On becoming neutral: effects of experimental neutralizing reconsidered

Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 found that writing out a negative thought produced anxiety and an urge to neutralize the thought, that instructing participants to neutralize the thought reduced anxiety/neutralization urge in the short run (i.e. within 2 min), but that in the control group 20 min without instruction was attended by the same reduction in anxiety/urge to neutralize (“natural decay”). The observations were made with pariticipants who scored high on “thought action fusion” and the experiment was set up as exerimental model of obsessions. We repeated the study with participants that were not selected on thought action fusion. All the findings reported by Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 were replicated. Correlational analysis indicated that the strength of the effect was not related to scores on scales measuring “thought action fusion”. Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 did not assess whether non-neutralizing was followed by immediate reductions in distress. We did assess this and found that the larger part of the immediate reduction of distress after neutralization also occurs when no neutralization instruction is given. The effects of neutralization instructions in the present type of experiment are considerably less powerful than suggested earlier.     

Self-Serving Evaluations of Conflict Behavior and Escalation of the Dispute1

There is good evidence that people generally tend to evaluate behaviors, contributions, and outcomes in terms favorable to the self. The present series of studies expands this finding by showing that professional negotiators (Study 1), governmental decision makers (Study 2), and organizational consultants (Study 3) make self-serving evaluations of conflict behavior: They view their own conflict behaviors as more constructive and as less destructive than those of their opponents. In addition, results revealed that self-serving evaluation of conflict behavior is associated with increased frustration, with reduced problem solving, and with enhanced likelihood of future conflict. It is argued that these findings expand the conflict literature in that they provide better insight into the motivational-cognitive antecedents and consequences of conflict escalation.     

Suppression of emotional and neutral material

Previous studies have indicated that suppression of a thought results in an immediate increase of the frequency of this thought and/or in a rebound effect, i.e. in a heightened frequency of this thought later on. The present study (n = 53) examined the relationship between suppression and emotionality of the to-be-suppressed material. More specifically, it was investigated whether suppression of an emotional story results in stronger immediate enhancement or thought rebounds than suppression of a neutral story. There was a clear initial enhancement effect in the group suppressing a neutral story: subjects who tried to suppress experienced more target thoughts than subjects who did not try to suppress. In the neutral-story conditions, no rebound effect occurred. In the groups exposed to an emotional story, there was neither evidence of initial enhancement nor of a rebound. As most obsessions are related to emotional themes, the present findings cast doubt on the claim that the rebound phenomenon represents a valid laboratory model for clinical obsessions.     

Effects of matches and mismatches in agoraphobic and neutral situations

An experiment was conducted to investigate the generalizability of Rachman's match/mismatch model and to explore if environmental conditions affect the consequences of an underprediction. Twenty subjects walked around in agoraphobic, and 15 did so in neutral, situations. Both groups carried a walkman and 7 aversive human screams were administered to them at random times. The results gave strong support to previous investigations on matches and mismatches, but no differences were shown between agoraphobic and neutral situations. Possible explanations are discussed.     

Formal paraphasias: A single case study

A case study is reported of an aphasic patient, RB, who showed frequent form-related whole-word substitutions in oral naming, writing to dictation, and reading aloud. In both written language tasks, the abstractness of the targets influenced the number of formal errors. In oral naming, a high proportion of formal paraphasias was related to the intended words in both form and meaning. A comparison between targets and formal paraphasias indicated a high agreement both in word class, number of syllables, stress pattern, and in basic (stressed) vowels. The agreement in consonants (including word-initial consonants), however, was low. It is argued that RB's formal substitutions are not caused solely by errors of lexical selection but that semantic, lexical, and segmental factors contribute to the error outcome.     

Modification of muscle activation patterns during fast goal-directed arm movements

The motor programming of fast goal-directed arm movements was studied in a tracking task. A target jumped once or twice randomly to the left or right direction with an interstimulus interval (ISI) in a range between 50 and 125 msec. Double step stimuli were either two steps in the same direction (C-trial) or in opposite direction (R-trial). Tracking results show that at the beginning average EMG-activity is the same for responses to single step trials, R-trials and C-trials. Differences set in after some time equal to or somewhat shorter than ISI. It was concluded that muscle activation patterns of fast goal-directed movements are not preprogrammed but that they can be modified during the movement. The time interval between second target step and the moment when EMG activity of the double step response deviates from the EMG activity of a single step (RT2) could be smaller than the time interval between first target displacement and EMG onset. (RT1). If modification of the muscle activation pattern required a longer or larger activation of the active muscle, RT2 tended to be smaller than RT1, whereas RT2 was about equal to RT1 if the new muscle activation required a termination of the ongoing muscle activation pattern and the activation of another muscle.     

Strategic factors in a lexical-decision task: Evidence for automatic and attention-driven processes

The present study examined strategic factors in a semantic-priming, lexical-decision task. The first experiment demonstrated that the greater the proportion of related word-word pairs to unrelated word-word pairs, the greater the amount of facilitation, a result which is consistent with others reported in the literature. The second experiment demonstrated that this strategic factor apparently requires that sufficient time (at least several hundred milliseconds) be available for the processing of the priming word, and thus is probably caused by attention-driven processes. The third experiment replicated and extended the results of the first two studies by demonstrating that prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony is an important limiting factor in determining whether such proportion-induced strategic factors are involved in word-recognition processes, even when no other aspect or variable of the procedure changes. The results are discussed in the context of Posner and Snyder’s (1975a) two-process model of word recognition.     

Are prepared fears less severe, but more resistant to treatment?

In order to investigate the relationship between the extent to which clinical fears are prepared and clinically relevant characteristics of these fears (i.e. severity, age of onset and treatment outcome). the records of 63 obsessional and phobic patients were examined. Four independent raters scored the usable records (N = 55) on preparedness. The preparedness scores were combined and related to objective indices of severity (patients' scores on the Fear Survey Schedule, the Zung Depression Scale and the Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory, as well as the treatment duration), onset ages and treatment outcomes (pre-treatment minus post-treatment MOCI scores, for a subsample of obsessional patients only). In contrast to earlier studies, it was found that product-moment correlations among preparedness ratings were relatively low and that prepared fears did not make up a majority in the sample. Indices of severity either did not correlate at all or correlated negatively with preparedness ratings. The positive correlation between preparedness and onset ages reached borderline significance. Evidence suggestive of a resistance to treatment of prepared fears was obtained.