Conscious thoughts from reflex-like processes: A new experimental paradigm for consciousness research

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research.     

A Case Series of Family-Based Therapy for Weight Restoration in Young Adults with Anorexia Nervosa

This case series aims to examine the preliminary efficacy, acceptability and feasibility of Family-Based Treatment to promote weight restoration in young adults with anorexia nervosa. Four young adults with sub/threshold anorexia nervosa were provided 11–20 sessions of Family-Based Treatment for young adults with pre-, post- and follow-up assessments. At post- and follow-up, 3/4 participants were in the normal weight range, 3/4 were in the non-clinical range on the Eating Disorders Examination and reported being not/mildly depressed. At post-treatment, 2/4 were in the good psychosocial functioning range and by follow-up, 3/4 were in this range. These results suggest that Family-Based Treatment for young adults with anorexia nervosa is a promising treatment.     

Factor structure and internal consistency of the Spanish version of the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form

The aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of Parenting Stress Index-Short Form. After translating the instrument from English into Spanish using the forward-backward translation method, it was administered to a sample of 129 mothers of children aged between 10 and 39 months olds. The exploratory factor analysis identified two factors: Childrearing Stress and Personal Distress, which accounted for 48.77% of the variance. The internal consistency of these factors was high (Childrearing Stress: .90 and Personal Distress: .87). Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Impulsivity in borderline personality disorder: reward-based decision-making and its relationship to emotional distress

Impulsivity in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has been defined as rapid and unplanned action. However, a preference for immediate gratification and discounting of delayed rewards might better account for the impulsive behaviors that appear to regulate emotional distress in BPD. To investigate this, a delay discounting task was administered to 30 outpatients diagnosed with BPD and 28 healthy community controls (all aged 15-24) before and after a mood induction. Trait impulsivity was measured with the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale. The results showed that the BPD group had a greater preference for immediate gratification and higher rate of discounting the delayed reward than the control group. Although the mood induction resulted in increased feelings of rejection and anger in all participants, and the rate of delay discounting changed significantly in the control group, the rate of discounting did not change for the BPD group. There was no evidence of rapid decision-making in the BPD group as response times were similar between the two groups during both trials. Finally, greater general impulsiveness and nonplanning impulsiveness were associated with greater rates of discounting in the BPD group. Together these findings suggest that BPD is characterized by a preference for immediate gratification and tendency to discount longer-term rewards. This characteristic appears to exist independent of feelings of rejection and anger, rather than being reactive to this, and to be related to trait impulsivity.     

Evaluation of the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute Clinical Psychology Internship: a replication and extension

This study extends three earlier investigations involving participants who completed their predoctoral clinical psychology internship at the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute. Intern graduates (N = 37) evaluated how effectively their internship training prepared them for seven aspects of their current work as practicing psychologists. Participants also rated the relevancy of 24 different internship training experiences to their current work and how much these experiences contributed to their development as clinical psychologists. The present study, in conjunction with the three previous studies, covers most of the 40-year period since the inception of the internship program. Analysis of the current data indicates the internship has improved over time and was deemed an exceptional training experience by its graduates. Findings may be of particular interest to internship directors and faculty interested in improving their training program and those who plan to conduct a self-study to maintain their accreditation for clinical psychology internship.     

“When Will Your Program Be Available in Spanish?” Adapting an Early Parenting Intervention for Latino Families

This paper describes the Spanish adaptation of PACE—Parenting Our Children to Excellence. Successfully offered in preschools and daycare centers since 2002, PACE is a research-based preventive intervention to support families in their parenting task through discussions and activities that address practical childrearing issues and promote child coping-competence. Developed in response to community calls, the new program is known as CANNE –Criando a Nuestros Niños hacia el Éxito. The paper makes the processes linking original and adapted versions explicit by accounting for the conceptual and practical decisions that were made as CANNE was being developed. We begin by summarizing the challenges of adapting and translating a behavioral intervention, and by describing the coping-competence model that informs both versions of the program. We turn then to a detailed account of the adaptation itself and of its results. Specifically, we describe: (a) the consultation process at the origin of this adaptation, (b) the adaptation of the manual and the steps taken to establish the extent to which the English and Spanish versions correspond (adaptation fidelity), and (c) the translation of the manual and the cross-language comparison of measures to demonstrate that they yield comparable data when administered in English and Spanish.     

Inter-species variation in colour perception

Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to selectionist views, objects simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy.     

A multistream model of visual word recognition

Four experiments are reported that test a multistream model of visual word recognition, which associates letter-level and word-level processing channels with three known visual processing streams isolated in macaque monkeys: the magno-dominated (MD) stream, the interblob-dominated (ID) stream, and the blob-dominated (BD) stream (Van Essen & Anderson, 1995). We show that mixing the color of adjacent letters of words does not result in facilitation of response times or error rates when the spatial-frequency pattern of a whole word is familiar. However, facilitation does occur when the spatial-frequency pattern of a whole word is not familiar. This pattern of results is not due to different luminance levels across the different-colored stimuli and the background because isoluminant displays were used. Also, the mixed-case, mixed-hue facilitation occurred when different display distances were used (Experiments 2 and 3), so this suggests that image normalization can adjust independently of object size differences. Finally, we show that this effect persists in both spaced and unspaced conditions (Experiment 4)—suggesting that inappropriate letter grouping by hue cannot account for these results. These data support a model of visual word recognition in which lower spatial frequencies are processed first in the more rapid MD stream. The slower ID and BD streams may process some lower spatial frequency information in addition to processing higher spatial frequency information, but these channels tend to lose the processing race to recognition unless the letter string is unfamiliar to the MD stream—as with mixed-case presentation.