Adding motivational interviewing to exposure and ritual prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder: an open pilot trial

Exposure and ritual prevention (EX/RP) is an efficacious treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but high dropout rates and variable treatment adherence limit its effectiveness. Motivational interviewing (MI) has shown promise as an adjunct to symptom-focused treatments for improving treatment adherence and outcomes. The authors developed a manual integrating MI with EX/RP, consisting of three information-gathering/motivational enhancement sessions and 15 EX/RP sessions with an optional MI module to be used as needed. Six patients with moderate to severe OCD symptoms (Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale [Y-BOCS] score> or =16) underwent treatment. Five showed a decrease in their baseline Y-BOCS scores and an increase in their quality of life, with three achieving an excellent response (i.e. Y-BOCS< or =12 at Session 18). The authors briefly describe the motivational strategies used in the six cases and suggest that integrating MI with standard EX/RP is a promising method to increase and sustain patient engagement with EX/RP. Challenges in combining these treatments and maintaining the integrity of each as well as limitations of the study are discussed.     

Cumulating Evidence about the Social Animal: Meta‐Analysis in Social‐Personality Psychology

Like most scientific fields, social‐personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta‐analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta‐analysis, as they pertain to social‐personality psychology. Meta‐analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified reports and putting their findings and methods into a database, (iii) analyzing that database, and (iv) interpreting the results and reporting them. Use of meta‐analytic strategies has paralleled the knowledge explosion in social‐personality psychology, but must be used and consumed with careful discernment if the cumulated evidence about the social animal, Homo sapiens, is to have maximal value.     

Psychopathy,frustration, and reactive aggression: The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Psychopathy is a developmental disorder marked by emotional hyporesponsiveness and an increased risk for instrumental and reactive aggression. The increased risk for reactive aggression is the focus of the current paper. It will be argued that the increased risk for reactive aggression does not relate to an increased sensitivity to threatening stimuli since psychopathy is associated with a reduced sensitivity to threat. Instead, it is argued that the increased risk for reactive aggression relates to an increased risk for frustration; i.e., the emotional state following the performance of an action in the expectation of a particular reward and not receiving this reward. Two impairments seen in psychopathy would increase the risk for frustration and consequent potential reactive aggression; impairments in stimulus‐reinforcement learning and reversal learning. It is argued that both are known consequences of impairment in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, one of the regions principally implicated in psychopathy.     

Expertise in Deception Detection Involves Actively Prompting Diagnostic Information Rather Than Passive Behavioral Observation

In a proof‐of‐concept study, an expert obtained 100% deception‐detection accuracy over 33 interviews. Tapes of the interactions were shown to N = 136 students who obtained 79.1% accuracy (Mdn = 83.3%, mode = 100%). The findings were replicated in a second experiment with 5 different experts who collectively conducted 89 interviews. The new experts were 97.8% accurate in cheating detection and 95.5% accurate at detecting who cheated. A sample of N = 34 students watched a random sample of 36 expert interviews and obtained 93.6% accuracy. The data suggest that experts can accurately distinguish truths from lies when they are allowed to actively question a potential liar, and nonexperts can obtain high accuracy when viewing expertly questioned senders.