The role of honour concerns in emotional reactions to offences

We investigated the role of honour concerns in mediating the effect of nationality and gender on the reported intensity of anger and shame in reaction to insult vignettes. Spain, an honour culture, and The Netherlands, where honour is of less central significance, were selected for comparison. A total of 260 (125 Dutch, 135 Spanish) persons participated in the research. Participants completed a measure of honour concerns and answered questions about emotional reactions of anger and shame to vignettes depicting insults in which type of threat was manipulated. It was found that Spanish participants responded especially intensely to insults that threaten family honour, and that this effect of nationality on emotional reactions to threats to family honour was mediated by individual differences in concern for family honour.     

Successful Treatment of Olfactory Reference Syndrome With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Case Study

Olfactory reference syndrome (ORS) is characterized by a preoccupation with the belief that one's body emits a foul odor. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used to treat a woman in her 50s who presented in our outpatient anxiety disorders specialty clinic with ORS, accompanied by embarrassment, shame, distress, avoidance behavior, and social isolation. Monitoring and systematic reduction of safety behaviors, combined with exposure to anxiety-provoking situations, resulted in elimination of the perceived body odor over the course of ten treatment sessions. Scores on the Overvalued Ideas Scale indicated improvements in the client's insight over the course of treatment, and there was an 82.6% reduction in her preoccupation and compulsive behaviors as measured by the Body Dysmorphic Disorder Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. Indices of depression, anxiety, and stress as measured by the 21-item version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales were also reduced from the extremely severe to normal range. These findings suggest further investigation of CBT in the treatment of ORS is warranted.     

Mothers and Children as Informants of Bullying Victimization: Results from an Epidemiological Cohort of Children

Stressful events early in life can affect children’s mental health problems. Collecting valid and reliable information about children’s bad experiences is important for research and clinical purposes. This study aimed to (1) investigate whether mothers and children provide valid reports of bullying victimization, (2) examine the inter-rater reliability between the two informants, (3) test the predictive validity of their reports with children’s emotional and behavioral problems and (4) compare the genetic and environmental etiology of bullying victimization as reported by mothers and children. We assessed bullying victimization in the Environmental-Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a nationally-representative sample of 1,116 families with twins. We collected reports from mothers and children during private interviews, including detailed narratives. Findings showed that we can rely on mothers and children as informants of bullying victimization: both informants provided information which adhered to the definition of bullying as involving repeated hurtful actions between peers in the presence of a power imbalance. Although mothers and children modestly agreed with each other about who was bullied during primary and secondary school, reports of bullying victimization from both informants were similarly associated with children’s emotional and behavioral problems and provided similar estimates of genetic and environmental influences. Findings from this study suggest that collecting information from multiple informants is ideal to capture all instances of bullying victimization. However, in the absence of child self-reports, mothers can be considered as a viable alternative, and vice versa.     

How do I remember that I know you know that I know?

Communication is aided greatly when speakers and listeners take advantage of mutually shared knowledge (i.e., common ground). How such information is represented in memory is not well known. Using a neuropsychological-psycholinguistic approach to real-time language understanding, we investigated the ability to form and use common ground during conversation in memory-impaired participants with hippocampal amnesia. Analyses of amnesics' eye fixations as they interpreted their partner's utterances about a set of objects demonstrated successful use of common ground when the amnesics had immediate access to common-ground information, but dramatic failures when they did not. These findings indicate a clear role for declarative memory in maintenance of common-ground representations. Even when amnesics were successful, however, the eye movement record revealed subtle deficits in resolving potential ambiguity among competing intended referents; this finding suggests that declarative memory may be critical to more basic aspects of the on-line resolution of linguistic ambiguity.     

Caught in a bad romance: perfectionism, conflict, and depression in romantic relationships

According to the social disconnection model, perfectionistic concerns (i.e., harsh self-scrutiny, extreme concern over mistakes and others' evaluations, and excessive reactions to perceived failures) confer vulnerability to depressive symptoms indirectly through interpersonal problems. This study tested the social disconnection model in 226 heterosexual romantic dyads using a mixed longitudinal and experience sampling design. Perfectionistic concerns were measured using three partner-specific self-report questionnaires. Conflict was measured as a dyadic variable, incorporating reports from both partners. Depressive symptoms were measured using a self-report questionnaire. Perfectionistic concerns and depressive symptoms were measured at Day 1 and Day 28. Aggregated dyadic conflict was measured with daily online questionnaires from Days 2 to 15. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. There were four primary findings: (a) Dyadic conflict mediated the link between perfectionistic concerns and depressive symptoms, even when controlling for baseline depressive symptoms; (b) depressive symptoms were both an antecedent and a consequence of dyadic conflict; (c) perfectionistic concerns incrementally predicted dyadic conflict and depressive symptoms beyond neuroticism (i.e., a tendency to experience negative emotions) and other-oriented perfectionism (i.e., rigidly demanding perfection from one's partner); and (d) the relationships among variables did not differ based on gender. As the most rigorous test of the social disconnection model to date, this study provides strong support for this emerging model. Results also clarify the characterological and the interpersonal context within which depressive symptoms are likely to occur.     

The impact of affective and cognitive focus on attitude formation

We examined the effects of unobtrusive affective and cognitive focus on attitude formation. To induce focus, participants worked on a word-search puzzle consisting of either affective (e.g., emotion) or cognitive (e.g., reasoning) words. They then read positive and negative affective and cognitive information about a new attitude object. In the affective focus condition, evaluations were more congruent with the valence of the affective information than they were in the cognitive focus condition, where evaluations were more congruent with the valence of the cognitive information than they were in the affective focus condition. Affective focus also resulted in enhanced recall of affective information. The effects on evaluations remained stable over time, whereas effects on memory disappeared. Finally, affective focus was associated with faster response times, suggesting enhanced accessibility of affect-based attitudes. The present research shows that an affective or cognitive focus leads to the formation of different attitudes.     

Perceived Consensus in Estimates of the Prevalence of Driving Errors and Violations

This paper reports a study of perceptions of the prevalence of certain driving errors and violations in a large ( N = 1,656) sample of drivers. In keeping with previous research on perceptions of social consensus, it was predicted that (a) drivers who reported that they themselves regularly commit these errors and violations would make larger estimates of the percentage of other road users who regularly engage in these behaviors, by comparison with drivers who reported that they do not regularly commit these errors and violations; (b) comparison of estimates of social consensus for own behavior with the actual numbers of respondents reporting that they did or did not engage in these behaviors would show that those who do commit the behaviors regularly would overestimate consensus for their position, while those who do not commit the behaviors regularly would underestimate consensus for their position; and (c) these tendencies to overestimate or underestimate actual consensus for own position would be correlated with the perceived offensiveness to others of the behavior concerned, such that departures from actual consensus would be greater for behaviors rated as more offensive. The results provide strong support for the first two predictions but none for the third; indeed, the degree of over- or underestimation tended to be inversely related to offensiveness. In addition, there were unanticipated but highly consistent sex and age differences in perceptions of the prevalence of the target behaviors, with female and younger respondents making higher estimates than male and older respondents, respectively. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Negative priming for obsessive-compulsive checkers and noncheckers

Negative priming--the slowing of a response to an item that was recently ignored--was investigated in three groups: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) checkers, OCD noncheckers, and nonclinical control participants. All groups performed both a standard negative priming task, selecting targets based on a perceptual feature (i.e., color), and a modified negative priming task, selecting targets based on a semantic feature (i.e., referent size). All three groups demonstrated significant negative priming in both tasks, although the negative priming was much larger in the novel, semantic task than in the common, perceptual one. The findings suggest that patients with OCD do not demonstrate impairments in negative priming, contrary to earlier claims (Enright & Beech, 1990, 1993a, 1993b; Enright, Beech, & Claridge, 1995).