The durability of beneficial health effects associated with expressive writing

Abstract

This study examined the durability of benefits associated with expressive writing. Sixty-eight college undergraduates completed measures of physical and psychological health at the beginning of their first year and were then randomized to either an expressive writing or a control writing condition. Changes in physical health, psychological health (i.e., depression, stress, and anxiety), and academic performance were assessed two, four, and six months later. Findings indicated that participants assigned to the expressive writing condition reported less depression symptom severity at the two-month follow-up assessment relative to participants assigned to the control condition. However, these symptom reductions were not observed at any of the subsequent follow-up assessments. No significant changes were reported for physical health complaints, stress symptoms, anxiety symptoms, or academic performance. These findings suggest that, among first-year college students, expressive writing may provide some short-term relief for certain symptoms.     

Main and interactive effects of social support in predicting mental health symptoms in men and women following military stressor exposure

Abstract

Evidence across a multitude of contexts indicates that social support is associated with reduced risk for mental health symptoms. More information is needed on the effectiveness of different sources of support, as well as sex differences in support. Associations between social support from two sources – the military unit and friends and family – and mental health symptoms were examined in a study of 1571 Marine recruits assessed at the beginning and end of a highly stressful 13-week training program. Military social support buffered the stressor exposure–posttraumatic stress symptomatology (PTSS) relationship, whereas the relationship between stressor exposure and PTSS was highest when civilian social support was high. Further inspection of the interactions revealed that military support was most important at high levels of stressor exposure. Sex differences in the relationship between social support and symptoms were found, such that support from military peers was associated with lower levels of PTSS for men, whereas civilian support was associated with lower PTSS for women. While civilian social support was associated with lower levels of depression symptom severity in both women and men, the relationship was stronger for women. Reviewed implications focus on the importance of considering the recipient, source, and context of social support.     

Pediatric Symptom Checklist Ratings by Mothers with a Recent History of Intimate Partner Violence: A Primary Care Study

Screening for psychosocial problems is an effective way to identify children who need further evaluation, and many brief, psychometrically strong measures exist for this purpose. More research is needed, however, about the performance of these measures in special populations who are familiar to primary care settings. The purpose of this study was to examine and compare maternal ratings on the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) between low-income, urban mothers who had suffered intimate partner violence (IPV) in the past year (n = 23) and a demographically-matched comparison group of mothers (n = 23). Victims of violence rated their children as having significantly more problems in a number of categories (Total PSC Score, Externalizing, and Internalizing) than did mothers in the comparison group. The PSC shows promise as an adequate screening tool for psychosocial problems in the children of women who have suffered IPV, but more research is needed.     

How to Individuate Universals—Or Not

In a recent article in this journal, J. P. Moreland (2013) extends his theory of individuation to include universals. In this note, I show how Moreland’s novel proposal leads to the unwanted conclusion that every concrete particular exists of necessity and has but a single essential property.     

Attenuated Change Blindness for Exogenously Attended Items in a Flicker Paradigm

When two scenes are alternately displayed, separated by a mask, even large, repeated changes between the scenes often go unnoticed for surprisingly long durations. Change blindness of this sort is attenuated at “centres of interest” in the scenes, however, supporting a theory of change blindness in which attention is necessary to perceive such changes (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). Problems with this measure of attentional selection - via verbally described “centres of interest” - are discussed, including worries about describability and explanatory impotence. Other forms of attentional selection, not subject to these problems, are employed in a “flicker” experiment to test the attention-based theory of change detection. Attenuated change blindness is observed at attended items when attentional selection is realized via involuntary exogenous capture of visual attention - to late-onset items and colour singletons - even when these manipulations are uncorrelated with the loci of the changes, and are thus irrelevant to the change detection task. These demonstrations ground the attention-based theory of change blindness in a type of attentional selection which is understood more rigorously than are “centres of interest”. At the same time, these results have important implications concerning the nature of exogenous attentional capture.     

Are objects required for object-files? Roles of segmentation and spatiotemporal continuity in computing object persistence

Two central tasks of visual processing are (1) to segment undifferentiated retinal images into discrete objects, and (2) to represent those objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Here we explore the interaction of these two types of processing in the context of object files—mid-level visual representations that “stick” to moving objects on the basis of spatiotemporal properties. Object files can be revealed by object-specific preview benefits (OSPBs), wherein a “preview” of information on a moving object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different moving object), beyond display-wide priming. Here we explore the degree of segmentation required to establish object files in the first place. Surprisingly, we find that no explicit segmentation is required until after the previews disappear, when using purely motion-defined objects (consisting of random elements on a random background). Moreover, OSPBs are observed in such displays even after moderate (but not long) delays between the offset of the preview information and the onset of the motion. These effects indicate that object files can be established without initial static segmentation cues, so long as there is spatiotemporal continuity between the previews and the eventual appearance of the objects. We also find that top-down strategies can sometimes mimic OSPBs, but that these strategies can be eliminated by novel manipulations. We discuss how these results alter our understanding of the nature of object files, and also why researchers must take care to distinguish “true OSPBs” from “illusory OSPBs”.     

Feature-based inhibition underlies the affective consequences of attention

Rapid selection of a target in the presence of similar distractors can cause subsequent affective evaluation of a distractor to be more negative than that for the selected object. This distractor devaluation effect has previously been attributed to an association of attentional inhibition with the distractor's representation. Here, we investigated whether the associated inhibition leading to distractor devaluation is object based or feature based. Using colour-tinted face and building stimuli in a two-item simple visual search, followed by evaluation of face stimuli on a trustworthiness scale, we report that emotional evaluation was modified by prior attention whenever the search stimuli and the to-be-evaluated face shared the distractor feature, regardless of whether face identity seen in the two successive tasks matched or not. These data support the notion that inhibition can be feature-based and show that such inhibition can have emotional consequences.     

The role of eye fixations in concentration and amplification effects during multiple object tracking

When tracking spatially extended objects in a multiple object tracking task, attention is preferentially directed to the centres of those objects (attentional concentration), and this effect becomes more pronounced as object length increases (attentional amplification). However, it is unclear whether these effects depend on differences in attentional allocation or differences in eye fixations. We addressed this question by measuring eye fixations in a dual-task paradigm that required participants to track spatially extended objects, while simultaneously detecting probes that appeared at the centres or near the endpoints of objects. Consistent with previous research, we observed concentration and amplification effects: Probes at the centres of objects were detected more readily than those near their endpoints, and this difference increased with object length. Critically, attentional concentration was observed when probes were equated for distance from fixation during free viewing, and concentration and amplification were observed without eye movements during strict fixation. We conclude that these effects reflect the prioritization of covert attention to particular spatial regions within extended objects, and we discuss the role of eye fixations during multiple object tracking.     

When do ratings implicate perception versus judgment? The “overgeneralization test” for top-down effects

ABSTRACT

When looking at an object—say, a banana—we can both directly perceive its visual qualities (e.g., its size) and also make higher-level judgments about its visual and non-visual properties (e.g., not only its size, but also its cost). Suppose you obtain a rating of a property such as size. Does that rating implicate seeing or merely higher-level judgment? The answer often matters a great deal -- e.g., determining whether such ratings imply “top-down” effects of cognition on perception. Too often, however, this distinction is ignored in empirical investigations of such effects. Here we suggest a simple test for when such ratings can be used to implicate perception: whenever the very same experiment “overgeneralizes” to an unambiguously non-perceptual factor, the results cannot be used to draw implications about perception, per se. As a case study, we investigate an empirical report alleging that conservatives perceive Barack Obama as darker skinned than liberals do. Two simple experiments show that the very same effects, measured via the same “representativeness” ratings, obtain with unambiguously non-perceptual and even silly factors (involving bright red horns vs. halos, rather than brightness differences). We suggest that this renders such methods unable to implicate visual processing and we recommend that “overgeneralization tests” of this type always be conducted in such contexts.