Predicting borderline personality disorder features from personality traits, identity orientation, and attachment styles in Italian nonclinical adults: issues of consistency across age ranges

The aims of this study were to assess whether Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) features could be predicted by Big Five traits, impulsivity, identity orientation, and adult attachment patterns in a sample of 1,192 adult nonclinical participants, and to evaluate the consistency of these regression models across four age groups (<30 years, 30-39 years, 40-49 years, and >50 years, respectively). In the full sample, measures of neuroticism (N), impulsivity, and anxious insecure attachment were substantial predictors of BPD features (adjusted R(2) = .38, p < .001). Attachment scales were significant predictors of BPD features across all age groups, but different scales were relevant in different age groups. Our results suggest that in nonclinical populations, BPD may represent a complex constellation of personality traits and disturbed attachment patterns.     

Treating Depression in Men: The Role of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy

While initial treatment recommendations for depression in the context of relationship problems have been outlined, attention typically has been focused on females experiencing depression. Less is known about the assessment and treatment of men with depression and relationship distress. This article presents the current literature on depression and relationship problems, including what is currently known about the occurrence, expression, assessment, and treatment of depression in men. Theoretical and empirically based assessment and treatment recommendations are then provided for Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy with depressed men in distressed relationships.     

Countervailing Forces: Religiosity and Paranormal Belief in Italy

Due to the unique cultural niche inhabited by “paranormal” beliefs and experiences, social scientists have struggled to understand the relationship between religion and the paranormal. Complicating matters is the fact that extant research has primarily focused upon North America, leaving open the possible relationship between these two spheres of the supernatural in less religiously pluralistic contexts. Using data from a random, national survey of Italian citizens, we examine the nature of the relationship between religiosity and paranormal beliefs in a largely Catholic context. We find a curvilinear relationship between religiosity and paranormal beliefs among Italians, with those at the lowest and highest levels of religious participation holding lower average levels of “paranormal” belief than those with moderate religious participation. This pattern reflects how two influential social institutions, religion and science, simultaneously define the paranormal as outside of acceptable realms of inquiry and belief.     

Efficacy and predictors of long-term treatment success for Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment and Behavioral Weight-Loss-Treatment in overweight individuals with binge eating disorder

ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to assess the long-term efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment (CBT) and Behavioral Weight-Loss-Treatment (BWLT) in patients with binge eating disorder (BED) and to identify potential predictors of long-term treatment success.MethodIn a sample of overweight to obese BED patients from a randomized comparative trial we evaluated the efficacy of four months of CBT or BWLT, followed by 12 months extended care, and a final follow-up assessment 6 years after the end of active treatment. Outcomes included binge eating, eating disorder pathology, depressive feelings, and body mass index.ResultsAfter a strong improvement during active treatment, outcomes worsened during follow-up, yet remained improved at 6-year follow-up relative to pretreatment values. Long-term effects between CBT and BWLT were comparable. Rapid response during the early treatment phase was the only characteristic that was predictive of favorable treatment outcome in the long term.ConclusionsBoth CBT and BWLT can be considered to be comparably efficacious in the long-term. Patients not responding strongly enough during the first four therapy sessions might be in need of tailored interventions early during the treatment phase.     

Health anxiety,anxiety sensitivity,and attentional biases for pictorial and linguistic health‐threat cues

The study investigated attentional biases for pictorial and linguistic health‐threat stimuli in high and low health anxious individuals, who were selected from the upper and lower quartile ranges of a normal sample using a screening measure of health anxiety. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task which presented health‐threat and neutral pictures and words at two exposure durations, 500 ms and 1250 ms. The prediction that the high health anxious group would show a greater attentional bias for health‐threat cues than the low health anxious group was not supported despite the groups being well‐differentiated on a general measure of health anxiety, the Illness Attitudes Scale (IAS). Instead, the results indicated that individuals with high levels of anxiety sensitivity showed a significantly greater initial attentional bias for threat pictures compared with those with low anxiety sensitivity, as assessed by the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI).     

Evidence for a cognitive control network for goal-directed attention in simple sustained attention

The deterioration of performance over time is characteristic for sustained attention tasks. This so-called “performance decrement” is measured by the increase of reaction time (RT) over time. Some behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms of this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. Behaviourally, we examined the increase of RT over time and the inter-individual differences of this performance decrement. On the neurophysiological level, we investigated the task-relevant brain areas where neural activity was modulated by RT and searched for brain areas involved in good performance (i.e. participants with no or moderate performance decrement) as compared to poor performance (i.e. participants with a steep performance decrement). For this purpose, 20 healthy, young subjects performed a carefully designed task for simple sustained attention, namely a low-demanding version of the Rapid Visual Information Processing task. We employed a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design. The behavioural results showed a significant increase of RT over time in the whole group, and also revealed that some participants were not as prone to the performance decrement as others. The latter was statistically significant comparing good versus poor performers. Moreover, high BOLD-responses were linked to longer RTs in a task-relevant bilateral fronto-cingulate-insular-parietal network. Among these regions, good performance was associated with significantly higher RT-BOLD correlations in the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). We concluded that the task-relevant bilateral fronto-cingulate-insular-parietal network was a cognitive control network responsible for goal-directed attention. The pre-SMA in particular might be associated with the performance decrement insofar that good performers could sustain activity in this brain region in order to monitor performance declines and adjust behavioural output.     

Just Wars,Holy Wars,and Jihads,edited by Sohail Hashmi,Oxford University Press: New York, 2012, xvi + 434 pp. ISBN 978 019 975503 5, US$35.00 (paperback)

In recent years, academic interest in the nexus between Pentecostalism, economics, and capitalism has grown significantly. Notably, the vast majority of publications that have addressed this interface are to some degree conceptually framed by Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this article I consider what The Protestant Ethic might contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Pentecostalism and capitalism. First, I assess a particularly noteworthy attempt to draw Pentecostalism into Weber's genealogical account which draws a series of parallels between Pentecostalism and ascetic Protestantism. Second, I discuss the merits of an approach that is not primarily genealogical but remains indebted to the concepts that Weber introduces, elaborating a new affinity between Pentecostalism and capitalism in its present iteration. With this article, I seek to comprehensively extend the scope and sharpen the conceptual underpinnings of future analysis and empirical work in this area.     

A Moderated Nonlinear Factor Model for the Development of Commensurate Measures in Integrative Data Analysis

Integrative data analysis (IDA) is a methodological framework that allows for the fitting of models to data that have been pooled across 2 or more independent sources. IDA offers many potential advantages including increased statistical power, greater subject heterogeneity, higher observed frequencies of low base-rate behaviors, and longer developmental periods of study. However, a core challenge is the estimation of valid and reliable psychometric scores that are based on potentially different items with different response options drawn from different studies. In Bauer and Hussong (2009) we proposed a method for obtaining scores within an IDA called moderated nonlinear factor analysis (MNLFA). Here we move significantly beyond this work in the development of a general framework for estimating MNLFA models and obtaining scale scores across a variety of settings. We propose a 5-step procedure and demonstrate this approach using data drawn from n = 1,972 individuals ranging in age from 11 to 34 years pooled across 3 independent studies to examine the factor structure of 17 binary items assessing depressive symptomatology. We offer substantive conclusions about the factor structure of depression, use this structure to compute individual-specific scale scores, and make recommendations for the use of these methods in practice.     

The visual contour in depth

We asked subjects to match points on the surface of a smooth three-dimensional (3-D) shape with points on the surface of another object that was geometrically identical to the first object but was placed in a different pose, was differently textured, and was differently shaded. In all cases, the fiducial point was on the rim of one of the objects (i.e., the boundary of the visible region of the surface), whereas the matching point was well within the silhouette of the other object. This allowed us to draw (preliminary) conclusions concerning the way monocular human observers are able to handle the neighborhood of the rim, where the local slant assumes arbitrarily high values. All experiments were done in real space with real objects (no computer-simulated scenes), the points being indicated with laser beam illumination. The subject was given control over the direction of the laser beams and was thus able to perform the task by adjustment from the vantage position. We studied both consistency (whether the subject’s judgments were invariant against changes of relative pose) and veridicality (whether the depth of the visual contour as calculated from the settings agreed with the true distance as measured by mechanical means). Subjects caught much of the 3-D structure of the contour but did deviate appreciably and apparently idiosyncratically from the true geometry.     

Memory and the Moses illusion: Failures to detect contradictions with stored knowledge yield negative memorial consequences

Although contradictions with stored knowledge are common in daily life, people often fail to notice them. For example, in the Moses illusion, participants fail to notice errors in questions such as “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” despite later showing knowledge that the Biblical reference is to Noah, not Moses. We examined whether error prevalence affected participants' ability to detect distortions in questions, and whether this in turn had memorial consequences. Many of the errors were overlooked, but participants were better able to catch them when they were more common. More generally, the failure to detect errors had negative memorial consequences, increasing the likelihood that the errors were used to answer later general knowledge questions. Methodological implications of this finding are discussed, as it suggests that typical analyses likely underestimate the size of the Moses illusion. Overall, answering distorted questions can yield errors in the knowledge base; most importantly, prior knowledge does not protect against these negative memorial consequences.