Writing content predicts benefit from written expressive disclosure: Evidence for repeated exposure and self-affirmation

Expressive disclosure regarding a stressful event improves psychological and physical health, yet predictors of these effects are not well established. The current study assessed exposure, narrative structure, affect word use, self-affirmation and discovery of meaning as predictors of anxiety, depressive and physical symptoms following expressive writing. Participants (N = 50) wrote on four occasions about a stressful event and completed self-report measures before writing and three months later. Essays were coded for stressor exposure (level of detail and whether participants remained on topic), narrative structure, self-affirmation and discovery of meaning. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software was used to quantify positive and negative affect word use. Controlling for baseline anxiety, more self-affirmation and detail about the event predicted lower anxiety symptoms, and more negative affect words (very high use) and more discovery of meaning predicted higher anxiety symptoms three months after writing. Findings highlight the importance of self-affirmation and exposure as predictors of benefit from expressive writing.     

Do phenomenal concepts misrepresent?

Many contemporary physicalists concede to dualists that conscious subjects have distinctive “phenomenal concepts” of the phenomenal qualities of their experiences. Indeed, they contend that idiosyncratic characteristics of these concepts facilitate responses to influential anti-physicalist arguments. Like some some other critics of this approach, James Tartaglia (2013 Tartaglia, J. (2013). Conceptualizing physical consciousness. Philosophical Psychology, 26(6), 817–838.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) maintains that phenomenal concepts express contents that conflict with physicalism, but as a physicalist, the moral he distinctively draws from this is that phenomenal concepts misrepresent. He contends further that the contemporary physicalists’ account cannot accommodate this feature, and that in consequence, physicalists should abandon phenomenal concepts and return to the identity theory championed by Place and Smart in the 1950s. I respond to Tartaglia by identifying lacunae in his interpretation of contemporary physicalism and arguing that phenomenal concepts as conceived by the contemporary physicalists do not express contents that support either dualist or physicalist metaphysics: they are “metaphysically neutral.”     

Deep Brain Stimulation of the Subthalamic Nucleus in Parkinson’s Disease: A Meta-Analysis of Mood Effects

Neuropsychology Review - This meta-analysis examines mood changes after bilateral subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Deep brain...     

Changes in Female Rape Myth Acceptance Among College Students: A 20-Year Perspective

In this study, we compared changes in female rape myth acceptance (RMA) between 1998 and 2018 in two separate samples of college students from the same university in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The primary measure was the Attitudes Toward Rape Victims Scale (ARVS). First, we examined the factor structure of the ARVS with confirmatory factor analysis, finding good fit for a four-factor model comprising Assigning Blame or Responsibility to the Victim (Blame/Responsibility), Considering the Victim as Deserving of Sexual Violence (Deserving), Undermining the Victim’s Credibility (Undermine Credibility), and Trivializing the Experience or Denigrating the Victim (Trivialization/Denigration). Second, we used profile analysis, a type of multivariate repeated-measures ANOVA, to examine the main and interactive effects of Survey Year, Gender, and ARVS Subscale and Item within each subscale. At the subscale level, we found large main effects for Survey Year, Gender, and Subscale, with lower scores for the 2018 sample, women, and Deserving and Trivialization/Denigration, relative to Undermine Credibility and Blame/Responsibility. We also found interactions between Survey Year and Subscale and Gender and Subscale, indicating non-parallel profiles for the 1998 versus 2018 samples and women versus men. We found similar patterns at the item level within each subscale. These results indicate a substantial decline of female RMA in college students over a 20-year period, replicate the well-established gender difference in female RMA, and demonstrate that RMA varies by item content.

     

What can we Learn from the Experience of Non-Responders to a Parent-Only Intervention for Childhood Anxiety?

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Following a parent-only intervention for childhood anxiety, we sought to understand the treatment experience of those parents who affected reductions in their...     

Understanding culture across species

Recent claims of culture in great apes have provoked fervent argument about the 'true' definition of culture, most of which has been unhelpful. Instead, a range of definitions should be used to explore different aspects of the cognitive processes that together result in human culture, many of which can be productively studied in non-humans. A richer cognitive account of the contents of culture needs to be developed and used to compare animal and human cultures, instead of sterile searching for a cognitive Rubicon between them. Exploring six views of culture, this article highlights the fundamental contrast of whether culture evolves as a by-product of cumulative change in cognitive mechanisms, or whether it is actively selected for its advantages.