Depressive symptoms and use of perspective taking within a communicative context

Objective: The ability to take the perspective of one's conversational partner is essential for successful communication. We assessed whether individuals who report high levels of depressive symptoms have more difficulty with navigating this interpersonal task. Method: Undergraduate students participated in a computerised communication task that, on some trials, required perspective taking (N=125). Results: When participants were grouped according to their self-reported depressive symptoms, the “dysphoric group” (BDI ≥ 16, n=37) showed more errors than a “non-dysphoric group” (BDI ≤ 10, n=56) on trials requiring participants to use the perspective of the speaker, but not on control trials where perspective taking was not required. The dysphoric group demonstrated slower response times overall. Conclusions: Individuals with moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms are more challenged by using a speaker's perspective to interpret statements.     

Compression as a Universal Principle of Animal Behavior

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non‐human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here, we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior that reflects selection for efficiency of coding.     

Helping My Patients Find New Spontaneous Ways of Responding Emotionally: A 30-Year Long Journey as a Psychoanalyst

I started my journey as a psychoanalyst with the conviction that I had to provide my patients, through interpretation, with explicit information about their instinctual unconscious that they didn’t have access to. Now I think that through words (often using highly metaphorical, poetic language, with its tone and rhythm), patient and analyst coconstruct new forms of relating, that is to say, new forms of mutual regulation of emotions. The aim of therapeutic change is that patients find new, spontaneous forms of reacting emotionally. This change, from the psychoanalysis of suspicion to the psychoanalysis of the secure base from where new regulating strategies are co-constructed, is parallel to the change in values observed at a social level: central values of industrialized society, such as obedience, authority, discipline, etc., are being replaced by values such as authenticity and respect for one’s uniqueness in electronic societies.     

Peer relationships and academic achievement as interacting predictors of depressive symptoms during middle childhood

This article reports a longitudinal investigation that examines academic and social difficulties as predictors of depressive symptoms during middle childhood. Participants were 199 elementary school children (M=9.1 years) who were followed for 2 consecutive school years. In both years of the project, children completed a questionnaire assessing depressive symptoms and a peer nomination inventory assessing friendships and social standing. Grade point averages (GPAs) were obtained from a review of school records. Low GPAs were predictive of depressive symptoms, but this effect did not hold for children who had numerous friends. Similarly, children who had relatively few friends tended to experience depressive symptoms. However, the effect was attenuated for children with high GPAs. Taken together, the findings suggest that competencies in 1 domain can moderate the risks associated with difficulties in the other domain.     

Impact of Panel Gene Testing for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer on Patients

Recent advances in next generation sequencing have enabled panel gene testing, or simultaneous testing for mutations in multiple genes for a clinical condition. With more extensive and widespread genetic testing, there will be increased detection of genes with moderate penetrance without established clinical guidelines and of variants of uncertain significance (VUS), or genetic variants unknown to either be disease-causing or benign. This study surveyed 232 patients who underwent genetic counseling for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer to examine the impact of panel gene testing on psychological outcomes, patient understanding, and utilization of genetic information. The survey used standardized instruments including the Impact of Event Scale (IES), Multidimensional Impact of Cancer Risk Assessment (MICRA), Satisfaction with Decision Instrument (SWD), Ambiguity Tolerance Scale (AT-20), genetics knowledge, and utilization of genetic test results. Study results suggested that unaffected individuals with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer who received positive results were most significantly impacted by intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and distress. However, scores were also modestly elevated among unaffected patients with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer who received VUS, highlighting the impact of ambiguous results that are frequent among patients undergoing genetic testing with large panels of genes. Potential risk factors for increased genetic testing-specific distress in this study included younger age, black or African American race, Hispanic origin, lower education level, and lower genetic knowledge and highlight the need for developing strategies to provide effective counseling and education to these communities, particularly when genetic testing utilizes gene panels that more commonly return VUS. More detailed pre-test education and counseling may help patients appreciate the probability of various types of test results and how results would be used clinically, and allow them to make more informed decisions about the type of genetic testing to select.     

The reference frame for encoding and retention of motion depends on stimulus set size

The goal of this study was to investigate the reference frames used in perceptual encoding and storage of visual motion information. In our experiments, observers viewed multiple moving objects and reported the direction of motion of a randomly selected item. Using a vector-decomposition technique, we computed performance during smooth pursuit with respect to a spatiotopic (nonretinotopic) and to a retinotopic component and compared them with performance during fixation, which served as the baseline. For the stimulus encoding stage, which precedes memory, we found that the reference frame depends on the stimulus set size. For a single moving target, the spatiotopic reference frame had the most significant contribution with some additional contribution from the retinotopic reference frame. When the number of items increased (Set Sizes 3 to 7), the spatiotopic reference frame was able to account for the performance. Finally, when the number of items became larger than 7, the distinction between reference frames vanished. We interpret this finding as a switch to a more abstract nonmetric encoding of motion direction. We found that the retinotopic reference frame was not used in memory. Taken together with other studies, our results suggest that, whereas a retinotopic reference frame may be employed for controlling eye movements, perception and memory use primarily nonretinotopic reference frames. Furthermore, the use of nonretinotopic reference frames appears to be capacity limited. In the case of complex stimuli, the visual system may use perceptual grouping in order to simplify the complexity of stimuli or resort to a nonmetric abstract coding of motion information.     

Trait and state negative affect interactions moderate inhibitory control performance in emotionally loaded conditions

Following the framework that controlled performance is dependent upon cognitive and emotional processes which are inherently inter-linked, effects of trait and state negative affect (NA) on inhibitory control (IC) were studied in two experiments using an emotional day-night task (EDNT) - an inhibition based decision-making task embedded with emotional content. It was hypothesized that the effects of processing negatively loaded stimuli would depend on trait levels of negative and positive affects, particularly in conditions that entail IC. In Experiment 1, EDNT performance was compared with performance of an emotionally loaded control task that required to perform a dominant response rather than to inhibit it. In Experiment 2, EDNT performance was compared with an emotionally loaded control task that required performing an alternative rule which did not involve inhibiting the dominant response. Results of both Experiments showed that participants high on NA trait reactivity showed improved performance while processing ‘sad’ content, only in the inhibitory task and not in either of the control tasks. Results point to an interaction of trait and state factors in IC, and highlight the notion that heightened NA may sub-serve inhibition in sad contexts, which require counter-intuitive operations.     

Willem Blok's Contribution to Abstract Algebraic Logic

Willem Blok was one of the founders of the field Abstract Algebraic Logic. The paper describes his research in this field. Dedicated to the memory of Willem Johannes Blok     

An integrated device to evaluate a driver’s functional state

In the field of cognitive ergonomics, research on car drivers requires multimodal in-vehicle systems for recording not only driving-related behavior, but also contextual information from their surroundings. In addition, reliable information concerning a driver’s functional state should be obtained. In this article, we describe an integrated device simultaneously recording specific physiological data, video recordings of the driver and environment, parameters from the vehicle, and contextual data. Physiological signals from the autonomic nervous system provide objective and quantitative information on the driver’s alertness and his/her ability to process specific driving-related stimuli or other nonspecific information. Consequently, recorded physiological responses can be related to individual driving events. Electrodermal and cardiac activities are sensitive to time-dependent variations in arousal level and to certain external stimuli, so there is great interest in studying drivers’ behavior via measured physiological signals that have been established as suitable behavioral indicators. The present integrated device is capable of processing the relevant indices from raw measured data in real time.