How are depression and autobiographical memory retrieval related to culture?

This study investigated how culture influences the association between autobiographical memory retrieval and depression. Thirty clinically depressed patients and 30 controls, 15 each from Britain and Taiwan, completed the English and Chinese versions of the Autobiographical Memory Cueing Task (AMT). Overall, the depressed individuals from both cultural groups retrieved significantly fewer specific and more categoric autobiographical memories than their matched, nondepressed controls. Within the control groups, the British participants retrieved significantly more specific autobiographical memories and fewer categoric memories than their Taiwanese counterparts. These results suggest that difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories typical of depression may be a cognitive bias that occurs across cultures.     

Effects of concurrent load on feature- and rule-based generalization in human contingency learning

The effect of concurrent load on generalization performance in human contingency learning was examined in 2 experiments that employed the combined positive and negative patterning procedure of Shanks and Darby (1998). In Experiment 1, we tested 32 undergraduates and found that participants who were trained and tested under full attention showed generalization consistent with the application of an opposites rule (i.e., single cues signal the opposite outcome to their compound), whereas participants trained and tested under a concurrent cognitive load showed generalization consistent with surface similarity. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect with 148 undergraduates and provided evidence that it was the presence of concurrent load during training, rather than during testing, that was critical. Implications for associative, inferential, and dual-process accounts of human learning are discussed.     

Reducing developmental risk for emotional/behavioral problems: a randomized controlled trial examining the Tools for Getting Along curriculum

Researchers have demonstrated that cognitive-behavioral intervention strategies - such as social problem solving - provided in school settings can help ameliorate the developmental risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties. In this study, we report the results of a randomized controlled trial of Tools for Getting Along (TFGA), a social problem-solving universally delivered curriculum designed to reduce the developmental risk for serious emotional or behavioral problems among upper elementary grade students. We analyzed pre-intervention and post-intervention teacher-report and student self-report data from 14 schools, 87 classrooms, and a total of 1296 students using multilevel modeling. Results (effect sizes calculated using Hedges' g) indicated that students who were taught TFGA had a more positive approach to problem solving (g=.11) and a more rational problem-solving style (g=.16). Treated students with relatively poor baseline scores benefited from TFGA on (a) problem-solving knowledge (g=1.54); (b) teacher-rated executive functioning (g=.35 for Behavior Regulation and .32 for Metacognition), and proactive aggression (g=.20); and (c) self-reported trait anger (g=.17) and anger expression (g=.21). Thus, TFGA may reduce risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties by improving students' cognitive and emotional self-regulation and increasing their pro-social choices.     

Systems Theory,Family Attachments and Processes of Triangulation: Does the Concept of Triangulation Offer a Useful Bridge?

This article reviews the usefulness of the systemic concept of triangulation as a bridge between systemic thinking and practice and attachment theory. Traditionally attachment theory has theorized and researched with dyads, parent‐child and adult romantic partners, whereas systemic theory has worked therapeutically with the triangle as the basic human relationship; that is, when any two people interact, their interactions are influenced by their respective relationships with the same third person. Here it is argued, for example, that a child's attachment representations are shaped not only by the relationship with each parent but with the relationship between them. Thus, the process of triangulation in intimate relationships is seen in this article to link attachment theory with systemic thinking, as systemic theory needs a theory of love and attachment theory needs to consider how intimate relationships are nested and interconnected in an attachment network.     

Clinical Interviewing With Older Adults

Over the next few decades the older adult population will increase dramatically, and prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders are also expected to increase in the elderly cohort. These demographic projections highlight the need for diagnostic instruments and methods that are specifically tailored to older adults. The current paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of clinical interviewing with older adults, using two popular interview protocols as illustrative examples. Drawing upon preexisting basic research and our own observations collected in clinical and research settings over a 10-year period, we suggest procedures and suggestions for augmenting existing interview protocols to increase their usefulness with older adults in research and clinical settings. Strategies to optimize interview duration and enhance retrospective data accuracy and the pros and cons of dimensional versus dichotomous response formats, among other relevant topics, are discussed.     

Mental Health, Social Environment and Sexual Risk Behaviors of Adolescent Service Users: A Gender Comparison

We examined individual mental health problems (depression, conduct disorder, and substance abuse) and social environment (family, peer, and neighborhood) factors associated with the sexual risk behaviors of male and female adolescents. Interviews with 778 adolescents, aged 14 to 18, showed that both mental health problems and social environment were related to adolescents' involvement in sexual risk behaviors. Conduct disorder symptoms, substance abuse or dependence symptoms, and the interaction between peer misbehavior and neighborhood problems were significantly associated with risky sexual behaviors. Peer misbehavior was a particularly strong factor related to sexual risk behaviors for youths who lived in neighborhoods with multiple problems. The only gender differences were found in age, with older males more likely to report engaging in high risk sexual behaviors. This study suggests the utility of multidimensional intervention strategies to deal with various adolescent problem behaviors, including risky sexual behaviors, within the context of their social environment.     

The psychophysics of the kinesthetic aftereffect in the Petrie block experiment

Kinesthetic size is reported in the Petrie experiment by a simultaneous size comparison in which a standard block held between the thumb and forefinger of one hand is matched in size by moving the thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand along a wedge until the proper width is reached. After a baseline is obtained, a kinesthetic aftereffect is produced by rubbing a block of contrasting size followed by a return to the standard block. Experiments with 22 male Ss and 20 female Ss, tested in separate cycles, show that augmentation following stimulation with a block smaller than standard and reduction following stimulation with a block larger than standard are both statistically significant, and, at least for augmentation, the aftereffect persists for at least 48 h. When the data are corrected for regression there is no significant relationship between initial baseline and the amount of augmentation or reduction; reasons why such a relationship has been reported are indicated. The results suggest that when this kind of experiment is used for the study of individual differences (a) it is satisfactory to derive augmentation and reduction scores by subtracting the baseline from the absolute scores, provided the scores are corrected for regression, and (b) a counterbalanced order of presentation is not advisable in view of the carryover of augmentation from one day to the next, which is likely to make the two orders incommensurate.     

Intermodal perception of expressive behaviors by human infants

Four experiments demonstrate that infants of 5 and 7 months can detect information that is invariant across the acoustic and optic presentations of a single affective expression. Infants were presented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions accompanied by a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. The infants increased their looking time to a facial expression when it was sound-specified, as compared to when that filmed expression was projected silently. Even when synchrony relations were disrupted, infants looked proportionately longer to the film that was sound-specified, indicating that some factor other than temporal synchrony guided the infants' looking behavior. When infants viewed the filmed facial expressions either in a normal orientation or upside-down, those infants viewing the facial expressions in the normal orientation looked appropriately, while those viewing the inverted films did not. These findings support the view that infants are sensitive to amodal, potentially meaningful invariant relations in expressive behaviors. These results are discussed in the context of J. J. Gibson's theory of affordances.     

Level I and level II abilities in Asian,white, and black children

All the Asian-American, white, and black children in grades 2 through 6 in a California school district were given a battery of tests including measures of IQ, scholastic achievement, and short-term memory. Factor analysis of the tests yielded two main factors identified as Level I (memory) and Level II (general intelligence) in Jensen's system. The three ethnic groups were compared with one another on uncorrelated Level I and Level II factor scores. At every grade level, bivariate means of the three groups occupy distinctly different quadrants in the factor space. Asians and whites differ on Level I (A < W) but not on Level II. Asians and blacks differ on Level II (A > B) but not on Level I. Whites and blacks differ (W > B) on both Levels I and II, but the white-black difference on Level I is less than one fourth as large as the white-black difference on Level II. A similar pattern of group differences is found for scores on tests of memory and nonverbal IQ. Scholastic achievement shows much smaller correlations with the Level I than with the Level II factor.