Defining the Assessment and Treatment Competencies to Deliver Low-Intensity Cognitive Behavior Therapy: A Multi-Center Validation Study

Despite the vastly increased dissemination of the low-intensity (LI) version of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for the treatment of anxiety and depression, no valid and reliable indices of the LI-CBT clinical competencies currently exist. This research therefore sought to develop and evaluate two measures: the low-intensity assessment competency scale (LIAC) and the low-intensity treatment competency scale (LITC). Inductive and deductive methods were used to construct the competency scales and detailed rating manuals were prepared. Two studies were then completed. The first study used a quantitative, fully-crossed design and the second a multi-center, quantitative longitudinal design. In study one, novice, qualified, and expert LI-CBT practitioners rated an LI-CBT assessment session (using the LIAC) and an LI-CBT treatment session (using the LITC). Study two used the LIAC and LITC across four training sites to analyze the competencies of LI-CBT practitioners over time, across raters, and in relation to the actor/patients’ feedback concerning helpfulness, the alliance, and willingness to return. Both the LIAC and LITC were found to be single factor scales with good internal, test-retest reliability and reasonable inter-rater reliability. Both measures were sensitive to measuring change in clinical competence. The LIAC had good concurrent, criterion, discriminant, and predictive validity, while the LITC had good concurrent, criterion, and predictive validity, but limited discriminant validity. A score of 18 accurately delineated a minimum level of competence in LI-CBT assessment and treatment practice, with incompetent practice associated with patient disengagement. These observational ratings scales can contribute to the clinical governance of the burgeoning use of LI-CBT interventions for anxiety and depression in routine services and also in the methods of controlled studies.     

Flexible Utility Function Approximation via Cubic Bezier Splines

Psychometrika - In intertemporal and risky choice decisions, parametric utility models are widely used for predicting choice and measuring individuals’ impulsivity and risk aversion. However,...     

Perceived discrimination is associated with poorer health and well‐being outcomes among Pacific peoples in New Zealand

Our study investigated the association between perceived discrimination and outcomes related to health and well‐being for Pacific adults in New Zealand. We examined personal and group discrimination from the 2013 wave of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (n = 429 women and 196 men). Personal discrimination was associated with poorer health and well‐being outcomes (higher psychological distress and lower self‐esteem, subjective evaluation of health, satisfaction with life and personal well‐being). Group discrimination, in contrast, was associated with poorer well‐being but not health outcomes (lower subjective evaluation of health and personal well‐being). These findings corroborate previous research and highlight the corrosive effect of discrimination towards health and well‐being among Pacific communities in New Zealand.     

Examining abuse in online media

While online spaces and media offer unique possibilities for participating in critical and mundane communication, these also introduce several problems in the form of abuse such as trolling, flaming, or other anti‐social behavior. Social and personality psychologists offer a range of explanations for abusive behavior online. Here we distinguish between explanations that treat online abuse as readily known and consequently proceed with examining possible causes of such abuse, and those that treat abuse as a situated act of communication worth examining in its own right. The latter examines how abuse is accomplished, treated, and negotiated in specific online settings. A central advantage of doing so is that the specifics and details of instances of abuse become amenable to examination and consequently allow for identification of in situ means by which abuse maybe challenged. In taking this approach, online abuse is examined for how it is produced and situated in specific social and interactional settings.     

A taxometric study of the Adult Attachment Interview

This study is the first to examine the latent structure of individual differences reflected in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985), a commonly used and well-validated measure designed to assess an adult's current state of mind regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. P. E. Meehl's (1995) taxometric methods (i.e., MAXCOV-HITMAX) were applied to data from 504 AAIs. Analyses revealed that the variation underlying secure versus dismissing states of mind was more consistent with a dimensional than a taxonic model. (Taxometric analyses of preoccupation were indeterminate.) In addition, variation in secure adults' (n=278) reports about their early experiences revealed little evidence for qualitative groups of earned- and continuous-secures. Rather, the inferred life experiences of secure adults appeared to be distributed continuously. Findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications regarding the phenomenon of earned-security specifically and variation underlying secure and insecure states of mind more generally. The consequences of these analyses for AAI reliability training and coding are also explored.     

The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: an empirical rapprochement

Although 10 studies have been published on the empirical overlap of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and measures of self-reported attachment style, results in this literature have been inconsistently interpreted in narrative reviews. This report was designed as a rapprochement of the AAI and attachment style literatures and includes 3 studies. Study 1 (combined N = 961) is a meta-analytic review showing that by J. Cohen's (1992) criteria (mean r = .09), the association between AAI security and attachment style dimensions is trivial to small. Study 2 (N = 160) confirms meta-analytic results with state-of-the-art assessments of attachment security and also examines attachment dimensions in relation to the Big 5 personality traits. Finally, Study 3 is an investigation of 50 engaged couples that shows that developmental and social psychological measures of attachment security predict somewhat distinct--though theoretically anticipated--aspects of functioning in adult relationships.     

Selective deficits in episodic feeling of knowing in ageing: A novel use of the general knowledge task

Failure to recall an item from memory can be accompanied by the subjective experience that the item is known but currently unavailable for report. The feeling of knowing (FOK) task allows measurement of the predictive accuracy of this reflective judgement. Young and older adults were asked to provide answers to general knowledge questions both prior to and after learning, thus measuring both semantic and episodic memory for the items. FOK judgements were made at each stage for all unrecalled responses, providing a measure of predictive accuracy for semantic and episodic knowledge. Results demonstrated a selective effect of age on episodic FOK resolution, with older adults found to have impaired episodic FOK accuracy while semantic FOK accuracy remained intact. Although recall and recognition measures of episodic memory are equivalent between the two age groups, older adults may have been unable to access contextual details on which to base their FOK judgements. The results suggest that older adults are not able to accurately predict future recognition of unrecalled episodic information, and consequently may have difficulties in monitoring recently encoded memories.     

Non‐Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross‐Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns (N  = 400), and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers (N  = 56) with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns (e.g., Can you see, hear, feel, or touch this? Yes/No). Each naïve participant heard pre‐recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non‐arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning.