An experimental manipulation of rejection: Effects on children's attitudes and mood depend on rejection sensitivity and relationship history

Guided by rejection sensitivity (RS) theory, the objective of this study was to test whether children's RS was associated with elevated negative emotional responses (less positive in‐group attitudes and more negative mood) following an episode of overt peer rejection or ambiguous rejection, in comparison to acceptance. Also, the role of children's self‐reported history of peer acceptance was examined. Participants were 206 children (7–11 years) who were randomly assigned to experience rejection, ambiguous rejection, or acceptance in a group simulation study. Children's group liking and negative mood depended on the 3‐way interaction of experimental condition, RS and children's history. In the ambiguous condition, as expected, children with higher RS reported more negative mood, and this did not differ in low compared to high accepted children. However, RS was only associated with less positive group attitudes among high accepted children in the rejection condition, and RS was associated with more negative mood among low accepted children only (in both conditions). Findings show the relevance of RS for elevated negative mood when rejection threat is ambiguous, and the combined role of RS and social history in children's emotional responses when situations are less ambiguous.     

Teaching letter sounds to kindergarten English language learners using incremental rehearsal

Proficiency in letter–sound correspondence is important for decoding connected text. This study examined the effects of an evidence-based intervention, incremental rehearsal (IR), on the letter–sound expression of three kindergarten English language learners (ELLs) performing below the district benchmark for letter–sound fluency. Participants were native speakers of Hmong, Spanish, and Polish. A multiple-baseline design across sets of unknown letter sounds was used to evaluate the effects of IR on letter–sound expression. Visual analysis of the data showed an increase in level and trend when IR was introduced in each phase. Percentage of all non-overlapping data (PAND) ranged from 95% to 100%. All participants exceeded expected growth and reached the spring district benchmark for letter–sound fluency. Results suggest that IR is a promising intervention for increasing letter–sound expression for ELLs who evidence delays in acquiring letter sounds.     

Asymmetrical access to color and location in visual working memory

Models of visual working memory (VWM) have benefitted greatly from the use of the delayed-matching paradigm. However, in this task, the ability to recall a probed feature is confounded with the ability to maintain the proper binding between the feature that is to be reported and the feature (typically location) that is used to cue a particular item for report. Given that location is typically used as a cue-feature, we used the delayed-estimation paradigm to compare memory for location to memory for color, rotating which feature was used as a cue and which was reported. Our results revealed several novel findings: 1) the likelihood of reporting a probed object’s feature was superior when reporting location with a color cue than when reporting color with a location cue; 2) location report errors were composed entirely of swap errors, with little to no random location reports; and 3) both colour and location reports greatly benefitted from the presence of nonprobed items at test. This last finding suggests that it is uncertainty over the bindings between locations and colors at memory retrieval that drive swap errors, not at encoding. We interpret our findings as consistent with a representational architecture that nests remembered object features within remembered locations.     

Reliability of the 5-min psychomotor vigilance task in a primary school classroom setting

This study evaluated the reliability of the 5-min psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) in a single-sex Australian primary school. Seventy-five male students (mean age 5 11.82 years, SD = 1.12) completed two 5-min PVTs using a Palm personal digital assistant (PDA) in (1) an isolated setting and (2) a classroom setting. Of this group of students, a subsample of 37 students completed a test-retest reliability trial within the classroom setting. Using a mixed-model analysis, there was no significant difference in the mean response time (RT) or number of lapses (RTs ≥ 500 msec) between the isolated and the classroom setting. There was, however, an order effect for the number of lapses in the isolated setting, with the number of lapses being greater if the isolated test was conducted second. Test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) in the classroom setting indicated moderate to high reliability (mean RT = .84, lapses = .59). Bland-Altman analysis showed no systematic difference between the two settings. Findings suggest that the 5-min PDA PVT is a reliable measure of sustained attention in the classroom setting in this sample of primary-aged schoolchildren. The results provide further evidence for the versatility of this measuring device for larger interventions outside the laboratory.     

Treatment hurts: Lay theories of graded exposure in the treatment of four anxiety disorders

Objective: This paper concerned the perceived suffering/side effects caused by various well-known treatments for personal problems. It looked at whether people understood whether potentially painful treatments that confront negative aversive affect were effective or not.

Method: In total, 106 participants completed a long questionnaire assessing the ‘psychological pain’ ratings of 30 psychotherapy treatments, varying in fear exposure, for four relatively common anxiety disorders: social phobia, agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Results: Factor analytic results revealed four clear factors underlying lay efficacy beliefs of psychotherapy interventions, varying in fear exposure: talking therapies, fear confrontation, fear avoidance, and alternative therapies. Talking therapies were rated the most effective across all disorders, but also the most painful. Fear avoidance therapies were rated the least effective and, along with alternative medicine, the least painful. Treatments involving fear exposure were rated the most painful. Regression analysis revealed talking therapies to be rated more efficacious by younger subjects than older subjects.

Conclusion: Most people seem able to differentiate between the efficacies of interventions for different anxiety disorders and hold consensually held optimistic conceptions about the usefulness of psychotherapy treatments and counseling that involve fear exposure, despite knowledge of the psychophysical side effects that these therapies often entail. They favored talking cures over others, but that may have been due to misleading items in the questionnaire.     

A Structural Modeling Examination of the Executive Decline Hypothesis of Cognitive Aging Through Reanalysis of Crawford et al.'s (2000) Data

This study presents a new analysis of data previously published by Crawford, Bryan, Luszcz, Obansawin, and Stewart (2000) examining the role of executive function in age-related declines in general cognitive ability and memory. Although the original authors' question is relevant to understanding the role of executive function in aging, this paper argues that the methods used can be substantially improved to more accurately answer the question. Thus, Crawford et al.'s data are here analyzed using a more parsimonious methodological approach (structural equation modeling), and the results obtained depart from the authors' results but are in line with their original hypotheses. First, for younger individuals, age was differently associated with verbal measures of cognitive ability than with performance measures. Although the relation of age to executive function was stronger than the relation of age to verbal abilities, this difference was not apparent with regard to performance abilities. Second, across samples (i.e., younger and older individuals), memory was not accounted for by cognitive ability but was related to age and executive function. Finally, also across samples, executive function was strongly linked to recall and recognition measures, accounting for the largest variance in memory. These results are discussed in relation to previous findings as well as their theoretical significance for aging research.     

A little bit transparent with one another: Constructing vulnerability in the evangelical discourse of women preachers

Using four categories of Brown’s shame resilience theory (SRT), this paper analyses two similar online videos by prominent American evangelical female preachers: Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore. As each unpacks her survivor’s story of childhood sexual abuse, SRT (and its components of vulnerability, critical awareness, reaching out and speaking shame) can provide a matrix for interpreting the narrative in which each preacher frames her self-disclosure.