Questionnaire Assessment Potentially Overestimates Anxiety in Parkinson's Disease

Assessment of anxiety in Parkinson's disease (PD) is complicated by symptoms, such as trembling and shaking, that the two disorders have in common. This symptom overlap produces a potential for overestimation of the rate and severity of anxiety when assessed by self-report questionnaire. The purpose of this study is to estimate the extent to which anxiety scores in PD patients might be overestimated by two commonly-used mood state questionnaires. Fifty-nine patients with PD were administered the Beck Anxiety Inventory and the Profile of Mood States. Results indicate that the rate of clinically significant anxiety on these measures is indeed higher than the rate of clinical anxiety as determined by interview alone, suggesting the potential for overestimation of anxiety in PD when using self-report questionnaires.     

Choosing the best method for local validity estimation: relative accuracy of meta-analysis versus a local study versus Bayes-analysis

This study assessed the relative accuracy of 3 techniques--local validity studies, meta-analysis, and Bayesian analysis--for estimating test validity, incremental validity, and adverse impact in the local selection context. Bayes-analysis involves combining a local study with nonlocal (meta-analytic) validity data. Using tests of cognitive ability and personality (conscientiousness) as predictors, an empirically driven selection scenario illustrates conditions in which each of the 3 estimation techniques performs best. General recommendations are offered for how to estimate local parameters, based on true population variability and the number of studies in the meta-analytic prior. Benefits of empirical Bayesian analysis for personnel selection are demonstrated, and equations are derived to help guide the choice of a local validity technique (i.e., meta-analysis vs. local study vs. Bayes-analysis).     

‘Who's the Thief?’ The Influence of Knowledge and Experience on Early Detection of Criminal Intentions

Our study investigates if people are able to recognize thieves based on their nonverbal behavior prior to committing the crime. We implemented authentic closed‐circuit television footage from thefts committed at an international airport into a computer‐based test. Five groups of participants (students, police recruits, inexperienced police officers, experienced police officers, and criminal investigators) were studied. The results show that criminals display nonverbal behavior that can be used by observers for early recognition of criminal intentions. In addition, early recognition seems to benefit from knowledge about the criminals' modi operandi (criminal investigators performed best), which renders early recognition teachable and trainable. Further, all participants seem to be biased towards innocence, but this bias was less pronounced in police officers than in students. These findings are discussed in relation to the well‐documented truth‐bias and investigator‐bias in lie detection research as well as taking our measurement method into account.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist

There is increasing evidence for the significant contribution provided by sport psychologists within applied coaching environments. However, this rarely considers their skills/knowledge being applied when refining athletes’ already learned and well-established motor skills. Therefore, this article focuses on how a sport psychologist might assist a coach and athlete to implement long-term permanent and pressure proof refinements. It highlights key contributions at each stage of the Five-A model—designed to deliver these important outcomes—providing both psychomotor and psychosocial input to the support delivery. By employing these recommendations, sport psychologists can make multiple positive contributions to completion of this challenging task.     

Re-examining selective adaptation: Fatiguing feature detectors,or distributional learning?

When a listener hears many good examples of a /b/ in a row, they are less likely to classify other sounds on, e.g., a /b/-to-/d/ continuum as /b/. This phenomenon is known as selective adaptation and is a well-studied property of speech perception. Traditionally, selective adaptation is seen as a mechanistic property of the speech perception system, and attributed to fatigue in acoustic-phonetic feature detectors. However, recent developments in our understanding of non-linguistic sensory adaptation and higher-level adaptive plasticity in speech perception and language comprehension suggest that it is time to re-visit the phenomenon of selective adaptation. We argue that selective adaptation is better thought of as a computational property of the speech perception system. Drawing on a common thread in recent work on both non-linguistic sensory adaptation and plasticity in language comprehension, we furthermore propose that selective adaptation can be seen as a consequence of distributional learning across multiple levels of representation. This proposal opens up new questions for research on selective adaptation itself, and also suggests that selective adaptation can be an important bridge between work on adaptation in low-level sensory systems and the complicated plasticity of the adult language comprehension system.     

Correlates of Post-traumatic Growth Following a Myocardial Infarction: A Systematic Review

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - Correlates of post-traumatic growth (PTG) have been examined in the area of health psychology previously, with much focus on aspects of...     

The Impact of Community Mental Health Programs for Australian Youth: A Systematic Review

Australia has undergone significant youth mental health reform over the past 10 years, leading to numerous studies examining the effects of community-based mental health care programs for Australian youth. However, no synthesis of this literature currently exists. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to: (1) describe the types of community-based mental health programs that have been delivered to Australian youth in the past 10 years; and (2) examine their impact in improving young people’s mental health symptomology and psychosocial functioning. A systematic search of the peer-reviewed literature was conducted. Studies were included if they evaluated the extent to which such programs improved mental health symptomology (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use) and/or psychosocial outcomes (e.g., social functioning, school engagement, employment) for Australian youth aged 10–25 years. Thirty-seven studies were included. Four types of community-based youth mental health care programs were identified: therapy (n?=?16), case management (n?=?9), integrated ‘one-stop-shop’ (n?=?6) and lifestyle (n?=?6) programs. The majority of therapeutic programs were effective in reducing mental health symptomology. Case management and integrated approaches consistently yielded significant improvements in both symptomology and psychosocial outcomes. Lifestyle programs were effective in alleviating depressive symptoms, but inconclusive for other outcomes. This review provides support for youth-friendly, systemic, multidisciplinary and integrated assertive outreach models of community mental health care to improve outcomes for young Australians experiencing mental health concerns. Several recommendations for future research are provided to strengthen the local evidence-base supporting community mental health programs to ultimately enhance young people’s life trajectory.

     

The elephant in the room: attention to salient scene features increases with comedic expertise

Cognitive Processing - What differentiates the joke writing strategy employed by professional comedians from non-comedians? Previous MRI work found that professional comedians relied to a greater...     

Culture and the distinctiveness motive: constructing identity in individualistic and collectivistic contexts

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker-and, if anything, was stronger-in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism-collectivism was found to moderate the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing beliefs and values in an individual's context, rather than the individual's own beliefs and values, that account for these differences.