Treating PTSD in active duty service members using cognitive processing therapy or prolonged exposure therapy: Examining everyday practice at a military outpatient clinic

The Institute of Medicine has stressed the need for evaluations of evidence-based treatments (EBTs) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among active duty service members (AD) using a variety of evaluation approaches (Institute of Medicine, 2012). The current study examined the clinical files of 134 service members who completed treatment for PTSD using either prolonged exposure (PE) or cognitive processing therapy at an outpatient clinic. At the completion of each session, therapists made a clinical rating as to whether or not the session was protocol adherent. The total number of treatment sessions and the proportion of sessions rated as being protocol adherent were calculated. Multi-level models estimated the change in patient PTSD and other psychological symptoms over time as a function of clinician-rated protocol adherence and total number of sessions. Approximately 65% of clinic encounters were rated by therapists as being protocol adherent. Significant reductions in PTSD and psychological symptoms were associated with protocol adherence, and this was particularly true for patients who began treatment above clinical thresholds for both PTSD and other psychological symptoms. However, as the number of sessions increased, the impact of protocol adherence was attenuated. Patient characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, and co-morbidity for other psychiatric disorders were not related to symptom change trajectories over time. These findings suggest that protocol adherence and efficiency in delivery of EBTs for the treatment of PTSD with AD is critical.     

Women Engineering Students: Competence Perceptions and Achievement Goals in the Freshman Engineering Course

Research suggests that women engineering students in the United States typically have lower competence perceptions than their male classmates. According to achievement goal theory, low competence perceptions are associated with avoidance achievement goals which involve a preoccupation with avoiding failure rather than a focus on approaching success. The current study was conducted to see if women in a freshmen engineering course would rate their competence lower than their male classmates and if they would be more likely to adopt avoidance achievement goals. Further, would lower competence perceptions (i.e., perceived ability, self-efficacy) and avoidance goals have negative effects on grades and interest in the freshman engineering course? A sample of 117 first-semester engineering students from a U.S. Midwestern University completed surveys several times during the semester. Data were also collected from a sample of 82 first-semester students enrolled in an introductory psychology course for comparison purposes. Women in the freshman engineering course reported lower competence perceptions and higher levels of avoidance achievement goals than did men in the engineering course and than men and women in the psychology course. However, there were no significant gender differences in course grades or interest in the engineering course. Further analyses revealed indirect effects of gender on grades and interest in the engineering course through the competence perceptions. The indirect effects were negative suggesting lower values for women in engineering. The avoidance achievement goals were not influential in the indirect effects. The implications of these finding for the persistence of women in engineering are discussed.     

Sales Success as Predicted by A Process Measure of Adaptability

Previous studies of sales performance have not used process measures to evaluate the sales interaction as it occurred. The purposes of this paper are to propose the use of a process measure of adaptability and to determine whether observed adaptability behaviors could predict sales success. Salespeople's observed adaptability was positively related to two measures of sales success in a sample of telemarketing sales representatives.

A process measure of adaptability could be used to facilitate the selection of sales trainees by encouraging marketers to hire people who exhibit more adaptability during interactions. Sales training could also be used to teach current salespeople to adjust their dominance levels in order to project more adaptability in sales interactions.     

Quality-of-life after penile prosthesis placed at radical prostatectomy

Abstract

The clinical and psychosocial effects of immediate penile prosthesis implantation at the time of radical prostatectomy (RP) were investigated in 97 consecutive patients and 68 partners. Prosthesis recipients reported more frequent sexual contact, fewer marital problems and slightly fewer sexual functioning problems than the RP-alone patients. There were no group differences on any sociodemographic characteristics, on disease recurrence, on physical and psychosocial functioning, or on reported depression. Patients who chose the prosthesis did, however, evidence less of a link between depression and functional limitations and between depression and marital problems. They also had lower levels of agreement with their partners in reporting their own depression, as compared to the patients who opted for RP surgery alone. We conclude that the penile prosthesis was associated with an increased frequency of sexual contact, a reduction in reported marital problems, and stylistic differences between the two patient groups in dealing with affect.     

Relationship Quality as a Moderator of Anxiety in Siblings of Children Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders or Down Syndrome

The purpose of this study was to examine typically-developing adolescents’ perceived relationship quality with their developmentally-disabled sibling, specifically siblings diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or Down syndrome (DS). The 119 eleven through seventeen-year-old adolescent participants (M = 13.32, SD = 1.90) completed an online survey that assessed demographics, sibling relationship quality, and anxiety. Results showed that siblings of children with DS have a greater overall sibling relationship quality than do siblings of children with an ASD. Results further indicated that reporting more negative interchanges within the sibling relationship was related to higher levels of anxiety regardless of sibling disability type. Lastly, sibling relationship quality moderated the relation between sibling disability type and anxiety. These findings promote greater understanding of the sibling dynamic in families with children with developmental disabilities and suggest the need for establishing more research and greater clinical evaluation in this area. Furthermore, the current study suggests that therapeutic intervention to address the sibling relationship quality within children diagnosed with ASDs and their typically-developing siblings would be beneficial in order to increase social support within the relationship as well as decrease the amount of negative interchanges within the sibling relationship. Results also suggested that decreasing the amount of negative interchanges within the sibling relationship may decrease the level of anxiety the typically-developing sibling reports.     

The Representation of Left-Right Orientation: A Dissociation Between Imagery and Perceptual Recognition

Eight experiments were conducted to determine whether visual mental imagery preserves left-right orientation in conditions where recognition memory apparently does not. Such a dissociation would suggest that information in memory preserves left-right orientation, but the process that matches input to such representations does not respect this distinction. In the experiments reported here, participants were asked to use one of two methods to indicate which way Abraham Lincoln faces on a US penny: Either they selected the correct profile from two sketches, or they formed a mental image and then specified the direction. If participants had just viewed pennies and were asked to visualize a particular one, they performed far better than chance; in contrast, if imagery was discouraged, they performed poorly when recognizing the profiles perceptually. However, unless actively discouraged from doing so, most participants reported spontaneously visualizing pennies prior to perceptual recognition if they had recently seen pennies.     

The ethics of relationality: Judith Butler and social critique

This article takes up the work of Judith Butler in order to present a vision of ethics that avoids two common yet problematic positions: on the one hand, the skeptical position that ethical norms are so constitutive of who we are that they are ultimately impossible to assess and, on the other hand, the notion that we are justified in our commitment to any ethical norm that appears foundational to our identity. With particular attention to the trajectory of Butler’s project from The Psychic Life of Power to Giving an Account of Oneself, the article discusses the shortcomings of these two positions and the virtues of the alternative account that Butler develops during this period.     

Inhibition of return can be associated with object identity but not with object category

In this study, pre-schoolers and a comparison sample of fifth graders and high school students were presented with prediction tasks that varied by content of the base rate information (perceptual vs semantic) either presented alone (simple task) or accompanied by individuating data (complex task). Base rate choices, confidence scores, and explanations of the choices were registered. It is assumed that the presence of content effects in the processing of the base rates is in favour of a mental model account. Results indicated that pre-schoolers are able to build one-dimensional models with perceptual base rates in simple tasks. Fifth graders and high school students are able to build one-dimensional models with both types of content in simple tasks, as well as two-dimensional models in complex tasks. There is a local facilitation effect of semantic contents for fifth graders that disappears for high-school students. Consistency between subjects' choices, confidence scores and rationales depends on the subjects' grade, the number of sources involved, and the base rate content. Developmental trends are discussed in the light of previous research within formal, heuristic, and mental model approaches.     

Invited Address at the Occasion of the Bertelson Award 2005 Impairments in visual discrimination in amnesia: Implications for theories of the role of medial temporal lobe regions in human memory

A prominent and long-standing view of human long-term memory is that structures within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) work together to support the acquisition of memory for facts and events. In contrast to this view, recent studies in rats and non-human primates suggest dissociations in function between regions comprising the MTL. Evidence in support of such specialisation in humans, however, has been inconclusive, leading some researchers to propose that human MTL functions as a unitary system uniquely specialised for the acquisition and storage of long-term memory. This paper reviews some of the key studies from the animal and human literature that support an account of functional differentiation and discusses the different theoretical positions that have emerged from their findings. A series of recent experiments in humans designed to determine whether there is functional homogeneity in MTL regions across species are also reviewed and an alternative account of human memory—in which long-term memory is dependent upon representations distributed throughout the human brain rather than one specialised system—is proposed.