Is it the symptom or the relation to it? Investigating potential mediators of change in acceptance and commitment therapy for psychosis

Cognitive and behavioral interventions have been shown to be efficacious when used as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy for psychotic disorders. However, little previous research has investigated potential mediators of change in psychological treatments for psychosis. Acceptance and mindfulness-based therapies do not focus on directly reducing the psychotic symptoms themselves, but instead attempt to alter the patient's relationship to symptoms to decrease their negative impact. The current study examined this issue with data from a previously published randomized trial comparing brief treatment with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) versus treatment as usual for hospitalized patients with psychotic symptoms (Gaudiano & Herbert, 2006a). Results showed that the believability of hallucinations at posttreatment statistically mediated the effect of treatment condition on hallucination-related distress. Hallucination frequency did not mediate outcome. The current study is a first step toward understanding the potential mechanisms of action in psychological treatments for psychosis.     

The Use of Exploratory Factor Analysis and Principal Components Analysis in Communication Research

Exploratory factor analysis is a popular statistical technique used in communication research. Although exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and principal components analysis (PCA) are different techniques, PCA is often employed incorrectly to reveal latent constructs (i.e., factors) of observed variables, which is the purpose of EFA. PCA is more appropriate for reducing measured variables into a smaller set of variables (i.e., components) by keeping as much variance as possible out of the total variance in the measured variables. Furthermore, the popular use of varimax rotation raises some concerns about the relationships among the factors that researchers claim to discover. This paper discusses the distinct purposes of PCA and EFA, using two data sets as examples to highlight the differences in results between these procedures, and also reviews the use of each technique in three major communication journals: Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, and Communication Research.     

Untrained Temporal Differentiation and Equivalence Class Formation

The Psychological Record - The purposes of this study were to assess whether discriminative control over conjunc FR 5 t1 < IRT < t2 responding would transfer to members of stimulus...     

The impact of gender role conflict and counseling technique on psychological help seeking in men

We hypothesized that men's gender role conflict would predict attitudes towards psychological help-seeking after viewing counseling that focused on either client feelings or client cognitions. The sample was made up of 164 male undergraduates: 115 White, 13 African-American, 13 Hispanic, 18 Asian, 2 Portuguese, and 3 of unspecified ethnicity. Participants completed the Gender Role Conflict Scale (GRCS), viewed a videotape of a 10-minute counseling session that used interventions that were either emotion-focused or cognition-focused, and completed a measure of their attitudes towards seeking psychological help. Results indicated that men scoring high on gender role conflict who viewed the session that focused on feelings were least likely to indicate a willingness to seek psychological help compared to men in each of the three other conditions. We discuss implications for counseling interventions for men who adopt the traditional male gender role.A version of this paper was presented at the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada. We would like to thank Bob Cournoyer and Piet Lammert for portraying the counselor and client in the study.     

Gender differences in social support for socially anxious individuals

Given that social anxiety disorder is a common, chronic, debilitating disorder and socially anxious women appear to have different experiences related to social development and social support than men, it is essential that the gender differences in social anxiety and social support be understood. The present study examined perceived social support quantity and satisfaction in 23 women and 28 men seeking treatment for social anxiety disorder. Contrary to expectations, men and women did not differ on measures of social support. However, younger, unmarried women reported having smaller social support networks and less satisfaction with their social support networks than older, married women. Analyses of socially anxious men did not reveal such a pattern. The current study provides preliminary evidence that younger, single women have social support networks that are less satisfying than the social support networks of older, married women. Inclusion of social support modules within a cognitive behavioral treatment approach for social anxiety disorder may be warranted, particularly for young, unmarried women.     

Causal explanation improves judgment under uncertainty,but rarely in a Bayesian way

Three studies reexamined the claim that clarifying the causal origin of key statistics can increase normative performance on Bayesian problems involving judgment under uncertainty. Experiments 1 and 2 found that causal explanation did not increase the rate of normative solutions. However, certain types of causal explanation did lead to a reduction in the magnitude of errors in probability estimation. This effect was most pronounced when problem statistics were expressed in percentage formats. Experiment 3 used process-tracing methods to examine the impact of causal explanation of false positives on solution strategies. Changes in probability estimation following causal explanation were the result of a mixture of individual reasoning strategies, including non-Bayesian mechanisms, such as increased attention to explained statistics and approximations of subcomponents of Bayes’ rule. The results show that although causal explanation of statistics can affect the way that a problem is mentally represented, this does not necessarily lead to an increased rate of normative responding.     

Parafoveal letter-position coding in reading

The masked-priming lexical decision task has been the paradigm of choice for investigating how readers code for letter identity and position. Insight into the temporal integration of information between prime and target words has pointed out, among other things, that readers do not code for the absolute position of letters. This conception has spurred various accounts of the word recognition process, but the results at present do not favor one account in particular. Thus, employing a new strategy, the present study moves out of the arena of temporal- and into the arena of spatial information integration. We present two lexical decision experiments that tested how the processing of six-letter target words is influenced by simultaneously presented flanking stimuli (each stimulus was presented for 150 ms). We manipulated the orthographic relatedness between the targets and flankers, in terms of both letter identity (same/different letters based on the target’s outer/inner letters) and letter position (intact/reversed order of letters and of flankers, contiguous/noncontiguous flankers). Target processing was strongly facilitated by same-letter flankers, and this facilitatory effect was modulated by both letter/flanker order and contiguity. However, when the flankers consisted of the target’s inner-positioned letters alone, letter order no longer mattered. These findings suggest that readers may code for the relative position of letters using words’ edges as spatial points of reference. We conclude that the flanker paradigm provides a fruitful means to investigate letter-position coding in the fovea and parafovea.     

A Comparison of Paper and Computer Administered Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is one of the most widely used measures of young people’s mental health difficulties in research and clinical decision-making. Although the SDQ is available in both paper and computer survey formats, cross-format equivalences have yet to be established. The current study aimed to assess the measure’s equivalence across paper- and computer-based survey formats in a community-based school setting. The study examined self-reported measures completed by a matched sample of 11–14 year olds in secondary schools in England (589 completed paper version; 589 online version). Analyses demonstrate that the factor structure, although did not vary by survey format, resulted in poorly fitting models limiting the use of model based invariance testing. Results indicate that the measure does not operate similarly across different formats, with scale-level mean differences observed for the hyperactivity scale, which also affects the total difficulties score, with higher scores seen in the paper version. Responses to the impact supplement were also influenced by survey format, with higher impact in specific domains disclosed on the computer-based measure. Item-level differential item functioning was observed for four items in the measure; two from the prosocial scale where the DIF is large enough to affect the scale (DTF, ν² = 0.14). The inconsistency across survey formats highlights the need for more assessment of influences of different survey formats on young people, their perceived privacy and their mental health disclosures via different media. The findings also highlight the potential confounding effect of format when different methods of data collection are used, with a potentially substantive impact on cross-sample comparisons and within child clinical review.