Attributional style in psychosis--the role of affect and belief type

People holding persecutory beliefs have been hypothesised to show a self-serving attributional style, which functions to protect self-esteem Bentall, Corcoran, Howard, Blackwood, and Kinderman (2001). Experimental support for this has been mixed. Freeman et al. (1998) suggested depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might explain events differently. In this study, 71 participants completed measures of delusional beliefs, depression and attributional style. We hypothesised that those with persecutory beliefs would form grandiose and depressed subgroups, and that a self-serving attributional style would characterise only the grandiose subgroup. Hypotheses were partially confirmed. Clear subgroups were evident and only those with both persecutory and grandiose beliefs showed an externalising attributional style for negative events. Depression, irrespective of co-occurring persecutory beliefs, was related to a reduced self-serving bias and an externalising attributional style for positive events. On their own, persecutory beliefs were not related to any particular attributional style. Depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might account for some of the inconsistencies in the attribution literature. Even within a single symptom group, care should be taken in both research and therapy to consider individual symptom patterns.     

Suicidal ideation among adolescents in relation to recalled exposure to violence

The relationship between exposure to violence and vulnerability to suicide among adolescents was examined. The topic was initiated by the rapid increase in adolescent's exposure to violence and the sparse systematic research available on its relationship to attitudes about life and death. The study's main hypothesis is that high levels of exposure to violence are associated with high suicide risk according to two conceptual paradigms-Fear of Death and Attraction and Repulsion to Life. Eighty-five adolescents were administered three self report questionnaires. The questionnaires assessed levels of exposure to violence, fear of death, and attitudes towards life and death. Those who had been exposed to a high level of violence reported attitudes synonymous with the profile of an individual at risk for suicide (low fear of death, low repulsion to death, and low attraction to life; high repulsion to life and high attraction to death).     

Retrieval-induced forgetting: Evidence for a recall-specific mechanism

Previous work has shown that recalling information from long-term memory can impair the long-term retention of related representations—a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). We report an experiment in which the question of whether retrieval is necessary to induce this form of impairment was examined. All the subjects studied six members from each of eight taxonomic categories (e.g.,fruit orange). In the competitive practice condition, the subjects practiced recalling three of the six members, using category-stem cues (e.g.,fruit or____). In the noncompetitive practice condition, the subjects were reexposed to these same members for the same number of repetitions but were asked to recall the category name by using the exemplar and a stem as cues (e.g.,fr____orange). Despite significant and comparable facilitation of practiced items in both conditions, only the competitive practice subjects were impaired in their ability to recall the nonpracticed members on a delayed cued-recall test. These findings argue that retrieval-induced forgetting is not caused by increased competition arising from the strengthening of practiced items, but by inhibitory processes specific to the situation of recall.     

Encouraging People With Mood Disorders to Attend a Self‐Help Group1

Using an intervention based on referent power, self‐help sponsors sought to encourage attendance at self‐help meetings. They encouraged patients with major depression or bipolar disorder to attend self‐help meetings following their hospitalizations. The intervention successfully increased the attendance of the experimental group compared to those in the control group. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Object representation and predictive action in infancy

Previous research has shown that 6‐month‐old infants extrapolate object motion on linear paths when they act predictively on fully visible moving objects but not when they observe partly occluded moving objects. The present research probed whether differences in the tasks presented to infants or in the visibility of the objects account for these findings, by investigating infants’ predictive head tracking of a visible object that moves behind a small occluder. Six‐month‐old infants were presented with an object that moved repeatedly on linear or nonlinear paths, with an occluder covering the place where all the paths intersected. The first time infants viewed an object’s motion, their head movements did not anticipate either linear or nonlinear motion, but they quickly learned to anticipate linear motion on successive trials. Infants also learned to anticipate nonlinear motion, but this learning was slower and less consistent. Learning in all cases concerned the trajectory of the object, not the specific locations at which the object appeared. These findings suggest that infants form object representations that are weakly biased toward inertial motion and that are influenced by learning. The findings accord with the thesis that a single system of representation underlies both predictive action and perception of object motion, and that occlusion reduces the precision of object representations.     

Adolescent Perception of Peer Success: A Gendered Perspective over Time

Adolescent males and females (grades 6–12) (n = 552) were presented with nine brief vignettes from the Teen Apperception Scale, describing high-achieving hypothetical female (or male) peers, across nine domains: leadership, academics, athleticism (two), musicianship, art, popularity, humor, and multitalentedness. Teens rated likability, popularity, and attractiveness of vignette subjects in each domain. The sample was roughly evenly divided by gender (47% male and 53% female); students ranged in age from 11 to 18 years. The sample was ethnically diverse, and the socioeconomic status of the students' families ranged from lower middle to upper middle class. MANOVA analyses showed female vignette subjects to be rated significantly higher than male subjects by both genders and all grade groupings, at p < .0001 overall, and at values ranging from p < .05 to p < .0001 for six of nine subscales. Results are contrasted with those from highly similar studies 30 years ago, and used to reflect a possible shift in attitudes toward high achievement in women.     

Extending the psychological profile of market mavenism

• This paper describes a study in the psychology of market mavenism, the consumer tendency to become especially involved in the marketplace. The purpose was to investigate empirically associations with the important consumer characteristics of innovativeness, status consumption, and need for uniqueness. The findings support the notion that market mavenism is due less to the demographic characteristics of consumers as it is more a socially constructed phenomenon. Global innovativeness, status consumption, and creative choice counterconformity explained more variance in market mavenism than did demographics. Theoretically, these findings enrich our knowledge of the psychology of market mavens by suggesting some motivations for their behavior. Practically, marketing strategies can be fine‐tuned to appeal more effectively to this important segment of consumers by appealing to mavens' willingness to try new things, to their need for uniqueness, and to their willingness to seek social status through consumption.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Construct validity of parent ratings of inhibitory control.

Recent literature has emphasized the need to examine executive functions (EF) in children using multiple sources, including both parent rating and performance-based measures. Computerized Go/No-Go tests, including commercially available continuous performance tests (CPTs), represent one of the most commonly used methods of assessing inhibitory control - a variable central to the executive function construct. We examined the relationship between parent ratings of inhibitory control and CPT performance in two mixed clinical samples. Experiment 1 examined 109 children ages 6-18 using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Gioia, Isquith, Guy, & Kenworthy, 2000) and the Conners' CPT-II (Conners, 2000). In this sample, ratings on the BRIEF Inhibit scale (mean T-score = 62.3) were significantly higher than the CPT-II commissions score (mean T-score = 50.7; p < .0001); and the BRIEF and CPT-II scores were not highly correlated (r = - .12). Experiment 2 examined a sample of 131 children ages 7-18 using the BRIEF and the Tests of Variables of Attention (TOVA; Greenberg, 1996). In this sample, parent ratings on the BRIEF Inhibit scale (mean T-score = 56.8) were similar to TOVA commissions scores (mean T-score = 58.6; p = .33), although still poorly correlated (r = -.02). Factor analyses exploring covariance between BRIEF scales CPT-II variables (Experiment 1) and between BRIEF and TOVA (Experiment 2) yielded similar findings. In both experiments, all eight BRIEF scales loaded on a single factor, with no overlap with either the CPT-II or the TOVA. In mixed outpatient clinical samples, the BRIEF appears to measure different elements of inhibitory control than those assessed by computerized continuous performance tests.     

Social Comparisons,Social Support,and Self-Perceptions in Group Exercise for People With Parkinson's Disease

People with Parkinson's disease (PD) may experience declining function and limited interaction with others with PD. Group exercise provides opportunities for physical accomplishment and social support, as well as potential social challenges. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine experiences of social comparison, social support, and self-perceptions of 20 people with PD in group exercise. Participants experienced (a) reticence evolving to inspiration, (b) anxiety relief through camaraderie and breaking taboos, and (c) maintaining athletic identity through participating and helping others. Practical implications include facilitating a safe space and support to alleviate anxiety and sustain participation.     

Children on the autism spectrum update their behaviour in response to a volatile environment

Typical adults can track reward probabilities across trials to estimate the volatility of the environment and use this information to modify their learning rate (Behrens et al., 2007). In a stable environment, it is advantageous to take account of outcomes over many trials, whereas in a volatile environment, recent experience should be more strongly weighted than distant experience. Recent predictive coding accounts of autism propose that autistic individuals will demonstrate atypical updating of their behaviour in response to the statistics of the reward environment. To rigorously test this hypothesis, we administered a developmentally appropriate version of Behrens et al.'s (2007) task to 34 cognitively able children on the autism spectrum aged between 6 and 14 years, 32 age‐ and ability‐matched typically developing children and 19 typical adults. Participants were required to choose between a green and a blue pirate chest, each associated with a randomly determined reward value between 0 and 100 points, with a combined total of 100 points. On each trial, the reward was given for one stimulus only. In the stable condition, the ratio of the blue or green response being rewarded was fixed at 75:25. In the volatile condition, the ratio alternated between 80:20 and 20:80 every 20 trials. We estimated the learning rate for each participant by fitting a delta rule model and compared this rate across conditions and groups. All groups increased their learning rate in the volatile condition compared to the stable condition. Unexpectedly, there was no effect of group and no interaction between group and condition. Thus, autistic children used information about the statistics of the reward environment to guide their decisions to a similar extent as typically developing children and adults. These results help constrain predictive coding accounts of autism by demonstrating that autism is not characterized by uniform differences in the weighting of prediction error.