated with symptoms of all three disorders. Overall, these results suggest that the use of maladaptive strategies might play a more central role in psychopathology than the non-use of adaptive strategies and provide support of a transdiagnostic view of cognitive emotion regulation.     

Guilt and focusing in decision-making

In this paper we examined the impact of a specific emotion, guilt, on focusing in decision-making. Through the focusing mechanism, when making decisions, individuals tend to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in the decisional task, disregarding alternatives. In this paper, three experiments are performed to investigate whether an emotional state of guilt can critically guide individuals' focusing, and even prevailing over the focusing mechanism. Guilty emotional state was induced by asking participants to write about a guilty related life event. The emotional state was thus neither generated by nor related to the tasks used in the experiments. Results of the first two studies show that guilt affects focusing in decision-making in the case of only one explicitly specified option (a positive or a negative one). Guilty participants, when presented with a stated option that has predominantly positive characteristics, prefer other, unspecified options over the positive one. Guilty participants faced with a stated option that has predominantly negative features tend to prefer it to other, unspecified, options, instead. Finally, experiment 3 shows that guilty participants presented with two different options (a negative vs. a positive one) having different degrees of explicitness (i.e. they are not equally represented in the decision frame), focus on the negative option, even though the latter was not explicitly represented but only hinted at the end of the text. Overall, these results suggest that guilt emotion state can play a crucial role in either strengthening or reducing the focusing mechanism. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluation of the PAI–A Anxiety and Depression Scales: Evidence of Construct Validity

Against the background of a dearth of studies examining the properties of the scale scores of the Personality Assessment Inventory–Adolescent (PAI–A; Morey, 2007), this study was conducted to evaluate evidence of construct validity for the Anxiety (ANX) and Depression (DEP) scales of the PAI–A. Convergent and discriminant validity of the ANX and DEP scale scores were investigated using a sample of adolescents admitted to the adolescent program of a private tertiary care inpatient treatment facility. Multiple methods assessing anxious and depressive symptomology and diagnoses were included. Construct validity of the ANX and DEP scales was mostly supported. Advantages of using the PAI–A for the assessment of anxiety and depression were discussed.     

Mean Streets and Mental Health: Depression and Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder at Crime Hot Spots

This study explores the relationship between mental health and place at microgeographic units of analysis. We examine self‐reported symptomology for depression and PTSD for 2,724 survey respondents interviewed in three types of randomly selected street segments: violent crime hot spots, cool spots, and cold spots. We find that the mean symptomology score is 61% higher for depression in violent crime hot spots than cold spots, and 85% higher for PTSD. Overall, we estimate that 14.8% of residents of violent crime hot spots meet thresholds for moderate depression or a diagnosis of PTSD. This can be compared to only 6.5% of residents at the cold spots. Using PSM and weighted negative binomial regression approaches we show that observable selection factors are not responsible for the relationships identified. Examining geographic influences, we find an important area effect of violent crime for both mental health measures, and an additional impact of the specific street of residence for PTSD.     

Pharmacotherapy for the Pseudobulbar Affect in Individuals Who Have Sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury: a Systematic Review

Neuropsychology Review - Pseudobulbar affect is a debilitating condition that significantly reduces quality of life for many individuals following traumatic brain injury (TBI). It is characterized...     

The role of explanatory context for racial disparities in predicting sociopolitical attitudes during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic placed preexisting racial health disparities in stark relief. Recent studies have already established that, among prejudiced Whites, exposure to such racial disparities reduced concern about the pandemic and support for mitigation policies (Harrel & Lieberman, 2021; Stephens-Dougan, 2022). In response to such results, one cautionary line of reasoning argues that communicating the disparity figures without explanatory context can perpetuate (or at least not undermine) myths that African Americans are more likely to contract COVID-19 due to genetic predispositions or maladaptive behavioral tendencies (Chowkwanyun & Reed, 2020). In two studies, we test the claims that (a) explanatory context mitigates the tendency to attribute racial disparities to essential racial differences and (b) that perceptions of racial disparities are attuned to specific racial inequalities in the U.S., and not merely expressions of outgroup bias. In Study 1, we found that exposure to racial disparities with explanatory context (vs. without explanatory context) did not reduce racial essentialism or stereotyping, but did promote support for healthcare equity. In Study 2, we found that black disadvantage frames (vs. white vs. Hispanic) uniquely promoted support for equitable healthcare and multicultural inclusion. Importantly, and contrary to other recent findings, exposure to black disadvantage did not preclude support for equity.     

Poorer divided attention in children born very preterm can be explained by difficulty with each component task,not the executive requirement to dual-task

Children born very preterm (VP, ≤ 32 weeks) exhibit poor performance on tasks of executive functioning. However, it is largely unknown whether this reflects the cumulative impact of non-executive deficits or a separable impairment in executive-level abilities. A dual-task paradigm was used in the current study to differentiate the executive processes involved in performing two simple attention tasks simultaneously. The executive-level contribution to performance was indexed by the within-subject cost incurred to single-task performance under dual-task conditions, termed dual-task cost. The participants included 77 VP children (mean age: 7.17 years) and 74 peer controls (mean age: 7.16 years) who completed Sky Search (selective attention), Score (sustained attention) and Sky Search DT (divided attention) from the Test of Everyday Attention for Children. The divided-attention task requires the simultaneous performance of the selective- and sustained-attention tasks. The VP group exhibited poorer performance on the selective- and divided-attention tasks, and showed a strong trend toward poorer performance on the sustained-attention task. However, there were no significant group differences in dual-task cost. These results suggest a cumulative impact of vulnerable lower-level cognitive processes on dual-tasking or divided attention in VP children, and fail to support the hypothesis that VP children show a separable impairment in executive-level abilities.     

Gender,experimenter gender and medium of report influence the content of autobiographical memory report

In this study, we examined the role of context in autobiographical memory narratives, specifically as it pertains to gender among emerging adults. Male and female participants reported stressful events in their lives in the presence of an experimenter, and were randomly assigned either to report events verbally or type them, and to report in the presence of a male or female experimenter. Narratives were coded for factual and interpretive content. Results revealed that men verbally reporting to women reported longer narratives than all other groups. Women's narrative length did not vary by medium of report or conversational partner, but women used proportionally fewer internal state phrases when verbally reporting to men than when reporting to women. Women also used proportionally fewer evaluative statements in verbal reports than in typed narratives. Of these important interactions among context, gender, and experimenter gender, some findings, such as men's longer narratives and women's reduced internal states, were counter to expectations. These findings highlight the importance of methodological influences in autobiographical memory studies, in regard to both the context generated by experimental methods, and how gender differences are understood.     

Views on Abortion: A Comparison of Female Genetic Counselors and Women from the General Population

While literature characterizing individual genetic counselors’ abortion attitudes is sparse, the National Society of Genetic Counselors takes a clear stance for reproductive autonomy. To determine genetic counselors’ views, this study compared (1) genetic counselors’ abortion attitudes to those of women from the general population and (2) genetic counselors’ professional abortion attitudes to their personal abortion attitudes. Genetic counselors were invited to complete an online survey. Response rate was 44.3% (709/1,601). Compared to women from the general population, female genetic counselors were significantly more likely to agree abortion should be an option in all cases (p < .001). Controlling for other possible confounders, regression analyses revealed that being a genetic counselor, religious service attendance and age were significantly predictive of abortion attitudes. Although the vast majority of genetic counselors agree that abortion should be available, they are significantly less likely to personally consider abortion under all circumstances presented (p < .001), and the percentage of genetic counselors who would consider terminating in the case of a severe birth defect is similar to studies of other women.