Factors Affecting the Psychodiagnostic Significance of Color Perception

50 males, 17 and 18 years of age, and their natural parents were given the Blacky Defense Preference Inventory to determine if there are commonalities of defense preferences within families and within sex groups.

The results tended to support the hypothesis that male adolescents manifest defense preferences more similar to those of their father than to nonrelated adult males but failed to support a comparable hypothesis concerning the adolescent's similarity of defense preferences to his mother versus nonrelated adult females. The adolescent males did not reveal defense preferences more similar to those of their father than of their mother nor were sex differences in defense preferences observed. An additional finding suggested that the adult males are more heterogeneous in their defense preferences than are adult females.     

Interplay Between Service Era,PTSD Symptom Expression,and Treatment Completion Among Veterans

The current veteran population has grown significantly as a result of 3 recent major conflicts: Vietnam, Persian Gulf War, and Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF). Despite a strong presence in VA PTSD specialty clinics nationwide, little is known about how these veteran cohort groups differ in PTSD symptom presentation. Additionally, it is unclear how variations in PTSD symptom presentation may in turn affect treatment adherence and completion. Understanding factors associated with treatment dropout from exposure-based therapy for PTSD is an important area of study, as individuals who drop out of treatment are likely to remain symptomatic and experience significant impairment across a number of psychosocial domains. The present study examined the relationship between service theater affiliation and pretreatment symptom expression as predictors of treatment completion in a sample of 164 veterans. Although treatment completion did not differ by service era, study data revealed statistically significant differences in initial PTSD symptom expression. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed.     

The effects of venlafaxine and cognitive behavioral therapy alone and combined in the treatment of co-morbid alcohol use-anxiety disorders

The effects of the antidepressant venlafaxine (VEN-225 mg daily) and transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) alone and in combination on alcohol intake in subjects with co-morbid alcohol use disorders (AUDs) and anxiety disorders were compared. Drinking outcomes and anxiety were assessed for 81 subjects treated for 11 weeks with one of 4 conditions: 1) VEN–CBT, 2) VEN-Progressive Muscle Relaxation therapy (PMR), 3) Placebo (PLC)-CBT and 4) a comparison group of PLC-PMR. For subjects who reported taking at least one dose of study medication, the Time × Group interaction was significant for percent days of heavy drinking and drinks consumed per day. For the measure of percent days heavy drinking, the paired comparison of PLC-CBT versus PLC-PMR group indicated that the PLC-CBT group had greater drinking reductions, whereas other groups were not superior to the comparison group. In Week 11, the proportion of subjects in the PLC-CBT group that had a 50% reduction from baseline in percent days heavy drinking was significantly greater than those in the comparison group. Of the 3 “active treatment” groups only the PLC-CBT group had significantly decreased heavy drinking when contrasted to the comparison group. This finding suggests that the transdiagnostic CBT approach of Barlow and colleagues may have value in the management of heavy drinking in individuals with co-morbid alcoholism and anxiety.     

Complex Reaction Time and General Intelligence: A Refinement

College students (N = 28) completed a reaction-time task that yielded decision times for simple and complex conditions. Each student was also administered the revised edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS-R). Decision-time parameters generally correlated negatively with WAIS subscales. These correlations reached significance, however, mainly with timed performance subscales. The results were consistent with Vernon's (1983) results.     

Causal Attributions Predict Willingness to Support the Allocation of Funding to Lung Cancer Treatment Programs

Lung cancer patients may experience stigmatization as a result of the link between their disease and smoking, such as lack of public support for funding lung cancer treatment programs. This study examines whether causal attributions for the contraction of lung cancer predict the stigmatization of individuals with the disease by investigating willingness to support the allocation of funds to hypothetical lung cancer treatment programs. Participants were 766 undergraduate students. The findings indicate that participants who made causal attributions preferred to support the allocation of funding to programs that value the lives of breast cancer patients, rather than lung cancer patients. These findings have implications for understanding the influence of causal attributions on the stigmatization of lung cancer.     

Sleep-dependent consolidation of procedural motor memories in children and adults: the pre-sleep level of performance matters

In striking contrast to adults, in children sleep following training a motor task did not induce the expected (offline) gain in motor skill performance in previous studies. Children normally perform at distinctly lower levels than adults. Moreover, evidence in adults suggests that sleep dependent offline gains in skill essentially depend on the pre-sleep level of performance. Against this background, we asked whether improving children's performance on a motor sequence learning task by extended training to levels approaching those of adults would enable sleep-associated gains in motor skill in this age group also. Children (4-6 years) and adults (18-35 years) performed on the motor sequence learning task (button-box task) before and after ~2-hour retention intervals including either sleep (midday nap) or wakefulness. Whereas one group of children and adults, respectively, received the standard amount of 10 blocks of training before retention intervals of sleep or wakefulness, a further group of children received an extended training on 30 blocks (distributed across 3 days). A further group of adults received a restricted training on only two blocks before the retention intervals. Children after standard training reached lowest performance levels, whereas in adults performance after standard training was highest. Children with extended training and adults after reduced training reached intermediate performance levels. Only at these intermediate performance levels did sleep induce significant gains in motor sequence skill, whereas performance did not benefit from sleep in the low-performing children or in the high-performing adults. Spindle counts in the post-training nap were correlated with performance gains at retrieval only in the adults benefitting from sleep. We conclude that, across age groups, sleep induces the most robust gain in motor skill at an intermediate pre-sleep performance level. In low-performing children sleep-dependent improvements in skill may be revealed only after enhancing the pre-sleep performance level by extended training.     

The Ethics Code Does Not Equal Ethics: A Response to O’Donohue

ABSTRACT

O’Donohue has identified 37 criticisms of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Ethics Code), although many of his criticisms go far beyond what is found written in the APA Ethics Code, to include the process of adjudicating ethics complaints by the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee, and the process by which the Ethics Code was developed. The authors claim that a major shortcoming of O’Donohue’s article is that he adopted an unrealistically expansive role for the Ethics Code that was not clearly linked to furthering the goals of the ethics code revision.