The construction of self-injury in the clinical literature: a sociological exploration

This article presents a sociologically informed critique of a range of academic literatures relating to self-injury. It is noted how a lack of consensus on definitional issues, together with the inaccurate portrayal of the "typical self-injurer" in the clinical literature, has impeded the development of a sound understanding of self-injury. Some of the more problematic explanations for self-injury are explored. The individualistic focus of existing research is found to be inadequate, since it fails to account for the social context in which self-injury occurs. Social scientific approaches critically examine psychiatric and psychological constructions of self-injury, explore wider social and cultural meanings of the behavior, and examine its distribution across different social groups. The inclusion of social scientific perspectives into current debates will greatly improve understanding of self-injury.     

Power becomes you: The effects of implicit and explicit power on the self

Some power cues are explicit, obvious and salient, while others are implicit, subtle and harder to detect. Drawing from research demonstrating that people assimilate to implicit cues and contrast from explicit ones, we suggest that implicit and explicit power cues have different effects on people. Two laboratory experiments found that when power cues were implicit, people in high power conditions assimilated to stereotypes of power; they had relatively higher independent self construals, and they were more likely to see themselves as autonomous from, rather than connected to, others. The opposite effect emerged when power cues were explicit. These effects were replicated in a third study, where working adults rated their own power at work and the explicitness of power cues in their workplaces. We also found that power and cue explicitness predicted co-worker support, and that this effect was mediated by self construals. These results suggest that the way power is conveyed and expressed can influence important outcomes in organizations.     

Students’ perception of teachers’ two-way feedback interactions that impact learning

Social Psychology of Education - Teacher-student interactions are fundamental to learning outcomes. However, the facilitation of student-defined, in-class two-way feedback interaction is...     

The role of metacognitive beliefs in auditory hallucinations

The mechanisms contributing to the occurrence of auditory hallucinations have not been fully described, although many researchers agree that they may result from some type of misattributed cognitive event. A number of authors have shown that this misattribution may be influenced by ‘top down' processes such as beliefs and expectations. This type of cognitive bias has also been implicated in other psychological disorders. One area of focus, particularly within the anxiety disorders, has been on metacognitive beliefs and their role in the occurrence and maintenance of symptoms. Metacognitive beliefs have not been widely investigated in psychosis and tools to investigate them have not been developed. In this study, a metacognitions questionnaire [MCQ; Cartwright-Hatton, S., & Wells, A. (1997). Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 11(3),279–296.] (previously used with anxiety disorders) was modified and used to assess metacognitive beliefs with schizophrenic patients. Metacognitive beliefs were compared between schizophrenic patients who were currently experiencing auditory hallucinations and schizophrenic patients who had never had hallucinations. A group of patients with anxiety disorders and a group of non-patients were used as controls. Hallucinating and non-hallucinating schizophrenics scored significantly higher than both the non-patient group and the anxiety patient group on the amount to which they believed their thoughts should be consistent with each other. Hallucinators and anxiety controls had significantly lower confidence in their cognitive processes than non-hallucinating schizophrenics and normal controls. The significance of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on cognitive processes in hallucinations.     

Articulatory drift in the speech of children with articulation and phonological disorders

This study used electropalatography to identify articulatory drift in alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) produced by 10 children with functional articulation and phonological disorders. Drift involves an abnormal change in place of articulation that occurs during stop closure. An index was used to measure drift, with higher values indicating greater drift. The results showed that drift was higher for children who produced undifferentiated gestures (articulations with increased tongue-palate contact). Drift is an important characteristic of articulation because it is believed to reflect impaired speech motor control. In addition, drift could explain some perceptually based speech errors that are frequently reported in functional disorders.     

Familiarity breeds attraction: effects of exposure on the attractiveness of typical and distinctive faces

Several studies have shown that facial attractiveness is positively correlated with both familiarity and typicality. Here we manipulated the familiarity of typical and distinctive faces to measure the effect on attractiveness. In our first experiment, we collected ratings of attractiveness, distinctiveness, and familiarity using three different groups of participants. Our stimuli included 84 images of female faces, presented in a full-face view. We replicated the finding that attractiveness ratings negatively correlate with distinctiveness ratings. In addition, we showed that attractiveness ratings were positively correlated with familiarity ratings. In our second experiment, we demonstrated that increasing exposure to faces increases their attractiveness, although there was no differential effect of exposure on typical and distinctive faces. Our results suggest that episodic familiarity affects attractiveness ratings independently of general or structural familiarity. The implications of our findings for the 'face-space' model are discussed.     

The effect of temporal delay and spatial differences on cross-modal object recognition

In a series of experiments, we investigated the matching of objects across visual and haptic modalities across different time delays and spatial dimensions. In all of the experiments, we used simple L-shaped figures as stimuli that varied in either the x or the y dimension or in both dimensions. In Experiment 1, we found that cross-modal matching performance decreased as a function of the time delay between the presentation of the objects. We found no difference in performance between the visual-haptic (VH) and haptic-visual (HV) conditions. Cross-modal performance was better when objects differed in both the x and y dimensions rather than in one dimension alone. In Experiment 2, we investigated the relative contribution of each modality to performance across different interstimulus delays. We found no differential effect of delay between the HH and VV conditions, although general performance was better for the VV condition than for the HH condition. Again, responses to xy changes were better than changes in the x or y dimensions alone. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined performance in a matching task with simultaneous and successive presentation conditions. We failed to find any difference between simultaneous and successive presentation conditions. Our findings suggest that the short-term retention of object representations is similar in both the visual and haptic modalities. Moreover, these results suggest that recognition is best within a temporal window that includes simultaneous or rapidly successive presentation of stimuli across the modalities and is also best when objects are more discriminable from each other.     

Conversing across cultures: East-West communication styles in work and nonwork contexts

Four experiments provided evidence that East-West differences in attention to indirect meaning are more pronounced in work settings compared with nonwork settings as suggested by prior research on Protestant relational ideology. Study 1 compared errors in interpreting indirect messages in work and nonwork contexts across three cultures. Studies 2 and 3 examined differences in self-reported indirectness with coworkers versus nonwork acquaintances across three cultures controlling for variation in individualism--collectivism. Study 4 examined self-reported indirectness in bicultural managers and experimentally manipulated the salience of Western versus Eastern culture. The results showed that Americans, but not East Asians, were less attentive to indirect cues in work than nonwork settings and that East-West differences in indirectness were greater in work than nonwork settings.     

Effects of methylphenidate on working memory in pigeons

To assess the effects of methylphenidate on working memory, pigeons were trained in a delayed matching-to-sample task. Delay interval duration (0.2, 1, 3, 6, or 12 sec) was varied within sessions in order to separate delay-dependent from delay-independent effects of the drug on performance. A reduction in the sample response requirement from five responses to one response effectively reduced attention to the stimulus and impaired overall accuracy. Methylphenidate was administered in doses of 0.0 (saline control), 0.25, 2.5, and 10 mg/kg. Relative to performance with saline, accuracy was significantly reduced with 10 mg/kg methylphenidate to the same extent in both fixed ratio (FR) 1 and FR 5 conditions. The smaller doses had no effect, and there was no evidence that accuracy improved with drug administration. Intercepts and slopes of exponential functions fitted to measures of discriminability plotted as a function of delay showed that methylphenidate affected delay-independent aspects of performance (initial discriminability), but not delay-dependent aspects (rate of forgetting).     

A population-based 2-year longitudinal study of insomnia disorder in a Chinese population in Hong Kong

There is a paucity of literature examining the longitudinal course of insomnia using standardized diagnostic criteria. This study aims to evaluate the persistence, remission, relapse, and incidence rates of insomnia symptoms and insomnia disorders according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th and 5th edition (DSM-IV and DSM-5). A total of 398 community dwellers were interviewed annually over two years using the Brief Insomnia Questionnaire, a validated questionnaire for deriving insomnia diagnoses. Normal sleepers were defined according to the DSM-5 quantitative criteria as having insomnia symptoms at most twice per week. Estimates were weighted against population age and sex distribution. Persistence for two consecutive years was 26.3, 26.4, and 23.0% for insomnia symptoms, DSM-IV, and DSM-5 insomnia disorders; remission rate was 55.8, 22.9, and 26.1%, relapse rate was 21.8, 1.3, and 0%, while incidence rate was 62.4, 19.6, and 4.5%. The common trajectories for DSM-IV insomnia disorder were to remain the same (26.4%), followed by a change to insomnia symptoms at the second year (25.7%), and at the third year (17.3%). For DSM-5 insomnia disorder, a change to insomnia symptoms at the second year was the commonest (28.3%), followed by continuing the same (23.0%), and a change to insomnia symptoms at the third year (14.0%). Over a two-year naturalistic follow-up, persistence of insomnia disorder was roughly 25%. Changes from insomnia disorder to insomnia symptoms were common; however, remission only occurred in about 25%, highlighting the chronic course of insomnia, perhaps due to a lack of treatment, under-treatment, or resistance to treatment. Incidence of insomnia symptoms was 62.4%, suggesting a high risk of developing insomnia in the general population.