Linguistic influences on visual memory

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis has raised considerable controversy in the literatures of psychology and anthropology. Several misconceptions of the hypothesis are reviewed, and the hypothesis was experimentally supported in a visual reproduction paradigm. Subjects were first given label training for a set of figures, and were then asked to recall by drawing the shapes. Training with categorized labels resulted in a 25% improvement in recall when compared to a condition with nonword (paralog) labels. Even stronger evidence of linguistic influence on visual memory was obtained by examining the order of recall. The conceptual relationships among labels strongly influenced the sequence of reproductions.     

Reducing delusional speech in chronic, paranoid schizophrenics

Four schizophrenic patients with paranoid and grandiose delusions who had been hospitalized for an average of 17 yr were exposed to social reinforcement contingencies in a multiple baseline design. During the baseline period, each patient was interviewed for four 10-min sessions each day. The elapsed time from onset of conversation to onset of delusional talk was recorded. At the end of each day, the patients engaged in a 30-min informal chat with a nurse-therapist while relaxing with coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. The intervention introduced two contingencies: (1) The 10-min interviews were terminated as soon as the patient began talking delusionally; (2) The patients earned time for their evening chat by talking rationally during their daytime interviews. Increases of from 200 to 600% in the amount of rational talk exhibited during the interviews occurred as the contingencies were introduced for each patient sequentially over time. These increases were maintained in three patients when the amount of reinforcement was halved, but declined when the patients were confronted directly with their delusional ideas. A modest amount of generalization occurred from the day-time interviews to the evening chats but did not extend to the behavior of the patients on the ward.     

Reinforcement therapy in the classroom

Teachers were trained in the systematic use of attention and praise to reduce the disruptive classroom behavior of four first-grade children. Observation measures showed a significant improvement from baseline to treatment for these children and no significant changes for same-class controls. While the amount of teacher attention to target children remained the same from baseline to treatment, the proportion of attention to task-relevant behavior of these children increased. Psychological tests revealed no adverse changes after treatment.     

Pushing Up on the Glass Ceiling of Female Muscularity: Women’s Bodybuilding as Edgework

Women bodybuilders exemplify gendered deviance and risk a social stigma on top of the physical risk of partaking in this demanding sport. In the current study, we utilize Stephen Lyng’s (1990, 2005) theoretical concept of “edgework” to understand what motivates women bodybuilders to engage in this high-risk behavior. Our qualitative analysis of 29 women bodybuilders' responses to open-ended survey questions reveals that the three components of edgework (activity, skill, and sensation) are evident in their training and dietary regimens. Overall, this study offers an important theoretical contribution to the study of women’s bodybuilding while also extending Lyng’s edgework model to this understudied phenomenon.     

Emotion recognition in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

There is a limited amount of research that examines social-emotional functioning in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and the majority of it relies on parent and teacher reports of social impairments. Because these provide broad measures of social function, they fail to elucidate the underlying specific skills with which this group of children has difficulty. The current study examines emotion-recognition abilities in children with FASD, as it plays a central role in social interaction. Participants were 22 children with diagnosed FASD (ages 8–14), and age- and gender-matched typically developing controls. Tasks included measures of emotion recognition from three nonlinguistic modalities: facial expressions, emotional tone of voice, and body positioning and movement. Participant’s parents completed measures of adaptive and behavioral function that were related to children’s performance on aspects of emotion recognition. Overall, the results show that children with FASD have more difficulties with emotion recognition than typically developing age-matched peers, but these difficulties may not be clinically significant (e.g., smaller effect size) or may be specific to the age of the individual exhibiting the emotion (i.e., child vs. adult). These results are discussed in the context of previous studies.     

The Role of Avoidance in Complicated Grief: A Detailed Examination of the Grief-Related Avoidance Questionnaire (GRAQ) in a Large Sample of Individuals with Complicated Grief

Grief-related avoidance is a significant component of complicated grief, yet has rarely been formally measured in a validated fashion. Further, more work is needed to understand the impact of grief-related avoidance on symptom severity and functional impairment among individuals with complicated grief (CG). The Grief-Related Avoidance Questionnaire (GRAQ; Shear, Monk et al. 2007) was created to assess grief-related avoidance and the present analysis aimed to further develop this measure and construct by confirming the GRAQ’s psychometric properties and examining loss-related predictors of avoidance. In a sample of 393 adults with CG, we found the GRAQ had high internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89 and good convergent validity. While the EFA results suggest that the GRAQ may be unidimensional, a 3-factor model generally corresponded with the findings by (Shear, Monk et al. 2007), which suggested the presence of 3 subscales. Loss-related variables age, relationship to the deceased, and cause of death were all significant predictors of GRAQ scores. Our findings support that among individuals with complicated grief, avoidance is common, measurable and an important contributor to impairment.     

Prediction and control as determinants of behavioural uncertainty: effects on task performance and heart rate reactivity.

Control or control-belief is often viewed as being directly instrumental in facilitating coping mechanisms in aversive situations, and yet the empirical evidence for the beneficial effects of control is inconclusive. In this study we investigated the role of predictability in determining the effects of perceived control during an aversive reaction time task. Fifty-six subjects were allocated to one of four groups; predictable-control, predictable-no control, unpredictable-control, unpredictable-no control. In the predictable conditions, subjects could temporally predict the occurrence of an aversive noise. In the perceived control conditions, duration of the aversive tone was contingent on subject's performance. All subjects were matched in terms of the nature of the task and in the number and time of receipt of both the warning signal and noise. Heart rate reactivity and two performance parameters were measured, reaction time and performance increase. Both predictability and control-belief led to a reduction in heart rate reactivity, although they appeared to function independently and at different points in the sequence of events. That is, predictability or perceived control was sufficient to mitigate the effects of an aversive situation. Neither perception of control or predictability led to better task performance. These results are discussed in terms of behavioural uncertainty explanations.