The Impact of Demand Characteristics on Brief Acceptance- and Control-Based Interventions for Pain Tolerance

The present analog study compared the effectiveness of an acceptance- and control-based intervention on pain tolerance using a cold pressor task, and is a partial replication and extension of the Hayes, Bissett et al. (Hayes, S. C., Bissett, R.T., Korn, Z., Zettle, R. D., Rosenfarb, I. S., Cooper, L. D., & Grundt, A. M. (1999). The impact of acceptance versus control rationales on pain tolerance. The Psychological Record, 49, 33-47) study. Our aim was to test the effects of a nonspecific source of therapeutic change within the context of ACT therapy. Otherwise healthy undergraduates (N = 20) were exposed to a cold pressor task before, immediately after, and 10 min following one of the two interventions. Half of the participants also were assigned to a high demand characteristic condition in which the experimenter maintained close physical proximity, eye contact, and placed subtle social pressure on participants to please the experimenter. The results showed that the most important factor influencing latency to withstand the cold pressor task was social pressure. The acceptance-based intervention was more subject to demand than the control strategy. Evaluative ratings of pain were unaffected by the demand manipulation. The current data suggest that demand characteristics can exert a significant positive impact on the outcome of therapeutic protocols. The implications of this view for acceptance- and control-based psychosocial interventions are discussed.     

Contextualized personality: traditional and new assessment procedures

We describe our ongoing program of research related to the assessment of contextualized personality, focusing on social roles and cultural cues as contextual factors. First, we present our research employing the traditional assessment approach, wherein participants are asked to rate explicitly their personality across several different roles. We argue that this hypothetical approach is potentially susceptible to the influence of stereotypes, social desirability, and demand characteristics. We therefore describe the development of three novel and subtle assessment procedures that are based on obtaining online self-representations that are activated while occupying a specific context. Finally, the strengths and limitations of all four approaches, as well as directions for future research in the study of contextualized personality, are discussed.     

Anxiety and sensitivity to gaze direction in emotionally expressive faces

This study investigated the role of neutral, happy, fearful, and angry facial expressions in enhancing orienting to the direction of eye gaze. Photographs of faces with either direct or averted gaze were presented. A target letter (T or L) appeared unpredictably to the left or the right of the face, either 300 ms or 700 ms after gaze direction changed. Response times were faster in congruent conditions (i.e., when the eyes gazed toward the target) relative to incongruent conditions (when the eyes gazed away from the target letter). Facial expression did influence reaction times, but these effects were qualified by individual differences in self-reported anxiety. High trait-anxious participants showed an enhanced orienting to the eye gaze of faces with fearful expressions relative to all other expressions. In contrast, when the eyes stared straight ahead, trait anxiety was associated with slower responding when the facial expressions depicted anger. Thus, in anxiety-prone people attention is more likely to be held by an expression of anger, whereas attention is guided more potently by fearful facial expressions.     

Right-hemisphere reading in a case of developmental deep dyslexia

The right-hemisphere hypothesis of deep dyslexia has received support from functional imaging studies of acquired deep dyslexia following damage to the left cerebral hemisphere, but no imaging studies of cases of developmental deep dyslexia, in which brain damage is not suspected, have been reported. In this paper, we report the first evidence of right hyperactivation in an adult case of developmental deep dyslexia. Hyperactivation was observed in the right inferior frontal cortex during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the oral reading of imageable content words and nonwords to which imageable lexical responses were frequently made. No evidence of right hyperactivation was observed in the oral reading of function words, nor during the naming of imageable words in response to pictured objects. The results reveal strategic and selective use of right-hemisphere functions for particular types of written stimuli. We propose that children with developmental deep dyslexia compensate for their lack of phonological skills by accessing right-hemisphere imageable associations that provide a mnemonic for linking written forms to spoken names.     

Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. The authors investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic and phonological codes. A series of cross-modal lexical decision experiments shows that the magnitude of priming reflects the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, moderately similar items produce intermediate facilitation (e.g., lately-late). This pattern is observed for word pairs exhibiting different types of morphological relationships, including suffixed-stem (e.g., teacher-teach), suffixed-suffixed (e.g., saintly-sainthood), and prefixed-stem pairs (preheat-heat). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models that use distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes.     

A low-cost method for digitizing videotaped continuous movements on the Macintosh

We describe an inexpensive means of digitizing videotaped positions of moving points, such as the positions of the joints of a person who is performing an action. Single-frame video images and a Macintosh computer monitor are optically superimposed, using a half-silvered mirror, and the positions of reference points in the video image are manually clicked in by the operator, so that the screen coordinates of the reference points on each frame can be stored in a text file for later analysis. The digitizing program records comments and identifying information along with the position data.