PTSD, Depressive Symptoms, and Suicidal Ideation in African American Women: A Mediated Model

Although research has shown positive associations among post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation, the nature of these relations is unclear, especially in African American women. This study examined the associations among these comorbid psychological difficulties in a sample of 136 low-income, African American women. Specifically, the goal of this investigation was to ascertain if overall depressive symptoms, as well as both the cognitive-affective and somatic components of depression, mediated the PTSD-suicidal ideation link. Results from bootstrapping analyses revealed that overall depressive symptoms and the cognitive-affective components of depression, but not the somatic components, mediated the PTSD-suicidal ideation link.     

Video Intervention for Child and Caregiver Distress Related to the Child Sexual Abuse Medical Examination: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study

Children who disclose child sexual abuse are often referred for a comprehensive medical exam to ensure physical well-being and gather evidence. This study examined a brief, developmentally appropriate, psychoeducational video designed to instruct children and caregivers about the exam procedures and coping strategies to be used during the exam. Sixty-nine children ages 4–15 and their caregivers were randomly assigned to view the psychoeducational video (n = 35) or to receive standard practice (n = 34). Distress before, during, and after the exam was assessed in both children and caregiver, as were measures of satisfaction and knowledge about the investigation process and coping strategies. Consistent with hypotheses, results indicated that the video intervention was well-received by families, increased caregiver knowledge, and decreased stress during the examination. Caregiver and child distress decreased from pre to post examination across both conditions, and, unexpectedly, there were no significant differences in these decreases between groups. Overall results from this pilot study are promising in supporting a cost-effective and brief early intervention approach at the time of the medical examination for child sexual abuse for children and their caregivers.     

Concurrent Performance of Gunner's and Robotics Operator's Tasks in a Multitasking Environment

In this study, we simulated a generic mounted crew station environment and conducted an experiment to examine the workload and performance of the combined position of gunner and robotics operator. Results showed that participants' gunnery task performances degraded significantly when he had to concurrently monitor, manage, or teleoperate an unmanned ground vehicle compared to the gunnery single task condition. For the robotics tasks, participants had the lowest performance when using the semi-autonomous robot, indicating overreliance on the aided target recognition capabilities available when task load was heavy (i.e., concurrent performance of the gunnery task). Participants' perceived workload increased consistently as the concurrent task conditions became more challenging. Individual difference factors such as spatial ability and perceived attentional control were found to correlate significantly with some of the performance measures. Implications for military personnel selection were discussed.     

Remembering the silver lining: Reappraisal and positive bias in memory for emotion

Reappraisal and distraction, unlike suppression, are known to decrease the intensity of negative emotion in the short term. Little is known about long-term characteristics associated with emotion regulation strategies, however. In a longitudinal study, we examined the relation between the strategies people reported using to regulate emotions during a stressful situation and their later memory for their emotions. Students in Italy rated the intensity of positive and negative emotions they were experiencing as they prepared for their high school exit exam. They also rated the extent to which they were regulating emotion using reappraisal, distraction, and suppression. Six weeks later, students recalled their pre-exam emotions. The more students reported engaging in reappraisal before the exam, the more they overestimated positive emotion and underestimated negative emotion when recalling their experience. The association between reported reappraisal and memory bias was partially mediated by positive changes over time in students’ appraisals of the exam preparation experience. Reports of engaging in distraction and suppression were not associated with memory bias. Because remembered emotion guides future choices, these findings suggest that reappraisal is a highly adaptive strategy for coping with stressful situations, not only in the short run, but also in the long run.     

Negative Treatment Effects in Dyadic Psychotherapy: A Focus on Prevention and Intervention Strategies

Therapy holds the potential to harm as well as help. This paper highlights approaches that may help prevent or decrease the incidence of negative effects in psychotherapy. These approaches include supervision, peer consultation, ongoing assessment of the therapeutic process, therapist-client matching, and referrals and transfers. We hope that this paper will serve as a stimulus for clinicians, psychotherapy researchers, and educators to put forth collabo-rative effort into identifying variables directly associated with adverse treat- ment outcomes and determining appropriate prevention and intervention strategies.     

Early Language Impairment and Young Adult Delinquent and Aggressive Behavior

Clinic and forensic studies have reported high rates of language impairments in conduct disordered and incarcerated youth. In community samples followed to early adolescence, speech and language impairments have been linked to attention deficits and internalizing problems, rather than conduct problems, delinquency, or aggression. This study examines the young adult antisocial outcomes of speech or language impaired children. Language impaired boys had higher levels of parent-rated delinquency symptoms by age 19 than boys without language impairment, controlled for verbal IQ and for demographic and family variables. Language impaired boys did not differ from controls in self-reported delinquency or aggression symptoms on a standardized checklist; however, language impaired boys reported higher rates of arrests and convictions than controls. Language impairment was not related to aggression or delinquency in girls. We examine alternate models of the interrelationships between language, academics, and behavior, at ages 5, 12, and 19.     

Visual experience is not necessary for efficient survey spatial cognition: evidence from blindness

This study investigated whether the lack of visual experience affects the ability to create spatial inferential representations of the survey type. We compared the performance of persons with congenital blindness and that of blindfolded sighted persons on four survey representation-based tasks (Experiment 1). Results showed that persons with blindness performed better than blindfolded sighted controls. We repeated the same tests introducing a third group of persons with late blindness (Experiment 2). This last group performed better than blindfolded sighted participants, whereas differences between participants with late and congenital blindness were nonsignificant. The present findings are compatible with results of other studies, which found that when visual perception is lacking, skill in gathering environmental spatial information provided by nonvisual modalities may contribute to a proper spatial encoding. It is concluded that, although it cannot be asserted that total lack of visual experience incurs no cost, our findings are further evidence that visual experience is not a necessary condition for the development of spatial inferential complex representations.     

Proactive interference effects on sentence production

Proactive interference refers to recall difficulties caused by prior similar memory-related processing. Information-processing approaches to sentence production predict that retrievability affects sentence form: Speakers may word sentences so that material that is difficult to retrieve is spoken later. In this experiment, speakers produced sentence structures that could include an optionalthat, thereby delaying the mention of a subsequent noun phrase. This subsequent noun phrase was either (1) conceptually similar to three previous noun phrases in the same sentence, leading to greater proactive interference, or (2) conceptually dissimilar, leading to less proactive interference. Speakers produced morethats (and were more disfluencies) before conceptually similar noun phrases, suggesting that retrieval difficulties during sentence production affect the syntactic structures of sentences that speakers produce.