Cooperation versus competition in a mass emergency evacuation: A new laboratory simulation and a new theoretical model

Virtual reality technology is argued to be suitable to the simulation study of mass evacuation behavior, because of the practical and ethical constraints in researching this field. This article describes three studies in which a new virtual reality paradigm was used, in which participants had to escape from a burning underground rail station. Study 1 was carried out in an immersion laboratory and demonstrated that collective identification in the crowd was enhanced by the (shared) threat embodied in emergency itself. In Study 2, high-identification participants were more helpful and pushed less than did low-identification participants. In Study 3, identification and group size were experimentally manipulated, and similar results were obtained. These results support a hypothesis according to which (emergent) collective identity motivates solidarity with strangers. It is concluded that the virtual reality technology developed here represents a promising start, although more can be done to embed it in a traditional psychology laboratory setting.     

Help-Seeking from Clergy and Spiritual Counselors Among Veterans with Depression and PTSD in Primary Care

Little is known about the prevalence or predictors of seeking help for depression and PTSD from spiritual counselors and clergy. We describe openness to and actual help-seeking from spiritual counselors among primary care patients with depression. We screened consecutive VA primary care patients for depression; 761 Veterans with probable major depression participated in telephone surveys (at baseline, 7 months, and 18 months). Participants were asked about (1) openness to seeking help for emotional problems from spiritual counselors/clergy and (2) actual contact with spiritual counselors/clergy in the past 6 months. At baseline, almost half of the participants, 359 (47.2 %), endorsed being “very” or “somewhat likely” to seek help for emotional problems from spiritual counselors; 498 (65.4 %) were open to a primary care provider, 486 (63.9 %) to a psychiatrist, and 409 (66.5 %) to another type of mental health provider. Ninety-one participants (12 %) reported actual spiritual counselor/clergy consultation. Ninety-five (10.3 %) participants reported that their VA providers had recently asked them about spiritual support; the majority of these found this discussion helpful. Participants with current PTSD symptoms, and those with a mental health visit in the past 6 months, were more likely to report openness to and actual help-seeking from clergy. Veterans with depression and PTSD are amenable to receiving help from spiritual counselors/clergy and other providers. Integration of spiritual counselors/clergy into care teams may be helpful to Veterans with PTSD. Training of such providers to address PTSD specifically may also be desirable.     

Structural-functional correlations between hippocampal volume and cortico-limbic emotional responses in depressed children

Although hippocampal atrophy and altered functional brain responses to emotional stimuli have been found in major depressive disorder (MDD), the relationship between the two is not yet well understood. The present study focused on children with and without a history of preschool onset MDD (PO-MDD) and directly examined the relations between hippocampal volume and functional brain activation to affect-eliciting stimuli. Children completed annual diagnostic assessments starting at preschool. When children were school-aged, high-resolution structural MRI and task-related functional MRI data were acquired from N = 64 nonmedicated children. During fMRI, subjects were shown emotional faces. Results from the total sample indicated that smaller bilateral hippocampal volumes were associated with greater cortico-limbic (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) activation to sad or negative faces versus neutral faces. Left hippocampal volume was negatively associated with the cortico-limbic activation in both the PO-MDD and healthy children. Right hippocampal volume was negatively correlated with amygdala responses in the PO-MDD group, but not in the healthy comparison group. These findings suggest that there may be important interrelationships between reduced hippocampal volume and hyperactivation of brain responses in children, both those with and those without a history of PO-MDD.     

Skills,spills and the nature of mindful action

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

Prison rioters: exploring infraction characteristics, risk factors, social correlates, and criminal careers

Investigation of individual inmates' characteristics are almost entirely absent from research of prison riots. The current study sought to fill this void using official infraction records and prison dossiers of 831 male inmates selected from the southwestern USA. Logistic regression models indicated that inmates who were cited for criminal infractions, such as theft, possession of weapons or drugs, threatening staff, and social risk factors were significantly more likely to engage in prison rioting. In fact, the model which contained criminal career, demographic information, infraction, and other social risk factors explained 40% of the variation in prison rioting. Suggestions for research on prison riots that included inmates' criminal history and characteristics of infraction are offered.     

The interaction of pathways to fear in childhood anxiety: a preliminary study

Recent research has shown that the verbal information pathway to fear creates long-term fear cognitions and can create cognitive biases and avoidance in children. However, the interaction between the verbal information pathway to fear and other pathways is untested. This experiment exposed children (aged 6–8) to threat information about a novel animal to see the impact on a measure of avoidance after a subsequent simulated direct negative encounter with that animal. Results showed that a direct negative experience (without prior information) or threat information (without a subsequent negative experience) produced similar effects, but in combination (verbal threat information followed by a direct negative experience) the effect was significantly magnified. These results support theories of fear acquisition that suppose that verbal information impacts on the strength of associations formed in subsequent conditioning episodes, and suggest that pathways to fear have interactive effects.