Relationship Distress as a Mediator of Adverse Childhood Experiences and Health: Implications for Clinical Practice with Economically Vulnerable Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are interpersonal sources of distress negatively correlated with physical and mental health, as well as maladaptive intimate partner conflict strategies in adulthood. Economically vulnerable racial and ethnic minorities report the greatest disparities in exposure to ACE, as well as relationship distress and health. Yet, little is known about the connections between ACE, relationship distress, and health. We therefore tested a theoretical model for the mediating role of relationship distress to explain the ACE‐health connection with a sample (N = 96) predominantly racial/ethnic minorities (87%) with low income. We applied partial least squares structural equation modeling with bootstrapping (N = 500). Relationship distress strengthened the predictive relationship between ACE and health, and accounted for 42% of the variance in health. The results provide preliminary support for relationship distress as a social determinant of health disparities with implications for interdisciplinary health intervention.     

Intentional control of event counting

Event counting depends on simple, well-learned knowledge but is effortful and error-prone. In 6 experiments, the authors examined event-counting performance, testing a model that suggests that counting is controlled by minimal goal representations coordinated with perceptual events by temporal synchrony. In Experiment 1, they examined self-paced counting with or without delays that disrupted participants' preferred pacing. In subsequent experiments, participants counted computer-paced events occurring at rhythmic or varied intervals, reporting or verifying totals. Several results support the model: Participants counted rhythmic events more accurately, made undetected undercount errors when counting rhythmic events, and made false alarms to undercount or overcount probes presented at different times. These results suggest that intentions that guide fluent counting specify parameters deictically rather than semantically and that error monitoring is implicit.     

Psychotic symptoms in posttraumatic stress disorder

Recent data suggest that the presence of psychotic symptoms in patients suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may represent an underrecognized and unique subtype of PTSD. Among combat veterans with PTSD, 30% to 40% report auditory or visual hallucinations and/or delusions. The presence of psychotic symptoms in PTSD is associated with a more severe level of psychopathology, similar to that of chronic schizophrenia. In this review, the differential diagnosis of psychotic symptoms in PTSD is discussed, including possible comorbid schizophrenia, psychotic depression, substance-induced psychosis, and personality disorder. A recent biologic study supporting the existence of a unique subtype of PTSD with psychotic features is also addressed, as are the similarities between PTSD with psychotic features and psychotic depression disorder. Finally, data on the treatment implications of psychotic symptoms in PTSD are presented. The intriguing recent findings on psychotic symptoms in PTSD need further investigation in noncombat-related PTSD populations before findings can be generalized to all individuals with PTSD.     

Information acquisition strategies and the cognitive structure of arithmetic

In three experiments, we examined the sensitivity of information acquisition strategies to the underlying cognitive structure of arithmetic tasks. Previous work has shown that individuals solve arithmetic problems more quickly when they consider operators before operands. The operators establish the goal, and the operands are then assimilated into that goal. In the present experiments, participants performed arithmetic tasks in which they controlled the display of operators and operands, using separate keystrokes. The participants chose to see the operator before the operands in most conditions. This ordering was more likely when task constraints made it easier to achieve, when feedback emphasized execution time, and in a more complex multiple-step task. These results extend previous research on strategy selection and information acquisition, supporting the idea that coordination between the environment and ongoing cognition is an important feature of cognitive skill.     

The characteristics and correlates of fantasy in school-age children: imaginary companions, impersonation, and social understanding

Past research with 152 preschoolers found that having an imaginary companion or impersonating an imaginary character was positively correlated with theory of mind performance. Three years later, 100 children from this study were retested to assess the developmental course of play with imaginary companions and impersonation of imaginary characters and how these types of role play were related to emotion understanding, self-perception, and personality. The results showed that school-age children interact with imaginary companions and impersonate imaginary characters as much as preschoolers. Overall, 65% of children up to the age of 7 had imaginary companions at some point during their lives. School-age children who did not impersonate scored lower on emotion understanding. Theory of mind at age 4 predicted emotion understanding 3 years later.     

A preliminary analysis of the effects of response cards on student performance and participation in an upper division university course

We evaluated the effects of response cards on student quiz scores and participation in an upper division undergraduate course at a small, private university. Results showed that response cards increased both quiz scores and student participation. In addition, a measure of the social validity of the response-card procedure suggested that students approved of the use of the cards.     

Mental Transformation Skill in Young Children: The Role of Concrete and Abstract Motor Training

We examined the effects of three different training conditions, all of which involve the motor system, on kindergarteners’ mental transformation skill. We focused on three main questions. First, we asked whether training that involves making a motor movement that is relevant to the mental transformation—either concretely through action (action training) or more abstractly through gestural movements that represent the action (move‐gesture training)—resulted in greater gains than training using motor movements irrelevant to the mental transformation (point‐gesture training). We tested children prior to training, immediately after training (posttest), and 1 week after training (retest), and we found greater improvement in mental transformation skill in both the action and move‐gesture training conditions than in the point‐gesture condition, at both posttest and retest. Second, we asked whether the total gain made by retest differed depending on the abstractness of the movement‐relevant training (action vs. move‐gesture), and we found that it did not. Finally, we asked whether the time course of improvement differed for the two movement‐relevant conditions, and we found that it did—gains in the action condition were realized immediately at posttest, with no further gains at retest; gains in the move‐gesture condition were realized throughout, with comparable gains from pretest‐to‐posttest and from posttest‐to‐retest. Training that involves movement, whether concrete or abstract, can thus benefit children's mental transformation skill. However, the benefits unfold differently over time—the benefits of concrete training unfold immediately after training (online learning); the benefits of more abstract training unfold in equal steps immediately after training (online learning) and during the intervening week with no additional training (offline learning). These findings have implications for the kinds of instruction that can best support spatial learning.     

The Influence of Individual‐Oriented Relationship Education on Equality and Conflict‐Related Behaviors

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a widespread, pervasive problem that affects couples and individuals from diverse backgrounds. Effective IPV screening practices and interventions that consider IPV context have not been widely studied. Therefore, the authors examined the influence of individual‐oriented relationship education for 230 low‐income participants on equality and conflict‐related behaviors, while accounting for baseline IPV characteristics. Participants who began the intervention with more IPV experiences reported significant improvements in equality and conflict‐related behaviors postintervention.     

Using spatial terms to select an object

Our interactions with the world often involve selecting one object from a cluttered array of objects. One way to accomplish this is with language. For example, spatial terms, such as above, guide selection by specifying the position of one object (the located object) with respect to a second object (the reference object). Most of the work on the apprehension of spatial terms has examined displays that contain only these two objects. In the present paper, we examine how the presence of an extra object (a distractor) in the display impacts apprehension. Consistent effects of distractor presence were obtained across acceptability-rating and speeded sentence/picture verification tasks. Importantly, these effects were independent of the placement of the distractor. These results suggest that the distractor has its influence during processes that spatially index and identify the located and reference objects and that processes involved in computing the spatial term operate only on these objects.     

What do the hands externalize in simple arithmetic?

In 4 experiments, the authors examined the use of the hands in simple arithmetic tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that pointing increases both accuracy and speed in counting arrays of items, whether those items are identical or distinctive. Experiment 3 demonstrated that individuals tend to nod their heads when not allowed to point and that nodding is associated with greater accuracy, suggesting that pointing is functional for reasons other than simply providing additional visual information. Experiment 4 examined changes in speech when adding arrays of digits, depending on whether participants were allowed to use their hands to manipulate the tokens on which the digits were presented. Taken together, the results of these experiments are consistent with recent research suggesting that gesture can serve cognitive functions and that the hands can support the binding of representational elements to their functional roles by providing phase markers for cyclic cognitive processes.