It’s not what you said,it’s how you said it: An analysis of therapist vocal features during psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is a conversation, whereby, at its foundation, many interventions are derived from the therapist talking. Research suggests that the voice can convey a variety of emotional and social information, and individuals may change their voice based on the context and content of the conversation (e.g. talking to a baby or delivering difficult news to patients with cancer). As such, therapists may adjust aspects of their voice throughout a therapy session depending on if they are beginning a therapy session and checking in with a client, conducting more therapeutic ‘work’ or ending the session. In this study, we modelled three vocal features—pitch, energy and rate—with linear and quadratic multilevel models to understand how therapists’ vocal features change throughout a therapy session. We hypothesised that all three vocal features would be best fit with a quadratic function—starting high and more congruent with a conversational voice, decreasing during the middle portions of therapy where more therapeutic interventions were being administered, and increasing again at the end of the session. Results indicated a quadratic model for all three vocal features was superior in fitting the data, as compared to a linear model, suggesting that therapists begin and end therapy using a different style of voice than in the middle of a session.     

The Silent Treatment? Changes in patient emotional expression after silence

Psychotherapy can be an emotionally laden conversation, where both verbal and nonverbal interventions may impact the therapeutic process. Prior research has postulated mixed results regarding how clients emotionally react following a silence after the therapist is finished talking, potentially due to studying a limited range of silences with primarily qualitative and self-report methodologies. A quantitative exploration may illuminate new findings. Utilising research and automatic data processing from the field of linguistics, we analysed the full range of silence lengths (0.2–24.01 s), and measures of emotional expression—vocally encoded arousal and emotional valence from the works spoken—of 84 audio recordings of Motivational Interviewing sessions. We hypothesised that both the level and the variance of client emotional expression would change as a function of silence length; however, due to the mixed results in the literature, the direction of emotional change was unclear. We conducted a multilevel linear regression to examine how the level of client emotional expression changed across silence length, and an ANOVA to examine the variability of client emotional expression across silence lengths. Results of both analyses indicated that as silence length increased, emotional expression largely remained the same. Broadly, we demonstrated a weak connection between silence length and emotional expression, indicating no persuasive evidence that silence leads to client emotional processing and expression.     

Assessment of predation risk through conspecific cues by anuran larvae

Animal Cognition - Accurate assessment of predation risk is critical for prey survival during predator–prey interactions. Prey can assess predation risk by the presence of cues dropped by...     

Does remote work erode trust in organizations? A within-person investigation in the COVID-19 context

The global COVID-19 pandemic led to a widespread increase in remote work arrangements. This trend raised concerns regarding the potential negative ramifications it might have for organizational trust and cooperation. We explored the initial effect of COVID-19 induced remote work on trust in organizations: trust in co-workers, trust in the supervisor and in the organization at large. In a four-wave longitudinal survey of remote workers (N ∼ 1000) in the UK conducted between May 2020 and August 2020 (first COVID wave), we examined the association between the share of remote work (out of total working hours) and different forms of trust at work. The results showed that, for the same individual, increasing the share of working hours spent remotely was associated with more trust in the organization at large (but not in the supervisor and co-workers). Further, during the months where individuals spent more time working remotely, they experienced lower turnover intentions (but not less burnout or more work engagement, productivity, and satisfaction) compared to the months where they spent less time working remotely. The results contribute to the literature on flexible work arrangements, organizational trust, and other work outcomes.     

Word substitution errors in a speeded picture-word task

Using a speeded-naming variant of the picture-word task, we found that word substitution errors can be elicited in the laboratory. In this variant of the task, participants often responded by saying the word instead of the picture's name. Such word substitution errors are interesting because they allow the evaluation of the relative merits of two broad classes of word production models. We obtained evidence in support of interactive models of word production. In addition, the error data presented evidence that speeded naming taps a late, name retrieval process and that picture naming is semantically mediated.     

Task Enjoyment: A Mediator Between Achievement Motives and Performance

Task enjoyment is an important component in social cognitive theories of achievement motivation and intrinsic motivation. Combining these theories with the classic achievement-motivation theory we predicted that task enjoyment and its facilitating behavioral manifestations are associated with an approach-oriented achievement motive and only when individuals anticipate forthcoming competence feedback. In the present study we regarded task enjoyment as a mediator between the achievement motive and performance. First, a two-way ANOVA design was adopted. Success-motivated individuals performed better in a reaction task than failure-motivated individuals, and they reported more task enjoyment during performance. This relationship was not dependent on whether competence information had been announced or not. Second, path analyses showed as expected that the relationship between achievement motivation and performance was mediated by task enjoyment. This mediation was observed only under the condition that individuals expected competence feedback. These results were discussed considering current theories of achievement motivation and intrinsic motivation. It is shown that the findings enrich the related nomological networks in some important ways.     

ASSESSMENT OF SELF-INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR MAINTAINED BY ACCESS TO SELF-RESTRAINT MATERIALS

This study replicates and extends prior research showing that access to self-restraint materials can reinforce self-injurious behavior (SIB). A functional analysis was conducted showing that SIB occurred at differentially high rates when access to restraint materials (a leather jacket) was made contingent on the behavior. In addition, an alone condition during the functional analysis showed that SIB did not occur in the absence of restraint materials. Finally, a treatment analysis showed that functional communication training was effective using an alternative reinforcer.     

Units of counting: Developmental changes

Insofar as counting is directed toward a definite quantification goal, only items that qualify as valid instances of what is being quantified should be included in the count. Thus, the choice of what to treat as a unit to be counted depends upon one's quantification goals. The present research examined developmental changes in the way children define units for counting. In the first experiment, children were shown arrays of toy animals and asked to count either the number of families or the number of individuals within a family. In the second and third experiments, the stimuli were objects that came apart into two pieces. Children were shown arrays composed of some intact objects and some objects that were separated into their parts, and they were asked either to count the number of wholes or the number of pieces in the entire array. Virtually all the counts children generated were based on some type of common unit, even if it was only defined by physical discreteness. However, marked age differences emerged in children's adaptation of their counting units to what they were asked to count.     

Peer-Group and Romantic Relationships in Adolescents from Intact and Separated Families

The impact of family structure (intact vs. separated) on adolescents' friendship and romantic relationship were assessed, using an Italian representative sample of 300 adolescents. Findings reveal some significant differences related to family structure. Compared to adolescents from intact homes, adolescents from separated families display a higher level of distrust of others, are less likely to foresee marriage as a certain step in their lives, and show a higher degree of fear toward marriage. Contrary to expectations, there is no significant difference either in the extent and the frequency of contacts with the peer network or the existence of a romantic relationship among the two groups of adolescents. Implications are discussed.     

Components of Stroop-like interference in word reading

Previous research has shown that the naming of the picture of, for example, a guitar is substantially delayed when it is accompanied by the name of an object from the same semantic category (e.g., piano) as compared to a nonword control (e.g., xxxxx). La Heij (1988a) has shown that a large part of this Stroop-like interference effect can be attributed to two semantic characteristics of the distractor word: its semantic similarity to the target picture and its semantic relevance in the task at hand. Furthermore, it was argued that the locus of these two interference effects is the process of target-name retrieval. If this is true, semantic interference effects should diminish or disappear when, instead of a picture-naming task, a word-reading task is used. In the present study this prediction is tested. The effects of four distractor characteristics are examined: semantic relatedness, semantic relevance, response set membership and wordness. In contrast to the original picture-naming task only the effect of wordness reached significance. The results of experiments 2 and 3 show that the absence of significant semantic context effects in experiment 1 is not simply due to the fact that a distractor word has less time to affect a word-reading response. The results are taken to support a name-retrieval account of semantic interference in color and picture naming.