The Sweating Cognitions Inventory: A Measure of Cognitions in Hyperhidrosis

Primary hyperhidrosis is a dermatological condition involving excessive sweating. Little research has been conducted on the psychological processes associated with this condition. A cognitive-behavioral approach would suggest that negative beliefs about the nature and consequences of sweating paradoxically increase sweating, and therefore maintain hyperhidrosis. The present research reports on the development and psychometric evaluation of the Sweating Cognitions Inventory (SCI), a self-report measure that assesses dysfunctional beliefs in hyperhidrosis. The SCI was administered to a clinical sample of patients diagnosed with hyperhidrosis (N = 226) as well as a student comparison group (N = 482). The SCI demonstrated good internal consistency and a stable, unidimensional factor structure in both samples. Sweating cognitions differentiated between the two groups, indicating discriminant validity. Correlations with comparison measures indicated that sweating cognitions were strongly related to sweating severity, and also to social anxiety and anxiety sensitivity. These results are consistent with our conceptualization that dysfunctional sweating cognitions can maintain and exacerbate excessive sweating. A cognitive-behavioral conceptualization of hyperhidrosis could advance our understanding of the condition and could lead to novel treatment approaches.     

Ingroup role models and underrepresented students’ performance and interest in STEM: A meta-analysis of lab and field studies

This meta-analysis synthesizes research on using ingroup role models to improve the performance and interest of underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). A systematic literature search resulted in forty-five studies that met the selection criteria, including the presence of a comparison group. Both lab and field studies suffered from small sample bias, with smaller sample sizes predicting larger effect sizes among lab studies, but smaller effect sizes among field studies. Correcting for small sample bias, ingroup role models had a small, but significant positive overall effect (d?=?0.20) among field studies and a non-significant overall effect (d?=?0.04) among lab studies. The only significant moderator was level of interaction, with in-person role models having smaller effects among lab studies (p?=?.008). Implications for interventions to increase the representation of female and underrepresented minority students in STEM and future directions for research are discussed.

     

School readiness. Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobiological conceptualization of children's functioning at school entry

The author examines the construct of emotionality, developmental relations between cognition and emotion, and neural plasticity and frontal cortical functioning and proposes a developmental neurobiological model of children's school readiness. Direct links are proposed among emotionality, use-dependent synaptic stabilization related to the prefrontal cortex, the development of executive function abilities, and academic and social competence in school settings. The author considers research on the efficacy of preschool compensatory education in promoting school readiness and recommends that programs expand to include curricula directly addressing social and emotional competence. Research should focus on the ontogeny of self-regulation and successful adaptation to the socially defined role of student, the development of prevention research programs to reflect this orientation, and interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate scientific methods and questions in the pursuit of comprehensive knowledge of human developmental processes.     

Group remembering: does social loafing underlie collaborative inhibition?

When people collaborate to recall information, they experience collaborative inhibition, a deficit in recall relative to nominal groups (the pooled, nonredundant recall of individuals working alone). That is, people recalling in groups do not perform up to their potential. Collaborative inhibition may be due to retrieval interference (e.g., B. H. Basden, D. R. Basden, S. Bryner, & R. L. Thomas, 1997) or to motivational factors such as social loafing in the group situation. Five experiments examined the role of motivational factors by varying monetary incentives, recall criterion, personal accountability, group cohesion, and group gender. Increasing motivation sometimes increased the overall level of recall but failed to eliminate the collaborative inhibition effect. The results suggest that collaboration interferes with an individual's ability to reconstruct his or her knowledge.     

Blocking and backward blocking involve learned inattention

Four experiments examine blocking of associative learning by human participants in a disease diagnosis procedure. The results indicate that after a cue is blocked, subsequent learning about the cue is attenuated. This attenuated learning after blocking is obtained for both standard blocking and for backward blocking. Attenuated learning after blocking cannot be accounted for by theories such as the Rescorla-Wagner model that rely on lack of learning about a redundant cue, nor can it be accounted for by extensions of the Rescorla-Wagner model designed to address backward blocking that encode absent cues with negative values. The results are predicted by the hypothesis that people learn not to attend to the blocked cue.     

The automaticity of race and Afrocentric facial features in social judgments

Four experiments were conducted to examine the automaticity of stereotyping based on racial category and (within-race) Afrocentric facial features. Results showed that both forms of stereotyping are efficient processes, able to operate when cognitive resources are highly restricted. The 2 differed, however, in their controllability. Participants demonstrated that they were sensitized to race-based stereotypes and able to control that influence to a significant degree. In contrast, participants appeared to be largely unaware of using Afrocentric features to make stereotypic inferences, and they proved unable to avoid doing so, even when they were given explicit information about the process and they demonstrated that they could easily and reliably identify the relevant features.     

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.     

Associations between use of self-regulatory strategies and daily eating patterns: An experience sampling study in college-aged women

Previous theorizing suggests there are multiple means by which people regulate their emotions and impulses, but that these strategies vary in the degree to which they support goal attainment. Some have proposed that proactive strategies (e.g. situation selection, distraction) may be particularly effective, while interventive strategies (e.g. suppression) are less effective. Despite these diverging predictions, researchers have yet to examine spontaneous use of these strategies and their respective and combined efficacy when applied to momentary food desires experienced in daily life. In the present study, we assessed eating patterns for one week via ecological momentary assessment in college-aged women (N?=?106). Results from pre-registered analyses indicated that using a variety of strategies, including preventative strategies such as situation selection and distraction, was associated with greater self-control success, as indexed by weaker desires, higher resistance, lower likelihood of enacting desires, and less food consumed. A similar pattern was observed when participants implemented additional strategies during desire episodes, which they were more likely to do when their desires conflicted with other self-regulatory goals. All associations were observed while controlling for momentary hunger levels, dieting status, age, and body mass index. These findings are consistent with a growing body of work assessing people’s spontaneous use of emotion regulation strategies in everyday contexts, suggesting potential meta-motivational tendencies marked by flexible and adaptive use of self-regulatory strategies.

     

The Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI): Factor structure,measurement invariance,and correlates in US preschoolers

This study tests the factor structure, measurement invariance, and correlates of the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) with a large and diverse sample of 3- to 5-year-olds (n = 844). Consistent with previous studies, a two-factor model that distinguishes working memory from inhibition provides the best fit to the observed data. This two-factor model has been shown to demonstrate strong measurement invariance for different subgroups of children (boys vs. girls, high vs. low income). Whereas boys tend to have greater working memory and inhibition difficulties (Cohen’s d = 0.15 and 0.20, respectively), children from low-income households tend to have more working memory problems than their peers from high-income households (Cohen’s d = 0.25). Finally, correlations between CHEXI scores, examiner reports of child behavior, and child performance on a battery of executive function (EF) tasks were investigated. CHEXI scores were found to be more consistently related to examiner reports of child behavior than child performance on EF tasks. Tthe strengths and weaknesses of the CHEXI as a questionnaire measure of EF are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Recognition of emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones in children with psychopathic tendencies.

The authors investigated the ability of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device scores (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), to recognize emotional facial expressions and vocal tones. The Psychopathy Screening Device indexes a behavioral syndrome with two dimensions: affective disturbance and impulsive and conduct problems. Nine children with psychopathic tendencies and 9 comparison children were presented with 2 facial expression and 2 vocal tone subtests from the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (S. Nowicki & M. P. Duke, 1994). These subtests measure the ability to name sad, fearful, happy, and angry facial expressions and vocal affects. The children with psychopathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both sad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their recognition of happy or angry facial expressions or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones. The results are interpreted with reference to the suggestion that the development of psychopathic tendencies may reflect early amygdala dysfunction (R. J. R. Blair, J. S. Morris, C. D. Frith, D. I. Perrett, & R. Dolan, 1999).