Viewing Cognitive Conflicts as Dilemmas: Implications for Mental Health

The idea that internal conflicts play a significant role in mental health has been extensively addressed in various psychological traditions, including personal construct theory. In the context of the latter, several measures of conflict have been operationalized using the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). All of them capture the notion that change, although desirable from the viewpoint of a given set of constructs, becomes undesirable from the perspective of other constructs. The goal of this study is to explore the presence of cognitive conflicts in a clinical sample (n = 284) and compare it to a control sample (n = 322). It is also meant to clarify which among the different types of conflict studied provides a greater clinical value and to investigate its relationship to symptom severity (SCL-90-R). Of the types of cognitive conflict studied, implicative dilemmas were the only ones to discriminate between clinical and nonclinical samples. These dilemmas were found in 34% of the nonclinical sample and in 53% of the clinical sample. Participants with implicative dilemmas showed higher symptom severity, and those from the clinical sample displayed a higher frequency of dilemmas than those from the nonclinical sample.     

Personality Dispositions and Health-related Habits and Attitudes: a Cross-sectional Study

We examined the relations between the Big-Five personality dimensions, Health Locus of Control, and health-related behaviours and attitudes. We focused on the question of potential advantages of the five-factor model as an integrated framework for personality and health research. Fifteen health habits and attitudes (including smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, a variety of dietary practices, current stressors, and attitudes toward smoking and alcohol consumption) were used to operationalize the subjects’ lifestyle. The study involved 1184 students from twelve different university schools. Although our results resembled those of other studies, we found that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were particularly noteworthy as predictors of health behaviours and cognitive attitudes and tendencies. Our results also suggest that both factors should be included as explanatory constructs in personality–disease models that may indirectly affect disease proneness via unhealthy behaviours. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automatic guidance of visual attention from verbal working memory

Previous studies have shown that visual attention can be captured by stimuli matching the contents of working memory (WM). Here, the authors assessed the nature of the representation that mediates the guidance of visual attention from WM. Observers were presented with either verbal or visual primes (to hold in memory, Experiment 1; to verbalize, Experiment 2; or merely to attend, Experiment 3) and subsequently were required to search for a target among different distractors, each embedded within a colored shape. In half of the trials, an object in the search array matched the prime, but this object never contained the target. Despite this, search was impaired relative to a neutral baseline in which the prime and search displays did not match. An interesting finding is that verbal primes were effective in generating the effects, and verbalization of visual primes elicited similar effects to those elicited when primes were held in WM. However, the effects were absent when primes were only attended. The data suggest that there is automatic encoding into WM when items are verbalized and that verbal as well as visual WM can guide visual attention.     

Subtyping eating disordered patients along drive for thinness and depression

Subtyping individuals who binge eat by “diet-DT” and “depression” has yielded two valid and clinically useful subtypes that predict eating severity, comorbid psychopathology and outcome. The present study aimed to find four subtypes based on these dimensions and test their validity. Besides, it explored the distribution of eating disorder (ED) diagnoses across subtypes given their known heterogeneity, crossover and binge-eating fluctuation.Cluster analysis grouped 1005 consecutively admitted ED adult women into four subtypes, those previously described “DT” (22%), “DT-depressive” (29%), and “mild DT” (25%) and “depressive-moderate DT” (24%). Overall “mild DT” presented lower and “DT-depressive” greater eating and comorbid psychopathology than the rest, whereas “pure DT” and “depressive-moderate DT” presented no differences on bulimic symptoms but in psychopathology (p < .01). Finally, while BN-P patients were mostly and similarly distributed in the “DT” and “DT-depressive” subtypes than in the other, AN were in the new “mild DT” and “depressive-moderate DT” (p < .01). However, BN-NP, BED and EDNOS were similarly represented across subtypes.Results are discussed with regard to 1) the newly emerged subtypes that may explain cases in which DT prevents or does not predict binge eating; 2) the confluence of DT-depression that signaled greater eating and comorbid pathology, particularly self-control problems; 3) ED-DSM-diagnostic criteria.     

An interview with LA Universal Self

LA Universal Self reports his phenomenology, according to which, as he puts it, ‘I am the universe’. The Interviewer challenges the report in a variety of ways, and LA Universal Self responds to each challenge. A traditional Universal Self mysticism is given a new physicalist interpretation.     

Working memory and target-related distractor effects on visual search

We examined two forms of top-down effects on visual selection: (1) information held in working memory (WM) and (2) the semantic relations between targets and distractors. We found that items held in WM affected search for a different target. This WM-based interference effect generalized across different exemplars, even though participants could remember the specific exemplar on the trial. This argues against a memory top-up account of performance. In addition, there was interference from distractors that were not held in WM but were semantically related to the target. The effects of WM capture and the effects of capture by a distractor related to the target combined additively. The data suggest that task-irrelevant information in WM and task-relevant templates for targets compete separately for selection. The implications for understanding top-down processes in search are discussed.     

Young children's comprehension of English SVO word order revisited: Testing the same children in act-out and intermodal preferential looking tasks

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2–0, 2–9 and 3–5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3–5 and at 2–9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although children at 2–9 performed better with familiar than with novel verbs in the act-out task. Children at 2–0 showed no evidence of comprehending word order in either task with novel verbs; with familiar verbs they showed competence in the IPL task but not in the act-out task. The difference in performance for familiar and novel verbs from the same children at 2–0, on the IPL task, and at 2–9, on the act-out task, is consistent with the hypothesis that early linguistic/cognitive representations are graded in strength, with early representations still weak and very task dependent. However, these representations also become more abstract with development, as indicated by the familiarity effect even in the more sensitive IPL task.     

Job satisfaction and cortisol awakening response in teachers scoring high and low on burnout

The burnout syndrome is an important psychosocial risk in the job context, especially in professions with a strong social interaction, as in the case of teaching. High levels of burnout have been related to negative psychological indicators and hormonal alterations. This study compares job satisfaction and the cortisol awakening response (CAR) in teachers scoring high (HB) and low (LB) on burnout. HB teachers showed lower job satisfaction and no significant differences in the CAR when compared with the LB group. The results of the study suggest a general dissatisfaction with work along with a different functioning of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in HB teachers. Although non significantly, they showed a lower magnitude of the CAR than LB teachers. When considering the whole sample, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization correlated negatively and personal accomplishment positively with each subscale of the job satisfaction questionnaire whereas cortisol levels or CAR did not correlate significantly with both burnout subscales and job satisfaction. These results should be taken into account when working to prevent burnout in teachers, as the modified parameters could be considered indicators of the onset or development of the syndrome.     

The importance of physicalism in the philosophy of religion

First, some say that core physicalism is not anti-religion. I argue that this seems to be incorrect. Physical completeness is a core element of contemporary physicalism; (the evidence for physical completeness is strong); and physical completeness both logically and not strictly logically rejects many central religious views. Consequently, there is a sense in which core physicalism is, in an important way, anti-religion. Second, physical completeness positively supports one significant religious view; and physical completeness permits one to hold two others. The view that physical completeness supports states that there is no natural grounding of the ordinarily taken boundary of the human body. The two views that physical completeness permits one to hold state that a person can be contrastlessly blissful in an ongoing way, and that a person can experience something like light circulating through the ordinary body in an ongoing way. It is further maintained that physicalism allows religious systems to develop in new forms.     

Attachment, Friendship, and Psychosocial Functioning in Early Adolescence

Fifth-graders' (N = 162; 93 girls) relationships with parents and friends were examined with respect to their main and interactive effects on psychosocial functioning. Participants reported on parental support, the quality of their best friendships, self-worth, and perceptions of social competence. Peers reported on aggression, shyness and withdrawal, and rejection and victimization. Mothers reported on psychological adjustment. Perceived parental support and friendship quality predicted higher global self-worth and social competence and less internalizing problems. Perceived parental support predicted fewer externalizing problems, and paternal (not maternal) support predicted lower rejection and victimization. Friendship quality predicted lower rejection and victimization for only girls. Having a supportive mother protected boys from the effects of low-quality friendships on their perceived social competence. High friendship quality buffered the effects of low maternal support on girls' internalizing difficulties.