Summoning White Bears or Letting Them Free: The Influence of the Content of Control Instructions on Target Thought Frequency

In the clinical literature, thought suppression is considered to play a role in the development of intrusion-related psychiatric syndromes, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, acute or posttraumatic stress disorder, phobias, and addiction. This assumption goes back to a study by D. M. Wegner, D. J. Schneider, S. R. Carter, and T. L. White (1987) in which participants were asked to suppress thoughts of a white bear, an assignment that proved to be nearly impossible to complete. The present two studies sought to explore the influence of the content of control instructions on intrusion frequency in thought suppression experiments. Notably, during nonsuppression (i.e., control) periods, participants can either be instructed to think about white bears (i.e., expression instruction), or to think of anything including white bears (i.e., liberal instruction). Results indicated that expression instructions resulted in an increased number of target thoughts, while liberal instructions did not. Implications for the interpretation of thought suppression findings are discussed.     

Ethnic identification biases responses to the Padua Inventory for obsessive-compulsive disorder

The authors report differential item functioning (DIF) between Black and White participants completing the 60-item Padua Inventory (PI) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The authors use an Internet-generated sample that included 105 Blacks, 67 Hispanics, 582 Whites, and 136 additional participants reporting an OCD diagnosis. Factor analysis replicated prior work indicating the PI consists of four factors: contamination fears, checking behaviors, impaired control over thoughts, and fear of losing control over impulses. On the contamination subscale, nonclinical Black and Hispanic mean scores were as high as the OCD group. Comparing Blacks to Whites, the authors applied an item response theory, DIF-graded response model to each factor and found significant DIF on eight items, with biased items in each factor. Results suggest that extraneous factors contribute to racial differences on scores. Cultural practices and fear of being negatively stereotyped may contribute to item bias.     

Eating disorder prevention programs: a meta-analytic review

This meta-analysis of eating disorder prevention programs found that intervention effects ranged from an absence of any effects to reductions in current and future eating pathology. Certain effects persisted as long as 2 years and were superior to minimal-intervention control conditions. Larger effects occurred for selected (vs. universal), interactive (vs. didactic), and multisession (vs. single session) programs; for programs offered solely to females and to participants over age 15; for programs without psychoeducational content; and for trials that used validated measures. The results identify promising prevention programs and delineate sample, format, and design features that are associated with larger effects, but they suggest the need for improved methodological rigor and statistical modeling of trials and enhanced theoretical rationale for interventions.     

Visual skills in airport-security screening

Abstract— An experiment examined visual performance in a simulated luggage-screening task. Observers participated in five sessions of a task requiring them to search for knives hidden in x-ray images of cluttered bags. Sensitivity and response times improved reliably as a result of practice. Eye movement data revealed that sensitivity increases were produced entirely by changes in observers' ability to recognize target objects, and not by changes in the effectiveness of visual scanning. Moreover, recognition skills were in part stimulus-specific, such that performance was degraded by the introduction of unfamiliar target objects. Implications for screener training are discussed.     

Regulatory and ethical principles in research involving children and individuals with developmental disabilities

Children and individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) compared to typical participants are disadvantaged not only by virtue of being vulnerable to risks inherent in research participation but also by the higher likelihood of exclusion from research altogether. Current regulatory and ethical guidelines although necessary for their protection do not sufficiently ensure fair distributive justice. Yet, in view of disproportionately higher burdens of co-occurring physical and mental disorders in individuals with DD, they are better positioned to benefit from research by equitable participation. Greater elucidation of this ethical dilemma is called for by researchers, institutional review boards, and funding agencies to urgently redress the imbalance. This article discusses many of the regulatory principles to ensure better research participation of children and individuals with DD: human rights, validity, distributive justice, beneficence/nonmaleficence, and autonomy.     

Brain development in autism: early overgrowth followed by premature arrest of growth

Due to the relatively late age of clinical diagnosis of autism, the early brain pathology of children with autism has remained largely unstudied. The increased use of retrospective measures such as head circumference, along with a surge of MRI studies of toddlers with autism, have opened a whole new area of research and discovery. Recent studies have now shown that abnormal brain overgrowth occurs during the first 2 years of life in children with autism. By 2-4 years of age, the most deviant overgrowth is in cerebral, cerebellar, and limbic structures that underlie higher-order cognitive, social, emotional, and language functions. Excessive growth is followed by abnormally slow or arrested growth. Deviant brain growth in autism occurs at the very time when the formation of cerebral circuitry is at its most exuberant and vulnerable stage, and it may signal disruption of this process of circuit formation. The resulting aberrant connectivity and dysfunction may lead to the development of autistic behaviors. To discover the causes, neural substrates, early-warning signs and effective treatments of autism, future research should focus on elucidating the neurobiological defects that underlie brain growth abnormalities in autism that appear during these critical first years of life.     

Impact of recent findings on study design of future autism clinical trials

There are specific challenges to studying the design of pharmacologic trials in child/adolescent and adult autism, such as subject stratification and parallel versus crossover designs. This article describes how optimal study design is influenced by subject selection and outcome measures chosen. Lessons learned in study design from the Research Units on Pediatric Psychopharmacology Autism Network trial with risperidone, Seaver Center trials with fluoxetine and valproate, Dartmouth trials with amantadine, and National Institutes of Health secretin trials are highlighted. The Internet System for Assessing Autistic Children system for managing multicenter clinical trials in autism and statistical issues in autism research are also described.     

Competitive martial arts and aggressiveness: a 2-yr. longitudinal study among young boys

This study is a follow-up study of Reynes and Lorant's studies assessing the effect of one year of judo and karate training on aggressiveness scores among young boys. The data reported here were obtained after a second year of practice, 14 judoka, 9 karateka, and 20 control participants who filled out the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire three times, 1 year apart. At the first assessment, all participants, born the same year, were 8 yr. old and at the third they were 10 yr. old. Analysis indicated that after two years of practice, karate training seemed to have neither positive nor negative effects on aggressiveness scores, while judo training seemed to have a negative effect on anger scores. However, the results suggested the importance of kata or meditation in training sessions on self-control acquisition for such young boys.