Attitudes about psychotherapy: A qualitative study of introductory psychology students who have never been in psychotherapy and the influence of attachment style

Design: Interviews about attitudes about psychotherapy with 12 undergraduate students who had never been in psychotherapy were analysed using consensual qualitative research. Results: Participants believed that the client role is to disclose, be receptive, and be motivated; that the therapist role is to listen, support, and give advice; and that the therapeutic relationship should be close and personal. Participants had ideas about the benefits (a healing therapeutic relationship, personal and interpersonal changes) and the barriers (self‐stigma and public stigma, difficulty revealing, need to solve problems on own, cost) associated with seeking therapy, and they disliked the idea of being diagnosed. In contrast with participants who were securely attached, those who were insecurely attached more often wanted a professional therapeutic relationship, wanted the therapist to ask questions, mentioned fewer benefits to therapy, and thought that they would have difficulty disclosing to a therapist. Discussion: Implications for changing attitudes about psychotherapy and improving training programs for practitioners are discussed.     

High Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity, reward responsiveness, and goal-striving predict first onset of bipolar spectrum disorders: a prospective behavioral high-risk design

A prospective, behavioral high-risk design provided a theoretically guided examination of vulnerability to first onset of bipolar spectrum disorder based on the Behavioral Approach System (BAS) model. Adolescents (ages 14-19) at an "age of risk" for bipolar disorder onset were screened on BAS sensitivity by interviewers blind to current symptoms, lifetime history, and family history of psychopathology. Participants were selected with high versus moderate levels of BAS sensitivity and administered a lifetime diagnostic interview. Those with a bipolar spectrum disorder, psychosis, or hypomanic episode with onset prior to the BAS sensitivity assessment were excluded. High BAS (n = 171) and moderate BAS (n = 119) sensitivity participants in the final sample completed baseline measures of symptoms, goal-setting, and reward responsiveness and were followed prospectively with semistructured diagnostic interviews every 6 months. Consistent with the vulnerability hypothesis of the BAS model of bipolar disorder, high BAS participants had a greater likelihood, and shorter time to onset, of bipolar spectrum disorder than moderate BAS participants across an average of 12.8 months of follow-up (12.9% vs. 4.2%), controlling for baseline depressive and hypomanic symptoms, and family history of bipolar disorder. High reward responsiveness on a behavioral task and ambitious goal-striving for popular fame and financial success (but not impulsivity) also predicted first onset of bipolar spectrum disorder controlling for the covariates and BAS risk group, and ambitious goal-striving partially mediated the BAS risk group effect. We discuss implications of the findings for the BAS model of bipolar disorder and early intervention efforts.     

Validation of a Buddhist Coping Measure Among Primarily Non‐Asian Buddhists in the United States

Researchers have developed scales to measure religious coping among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. However, there is no quantitative measure of religious coping for Buddhists. The present study describes the development and initial validation of a scale of Buddhist coping (BCOPE). Eight hundred sixty participants in the United States completed the BCOPE along with demographic information and scales of adjustment to stress. Construct validity of the BCOPE is demonstrated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which reveals 14 types of Buddhist coping. BCOPE subscales exhibited criterion validity through significant correlations with outcome measures. The BCOPE has incremental validity, predicting adjustment over and above demographic and global religious measures. The research and practical implications of the BCOPE are discussed.     

Effects of speed of word processing on semantic access: the case of bilingualism

Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to count the number of letters in pseudowords and actively disregard words. They were not explicitly told that pairs of words in immediate succession were embedded and could either be semantically related or not. We expected that slower word processing in bilinguals would result in semantic access indexed by semantic priming. As expected, bilinguals showed significant semantic priming, indexed by an N400 modulation, whilst monolinguals did not. Moreover, bilinguals were slower in performing the task. The results suggest that bilinguals cannot discriminate between pseudowords and words without accessing semantic information whereas monolinguals can dismiss English words on the basis of subsemantic information.     

Is dyslexia a visual perceptive disorder? New empirical data

Several studies have shown that a phonological deficit is the origin of developmental dyslexia, because dyslexics have important difficulties in mapping orthographic to phonological codes. However, visual criteria are still used for the diagnosis of dyslexia and to develop methods of intervention. This study attempts to determine whether there are visual problems in dyslexic children. To this aim, dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties, matched by chronological age, participated in two experiments. One study was based on the Reversal test and the other was a visual decision task in which participants had to decide whether two letters were the same or different. There were 40 pairs of letters, to measure reaction times and mistakes. The results showed that dyslexics had similar performance to controls in the detection of different visual stimuli. Developmental dyslexics do not appear to have visual perceptual problems, but a particular difficulty to retrieve the phonological code of graphemes.     

Perception mirrors production in 14- and 18-month-olds: the case of coda consonants

In a word learning experiment, 14- and 18-month-old infants are tested on their perceptual sensitivity to coda-consonant omissions. The results indicate that 14-month-olds are not sensitive to coda consonant omissions, showing a parallel with the omission of target coda consonants in early child language productions. At 18 months, infants are sensitive to coda-omission. The study strengthens the hypothesis that phonological wellformedness constraints influence infants' speech processing in general, and might restrict what is stored in their initial lexical representations. A lexical representation lacking information on the target coda consonant is, in turn, a likely source for coda-omissions in production.     

Knowledge and Concern about STIs/HIV and Sociodemographic Variables Associated with Getting Tested for HIV Among the General Population in Spain

HIV testing is important in terms of prevention and treatment. However, HIV testing rates in the Spanish general population remains low. Therefore, HIV testing promotion constitutes a key issue. A high level of knowledge about HIV/AIDS is associated with having been tested for HIV. The general aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of people who had ever been tested for HIV in Spain. The sample consisted of 1,106 participants from the general population — 60.0% females and 40.0% males — aged between 17 and 55 years old. The assessment instruments were a questionnaire on sociodemographic data and HIV testing, a scale of knowledge about STIs and HIV/AIDS, and a scale of concern about STIs/HIV. Results showed that greater knowledge about STIs and HIV was associated with a greater likelihood of being tested for HIV (OR = .77; 95.0% CI = .73–.82; p < .05). In addition, higher concern about HIV/AIDS decreased the likelihood of not having been tested for HIV (OR = .87; 95.0% CI = .83–.92; p < .05). In fact, the higher participants concern about STIs was, the lower their likelihood of not having been tested for HIV was (OR = .87; 95.0% CI = .83–.91; p < .05). It is necessary to promote HIV testing in the general population as well as to consider their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics.     

The paradoxical self: Awareness,solipsism and first-rank symptoms in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia as a pathology of self-awareness has attracted much attention from philosophical theorists and empirical scientists alike. I view schizophrenia as a basic self-disturbance leading to a lifeworld of solipsism adopted by the sufferer and explain how this adoption takes place, which then manifests in ways such as first-rank psychotic symptoms. I then discuss the relationships between these symptoms, not as isolated mental events, but as end-products of a loss of agency and ownership, and argue that symptoms like thought insertion and other ego-boundary disorders are by nature a multitude of paradoxes created by a fragmented awareness. I argue that such fragmentation does not always require or lead to a delusional elaboration as the definitive feature of its phenomenology, and present reasons for the role of the first-person pronoun as a mere metaphor used to represent the patient’s bizarre experiences where sensory perception and thinking processes converge. Further, I discuss the initial benefits of adopting a solipsistic stance and how despite being a maladaptive strategy, it nevertheless acts as a protective barrier for the integrity of one’s self. Lastly, I offer some suggestions for clinical practice, emphasizing the importance of understanding the patient’s suffering in any therapeutic alliance.     

Parsing Heuristic and Forward Search in First‐Graders' Game‐Play Behavior

Seventy‐three children between 6 and 7 years of age were presented with a problem having ambiguous subgoal ordering. Performance in this task showed reliable fingerprints: (a) a non‐monotonic dependence of performance as a function of the distance between the beginning and the end‐states of the problem, (b) very high levels of performance when the first move was correct, and (c) states in which accuracy of the first move was significantly below chance. These features are consistent with a non‐Markov planning agent, with an inherently inertial decision process, and that uses heuristics and partial problem knowledge to plan its actions. We applied a statistical framework to fit and test the quality of a proposed planning model (Monte Carlo Tree Search). Our framework allows us to parse out independent contributions to problem‐solving based on the construction of the value function and on general mechanisms of the search process in the tree of solutions. We show that the latter are correlated with children's performance on an independent measure of planning, while the former is highly domain specific.     

The Embodied Penman: Effector‐Specific Motor–Language Integration During Handwriting

Several studies have illuminated how processing manual action verbs (MaVs) affects the programming or execution of concurrent hand movements. Here, to circumvent key confounds in extant designs, we conducted the first assessment of motor–language integration during handwriting—a task in which linguistic and motoric processes are co‐substantiated. Participants copied MaVs, non‐manual action verbs, and non‐action verbs as we collected measures of motor programming and motor execution. Programming latencies were similar across conditions, but execution was faster for MaVs than for the other categories, regardless of whether word meanings were accessed implicitly or explicitly. In line with the Hand‐Action‐Network Dynamic Language Embodiment (HANDLE) model, such findings suggest that effector‐congruent verbs can prime manual movements even during highly automatized tasks in which motoric and verbal processes are naturally intertwined. Our paradigm opens new avenues for fine‐grained explorations of embodied language processes.