Can positive affect induce self-focused attention? Methodological and measurement issues

Some studies find that positive affect can induce self-focused attention, but other studies find no effect. We suggest that the contrary findings result from how self-awareness was measured. One group of participants listened to happy or neutral music; another group imagined and described a happy or neutral event. Two measures of self-focus were then taken. The experiment replicated past findings: Positive affect increased self-focus on a pronoun selection task, but had no effect on a modified private self-consciousness scale. The results were slightly stronger when affect was induced using music. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Measuring the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions

Faces provide identity- and emotion-related information—basic cues for mastering social interactions. Traditional models of face recognition suggest that following a very first initial stage the processing streams for facial identity and expression depart. In the present study we extended our previous multivariate investigations of face identity processing abilities to the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions. Analyses are based on a sample of N=151 young adults. First, we established a measurement model with a higher order factor for the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions (SRE). This model has acceptable fit without specifying emotion-specific relations between indicators. Next, we assessed whether SRE can be reliably distinguished from the speed of recognising facial identity (SRI) and found latent factors for SRE and SRI to be perfectly correlated. In contrast, SRE and SRI were both only moderately related to a latent factor for the speed of recognising non-face stimuli (SRNF). We conclude that the processing of facial stimuli—and not the processing of facially expressed basic emotions—is the critical component of SRE. These findings are at variance with suggestions of separate routes for processing facial identity and emotional facial expressions and suggest much more communality between these streams as far as the aspect of processing speed is concerned.     

The effects of trait and state anxiety on attention to emotional images: An eye-tracking study

Attentional biases for threatening stimuli have been implicated in the development of anxiety disorders. However, little is known about the relative influences of trait and state anxiety on attentional biases. This study examined the effects of trait and state anxiety on attention to emotional images. Low, mid, and high trait anxious participants completed two trial blocks of an eye-tracking task. Participants viewed image pairs consisting of one emotional (threatening or positive) and one neutral image while their eye movements were recorded. Between trial blocks, participants underwent an anxiety induction. Primary analyses examined the effects of trait and state anxiety on the proportion of viewing time on emotional versus neutral images. State anxiety was associated with increased attention to threatening images for participants, regardless of trait anxiety. Furthermore, when in a state of anxiety, relative to a baseline condition, durations of initial gaze and average fixation were longer on threat versus neutral images. These findings were specific to the threatening images; no anxiety-related differences in attention were found with the positive images. The implications of these results for future research, models of anxiety-related information processing, and clinical interventions for anxiety are discussed.     

An Interactional Analysis of Clinical Interviewing

Clinical interviewing is viewed here as a social interactional pattern in order to examine the nature and limits of the technique as a means of scientific data acquisition. I defend the technique against criticisms that it is ecologically suspect and prone to systematic biases, mainly due to influence of the interviewer on the interviewee or to unnatural and biasing interactional patterns. The Central Hypothesis of this work is that at least some forms of clinical interviewing are derivative of naturally occurring patterns of activity and interaction. As such, they do not warrant unnecessary a priori suspicion. More importantly, this view leads to avenues of empirical examination that allow determination and checking of the character of the clinical interaction, which bears directly on how and when data extracted in clinical contexts are scientifically valid. Data from an extensive corpus involving a single subject are used to illustrate and substantiate claims.     

Division of Labor: Procedural Learning in Teacher-led Small Groups

This article presents an observational study of teacher-student interaction in fourth-grade small group sessions introducing an algorithm for solving remainder divisions. The groups are segregated by arithmetic achievement. Teacher and student input is analyzed with reference to a cognitive analysis of the task. A quantitative analysis compares amounts of teacher and student input at specific, cognitively significant points in procedures across groups. This analysis shows that there are qualitative differences both in solution strategies that evolve in the course of the lesson and in the extent to which the teacher-student interaction focuses on two "critical constraints" that are central to acquisition of this procedure. A subsequent analysis of transcribed protocols from the small group sessions discloses interactional mechanisms that can account for these differences. Much of the teacher's input is characterized as an unpacking of the necessary procedure by calling in subprocedures which take the students' responses as arguments and by specifying subprocedures lower down in the goal hierarchy when students failed to produce adequate responses. The interactive mechanisms combine with students' background knowledge to result in the group differences detected in the quantitative analysis.     

Military Influence Tactics: Lessons Learned in Iraq and Afghanistan

When deployed U.S. soldiers attempt to influence the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of civilians, success can save lives and failure can be deadly. Survey data from 228 military personnel with deployment experience to Iraq and Afghanistan revealed that in a challenging wartime environment, empathy, respect, prior relationships, and familiarity with influence targets predicted success in cross-cultural influence attempts. Influence techniques involving resources and positive feelings were used more commonly in relatively successful influence attempts; negative tactics were used more commonly in unsuccessful attempts.     

On his brother's blindness

This commentary is slightly different from previous ones in that the clinical work presented took place some 20 years ago. This gave an opportunity, for those commentators who wished to, to take up how they think the work of a child psychotherapist might have changed in the intervening years.     

Processing ordinality and quantity: ERP evidence of separate mechanisms

We report an event-related potential (ERP) experiment of ordinal processing exploring the relationship between ordinal and numerical information.     

Deeper attentional masking by lateral objects in children with autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often associated with a detail-oriented perception and overselective attention in visual tasks, such as visual search and crowding. These results were obtained manipulating exclusively the spatial properties of the stimuli: few is known about the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual processing in ASD. In this study we employed an attentional masking (AM) paradigm comparing children with ASD and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) controls. The AM effect refers to an impaired identification of a target followed by a competitive masking object at different proximities in space and time. We found that ASD and TD groups did not differ in the AM effect provoked by the competitive object displayed in the same position of the target. In contrast, children with ASD showed a deeper and prolonged interference than the TD group when the masking object was displayed in the lateral position. These psychophysical results suggest that the inefficient attentional selection in ASD depends on the spatio-temporal interaction between competitive visual objects. These evidence are discussed in the light of the ASD altered neural connectivity hypothesis and the reentrant theory of perception.     

Do behavioural self-blame and stigma predict positive health changes in survivors of lung or head and neck cancers?

Survivors of lung or head and neck cancers often change tobacco and alcohol consumption after diagnosis, but few studies have examined other positive health changes (PHCs) or their determinants in these groups. The present study aims to: (a) document PHCs in survivors of lung (n?=?107) or head and neck cancers (n?=?99) and (b) examine behavioural self-blame and stigma as determinants of PHCs. We hypothesised that: (a) survivors would make a variety of PHCs; (b) behavioural self-blame for the disease would positively predict making PHCs; and (c) stigma would negatively predict making PHCs.

Methods: Respondents self-administered measures of PHC, behavioural self-blame, and stigma. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis tested the hypotheses.

Results: More than 65% of respondents reported making PHCs, the most common being changes in diet (25%), exercise (23%) and tobacco consumption (16.5%). Behavioural self-blame significantly predicted PHCs but stigma did not. However, both behavioural self-blame and stigma significantly predicted changes in tobacco consumption.

Conclusions: Many survivors of lung or head and neck cancers engage in PHCs, but those who do not attribute the disease to their behaviour are less likely to do so. Attention to this problem and additional counselling may help people to adopt PHCs.