Does Children's Colour Use Reflect the Emotional Content of their Drawings?

When children draw in clinical contexts, clinicians sometimes rely on children's colour use to make inferences about their emotional reaction to the subject of the drawing. Here, we examined whether children use colour to portray emotion in their drawings. In Experiment 1, children indicated their colour preferences and then coloured in outlines of figures characterized as nasty or nice. Children also drew complex, multi‐coloured pictures about their own happy or sad experiences. In Experiment 2, hospitalized children drew about being worried or scared in hospital and about their positive experiences. In both experiments, we examined the relation between children's colour use and their colour preferences. Three‐ to 10‐year‐old children used more preferred colours to colour in the nice outline. Although they were more likely to use non‐preferred colours to colour in the nasty outline, they tended to used a mix of preferred and non‐preferred colours. When both normal and hospitalized children produced drawings about positive and negative events, there was no relation between children's colour choices and their colour preferences; children primarily used preferred colours. These data suggest that clinicians should exercise extreme caution when interpreting the meaning of colour in children's drawings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anxiety reactivity and anxiety perseveration represent dissociable dimensions of trait anxiety

Trait anxiety is an individual-difference variable reflecting variation in state-anxiety elevations resulting from exposure to a stressor. It is usually measured using questionnaire instruments, such as the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T). The present research conceptually distinguishes, and independently assesses, two hypothetical dimensions of anxiety vulnerability which, it is argued, could plausibly make independent contributions to variance in trait-anxiety scores. These dimensions are anxiety reactivity, the probability of experiencing an anxiety reaction to a stressor, and anxiety perseveration, the persistence of anxiety symptoms once elicited. Participants were asked three questions about each STAI-T item. The traditional STAI-T question assessed how much of the time this symptom was experienced; the anxiety-reactivity question assessed the probability of experiencing the symptom in response to a stressor; and the anxiety-perseveration question assessed how long the symptom persisted, if elicited. Regression analysis determined that anxiety reactivity and anxiety perseveration scores both accounted for independent variance in trait-anxiety scores. It is argued that models of anxiety vulnerability should seek to differentiate both the causes and the consequences of elevated anxiety reactivity and increased anxiety perseveration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The next generation: the value of reminding

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of repeated processing in the context of the generation effect. In both experiments, participants studied words once or twice. Once-studied words either were read or were generated from a definition. Twice-studied words were read both times, generated both times, or read once and generated once. Free recall was best (in order of decreasing performance) after generating twice, after generating plus reading, and finally after generating once; any generation was better than purely reading. Recognition showed a similar pattern, except that the benefit of generating twice was not as striking as in recall and that reading plus generating was just as effective as generating twice. The overall pattern of results is accounted for by a simple model in which a second encoding results in a reminding of the first encoding, and this additional encoding supports subsequent recollection. This reminding is, consequently, more effective in recall than in recognition, and it operates in accordance with the principles of transfer-appropriate processing.     

Interval, blocking, and marking effects during the development of schedule-induced drinking in rats

Schedule-induced drinking (SID) can occur when food-deprived rats are given access to water while receiving pellets on an intermittent reinforcement schedule. These conditions can increase water intake excessively. The possible role of adventitious reinforcement of postpellet drinking was assessed by testing whether response-reinforcer contiguity, the relative predictiveness of a response, and whether it is marked are important in the development of SID. Rats exposed to a short interpellet interval acquired SID most rapidly, with this acquired drinking response maintained when animals were transferred to a longer interpellet interval, thus indicating an easy-to-hard effect (Experiment 1). Further experiments demonstrated that a stimulus (a brief-flashing house light) occurring prior to pellet delivery could block the acquisition of SID (Experiment 2), while a lick-contingent tone, intended to increase the associability of this response, produced more rapid acquisition of SID (Experiment 3). Analysis of lick distributions revealed that licking became concentrated in the first half of an interpellet interval only after several sessions. Overall, the results indicated that similar factors affect the acquisition of both SID and instrumental conditioning with delayed reinforcement, as is consistent with a superstitious conditioning account of SID development.     

Randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy and intolerance-of-uncertainty therapy for generalized anxiety disorder

This randomized controlled trial compared the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy (MCT) and intolerance-of-uncertainty therapy (IUT) for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in an outpatient context. Patients with GAD (N = 126) consecutively referred to an outpatient treatment center for anxiety disorder were randomly allocated to MCT, IUT, or a delayed treatment (DT) condition. Patients were treated individually for up to 14 sessions. Assessments were conducted before treatment (pretreatment), after the last treatment session (posttreatment), and six months after treatment had ended (follow-up). At posttreatment and follow-up assessments, substantial improvements were observed in both treatment conditions across all outcome variables. Both MCT and IUT, but not DT, produced significant reductions in GAD-specific symptoms with large effect sizes (ranging between 0.94 and 2.39) and high proportions of clinically significant change (ranging between 77% and 95%) on various outcome measures, and the vast majority of the patients (i.e., 91% in the MCT group, and 80% in the IUT group) no longer fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for GAD. Results further indicate that MCT produced better results than IUT. This was evident on most outcome measures, and also reflected in effect sizes and degree of clinical response and recovery.     

Did the Chinese Have a Change of Heart?

In their "The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China," Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre. Second, the operationalization of WFD is potentially misleading. And, third, dating the texts they use is extremely controversial. We conclude with some positive remarks.     

Reliability of upper extremity kinematics while performing different tasks in individuals with stroke

Assessments of upper extremity performance typically include qualitative rather than quantitative measures of functional ability. Kinematic analysis is an objective, discriminative measure that quantifies movement biomechanics; however, the use within the poststroke impaired upper extremity is not well established. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of upper extremity kinematics in 18 individuals with stroke and 9 healthy controls. Participants performed reaching and grasping tasks over 2 separate days and metrics included movement time, peak velocity, index of curvature, trunk displacement, maximum aperture, and percentage of the movement cycle where maximum aperture occurred. The results showed moderate to high intraclass correlation and low standard error of measurement values for most variables, demonstrating that kinematic analysis may be a feasible and useful tool to quantify upper extremity movement after stroke.     

Predicting support for racial transformation policies: Intergroup threat,racial prejudice,sense of group entitlement and strength of identification

Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self‐interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national telephone surveys which tested a theoretically based model of the predictors of policy support in post‐apartheid South Africa. The results provided limited support for Blumer's group position model. Compensatory and preferential treatment policies had different underlying predictors: Violated entitlement featured in the models of compensatory policy attitudes, but not preferential treatment policy attitudes, where threat was the strongest predictor. In addition to threat and violated entitlement, policy attitudes among the black sample were related to ingroup identification but those of the white sample were related to prejudice. The effects of these variables were in the opposite directions for the two samples: Policy support was associated with strong ingroup identification and high levels of threat among the black sample (i.e. prospective beneficiaries of the transformation policies), but with low levels of prejudice and threat among the white sample. We conclude by considering the implications that these findings have for social change programs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sources of Cognitive Exploration: Genetic Variation in the Prefrontal Dopamine System Predicts Openness/Intellect

The personality trait Openness/Intellect reflects the tendency to be imaginative, curious, perceptive, artistic, and intellectual - all characteristics that involve cognitive exploration. Little is known about the biological basis of Openness/Intellect, but the trait has been linked to cognitive functions of prefrontal cortex, and the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in motivation to explore. The hypothesis that dopamine is involved in Openness/Intellect was supported by examining its association with two genes that are central components of the prefrontal dopaminergic system. In two demographically different samples (children: N = 608; adults: N = 214), variation in the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) and the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (COMT) predicted Openness/Intellect, as main effects in the child sample and as a gene-gene interaction in adults.