Obsessive beliefs predict cognitive behavior therapy outcome for obsessive compulsive disorder

Cognitive accounts of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) assert that core beliefs are crucial to the development, maintenance, and treatment of the disorder. There are a number of obsessive beliefs that are considered fundamental to OCD, including personal responsibility, threat estimation, perfectionism, need for certainty, importance of thoughts, and thought control. The present study investigated if pretreatment severity of obsessive beliefs, as well as the change in obsessive beliefs following treatment, predicted intensive, residential cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment outcome. A series of hierarchical regression analyses were carried out to investigate the relations between obsessive beliefs and treatment outcome. Results indicated that inflated pretreatment responsibility/threat estimation beliefs were significantly related to less overall obsessive compulsive (OC) symptom reduction at discharge, explaining 2% of the overall variance. Changes in obsessive beliefs broadly, and importance/control of thoughts specifically, were positively related to overall OC symptom reduction at discharge, respectively explaining 18% and 3.6% variance. Results are modestly consistent with a number of theoretical models, which argue that inflated responsibility, threat estimation, and thought control are important to the maintenance and treatment of OCD.     

Assessing Legal Strains and Risk of Suicide Using Archived Court Data

Relatively little is known about legal entanglements and suicide risk. This matched case–control study estimated the risk of suicide associated with legal strains using online court archives, a novel source of exposure data. Court records linked to suicide deaths (N = 315), controls (N = 630), and unintentional injury and poisoning deaths (N = 630) for an urban county from 2000 to 2005 revealed that nearly a third of suicide victims had recent court involvement, twice the proportion among controls. Misdemeanors, car accidents, and foreclosures were each associated with a threefold risk of suicide. Implications for suicide prevention and research are discussed.     

Validity of the Wechsler abbreviated scale of intelligence and other very short forms of estimating intellectual functioning

Performance on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III) was compared to performance on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), as well as short form estimations of intellectual functioning derived from WAIS-III performance, in a mixed clinical sample of 72 participants. The WASI verbal IQ (VIQ) score was significantly higher than the WAIS-III VIQ, whereas performance IQ (PIQ) estimates all differed from actual WAIS-III PIQ and full scale IQ (FSIQ). Correlations of WAIS-III scores with WASI scores were consistently lower than were correlations between the WASI-III and all other short forms. Although maintaining administration times of 15 minutesfor a two-subtest FSIQ and 30 minutes for a four-subtest FSIQ, the WASI did not consistently demonstrate desirable accuracy in predicting scores obtained from the WAIS-III. The results suggest that clinicians should use the WASI cautiously if at all, especially when accurate estimates of individuals' WAIS-III results are needed.     

Working memory in chess

Three experiments investigated the role of working memory in various aspects of thinking in chess. Experiment 1 examined the immediate memory for briefly presented chess positions from master games in players from a wide range of abilities, following the imposition of various secondary tasks designed to block separate components of working memory. Suppression of the articulatory loop (by preventing subvocal rehearsal) had no effect on measures of recall, whereas blocking the visuospatial sketchpad (by manipulation of a keypad) and blocking the central executive (by random letter generation) had equivalent disruptive effects, in comparison with a control condition. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of similar secondary tasks on the solution (i.e., move selection) of tactical chess positions, and a similar pattern was found, except that blocking the central executive was much more disruptive than in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 compared performance on two types of primary task, one concerned with solving chess positions as in Experiment 2, and the other a sentence-rearrangement task. The secondary tasks in each case were both designed to block the central executive, but one was verbal (vocal generation of random numbers), while the other was spatial in nature (random generation of keypresses). Performance of the spatial secondary task was affected to a greater extent by the chess primary task than by the verbal primary task, whereas there were no differential effects on these secondary tasks by the verbal primary task. In none of the three experiments were there any differential effects between weak and strong players. These results are interpreted in the context of the workingmemory model and previous theories of the nature of cognition in chess.     

Combining Data from Parent Ratings and Parent Interview When Assessing ADHD

This study examined different methods of combining data from a well established rating scale – the Disruptive Behavior Disorders Rating Scale (DBDRS) – with data from a well established interview – the computerized self report version of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children for DSM-IV (P-DISC-IV) – when examining parent report of ADHD. These measures were completed for 80 children who participated in a summer camp for children with disruptive behavior. Results showed significant overlap between the two diagnostic measures but parent report on the DBDRS was more highly associated with children’s camp behaviors than was parent report on the P-DISC-IV. In addition, combining ratings and interview data using an “either/or” rule was more highly associated with camp behavior than was combining data using a “both/and” rule. Results suggest there may be little additional value of adding data from parent self-report on the computerized version of the P-DISC-IV to behavior rating data.     

More “tricks of the trade”: Reparameterizing LISREL models using negative variances

This paper shows how LISREL may be used to estimate simplex models which impose constraints on the variances of endogenous variables. This technique allows us to estimate both the parameters and the standard errors of the correlated measurement error model proposed by Wiley and Wiley (1974).We would like to thank Jim Wiley for his many helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. We are grateful also to an anonymous reviewer for supplying the EQS program presented in Figure 4.     

Head position and parsing ambiguity

A strongly principle-based model of parsing seeks to employ principles of the competence grammar directly in language processing. Within grammatical theory, the Projection Principle holds that each level of syntactic representation is a uniform projection of the lexical properties of heads. With respect to parsing this suggests that a phrasal node cannot be projected until the occurrence of its head and thus constitutes a strong empirical hypothesis concerning the fundamental nature of human language processing. This paper contrasts some cross-linguistic predictions made by a specific Grammarderived parsing model against those of a well-known top-down model whose functional motivation is decidedly nonlinguistic. This latter Minimal Attachment model is found to predict significant difficulty with respect to the processing of languages such as Japanese, which display rather different surface properties than English. This problem is not encountered in a model which recognizes the crucial role of heads in licensing argument structure with respect to Processing as well as Grammar. Cross-linguistic parsing differences are attributed to the linear and structural positions of licensing heads which constitute the primary locus of the cross-linguistic variation which is therefore ultimately to be ascribed directly to the Projection Principle.