Virtual reality exposure therapy and standard (in vivo) exposure therapy in the treatment of fear of flying

This controlled clinical trial tested virtual reality exposure (VRE) therapy for the fear of flying (FOF), a relatively new and innovative way to do exposure therapy, and compared it to standard (in vivo) exposure therapy (SE) and a wait list (WL) control with a 6- and 12-month follow-up. Eighty-three participants with FOF were randomly assigned to VRE, SE, or WL. Seventy-five participants, 25 per group, completed the study. Twenty-three WL participants completed randomly assigned treatment following the waiting period. Treatment consisted of 4 sessions of anxiety management training followed either by exposure to a virtual airplane (VRE) or an actual airplane at the airport (SE) conducted over 6 weeks. Results indicate that VRE was superior to WL on all measures, including willingness to fly on the posttreatment flight (76% for VRE and SE; 20% for WL). VRE and SE were essentially equivalent on standardized questionnaires, willingness to fly, anxiety ratings during the flight, self-ratings of improvement, and patient satisfaction with treatment. Follow-up assessments at 6 and 12 months indicated that treatment gains were maintained, with more than 70% of respondents from both groups reporting continued flying at follow-up. Based on these findings, the use of VRE in the treatment of FOF was supported in this controlled study, suggesting that experiences in the virtual world can change experiences in the real world.     

Knowing your place: self-perceptions of status in face-to-face groups

Status is the prominence, respect, and influence individuals enjoy in the eyes of others. Theories of positive illusions suggest that individuals form overly positive perceptions of their status in face-to-face groups. In contrast, the authors argue that individuals' perceptions of their status are highly accurate--that is, they closely match the group's perception of their status--because forming overly positive status self-perceptions can damage individuals' acceptance in a group. Therefore, the authors further argue that individuals are likely to refrain from status self-enhancement to maintain their belongingness in a group. Support for their hypotheses was found in 2 studies of status in face-to-face groups, using a social relations model approach (D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984). Individuals showed high accuracy in perceiving their status and even erred on the side of being overly humble. Moreover, enhancement in status self-perceptions was associated with lower levels of social acceptance.     

Influences of emotion on context memory while viewing film clips

Participants listened to words while viewing film clips (audio off). Film clips were classified as neutral, positively valenced, negatively valenced, and arousing. Memory was assessed in three ways: recall of film content, recall of words, and context recognition. In the context recognition test, participants were presented a word and determined which film clip was showing when the word was originally presented. In two experiments, context memory performance was disrupted when words were presented during negatively valenced film clips, whereas it was enhanced when words were presented during arousing film clips. Free recall of words presented during the negatively valenced films was also disrupted. These findings suggest multiple influences of emotion on memory performance.     

Clark and Hatfield's evidence of women's low receptivity to male strangers' sexual offers revisited

Although frequently cited, there has been no published scientific replication of Clark and Hatfield's (1989) and Clark's (1990) findings concerning women's low receptivity to male strangers' offers of casual sex. Consistently across three identically designed naturalistic experiments (aggregated N = 144), these authors reported a 0% acceptance rate by women. The present research analyzed an informal "real-life" journalistic project (N= 100) initiated by an Austrian magazine, in which results indicated a 6.1% acceptance rate (95% CI: 2.8-12.6%) for a complete stranger offering women immediate sexual involvement. Various contextual differences, such as setting, subjects' age and attractiveness, and age differences between requestor and receiver, probably contributed to the observed difference in outcome between the journalistic project and the original experiments. The present findings point to the importance of contextual effects in naturalistic investigations of women's receptivity to sexual offers.     

Childhood stuttering and dissociations across linguistic domains

The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the possible presence of dissociations in the speech and language skills of young children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) using a correlation-based statistical procedure [Bates, E., Appelbaum, M., Salcedo, J., Saygin, A. P., & Pizzamiglio, L. (2003). Quantifying dissociations in neuropsychological research. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 25, 1128-1153]. Participants were 45 preschool CWS and 45 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months), with the two groups matched by age, gender, race, and parental socioeconomic status. Children participated in a parent-child interaction for the purpose of disfluency analysis and responded to four standardized speech-language tests for subsequent analyses as main dependent variables. Findings indicated that CWS were over three times more likely than CWNS to exhibit dissociations across speech-language domains, with 44 cases of dissociation for CWS and 14 for CWNS across 10 possible comparisons. Results suggest that there may be a subgroup of CWS who exhibit dissociations across speech-language domains, which may result in a greater susceptibility to breakdowns in speech fluency. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) summarize findings from previous studies examining differences in speech and language performance between children who do and do not stutter; (2) describe what is meant by "dissociations" in the speech and language skills of young children who do and do not stutter; and (3) discuss three hypotheses that could account for the present findings that suggest CWS, more often than CWNS, exhibit dissociations in their speech-language system.     

Affective influences on the attentional dynamics supporting awareness

Identification of a 1st target stimulus in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence leads to transient impairment in report for a 2nd target; this is known as the attentional blink (AB). This AB impairment was substantially alleviated for emotionally significant target words. AB sparing was not attributable to a variety of nonaffective stimulus factors that could result in augmented distinctiveness. Arousal value, not the valence of stimulus events, was found to be responsible for AB sparing. These results suggest that arousal is associated with decreased attentional prerequisites for awareness, enabling emotional significance to shape perceptual experience.     

Relative numerousness judgment and summation in young and old Western lowland gorillas

The relationship between age, relative numerousness judgment, and summation was investigated in 11 Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). Experiments 1 and 2 evaluated the gorillas' ability to select the larger of 2 food quantities before and with training. The majority of gorillas did not reliably select the larger quantity in Experiment 1 until receiving training to do so in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 evaluated their ability to select the larger of 2 pairs of quantities. All gorillas selected the larger pair more often than chance, and the old were less accurate and slower than were the young. For most gorillas, performance in relative numerousness judgment with training and summation was comparable with previous reports in chimpanzees and orangutans.     

Human symbol manipulation within an integrated cognitive architecture

This article describes the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) cognitive architecture (Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and its detailed application to the learning of algebraic symbol manipulation. The theory is applied to modeling the data from a study by Qin, Anderson, Silk, Stenger, & Carter (2004) in which children learn to solve linear equations and perfect their skills over a 6-day period. Functional MRI data show that: (a) a motor region tracks the output of equation solutions, (b) a prefrontal region tracks the retrieval of declarative information, (c) a parietal region tracks the transformation of mental representations of the equation, (d) an anterior cingulate region tracks the setting of goal information to control the information flow, and (e) a caudate region tracks the firing of productions in the ACT–R model. The article concludes with an architectural comparison of the competence children display in this task and the competence that monkeys have shown in tasks that require manipulations of sequences of elements.     

AIDS and Its Treatments: Two Doctors' Narratives of Healing, Desire, and Belonging

In this essay, I analyze two memoirs--Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS--which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical "pragmatics" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.