Effectiveness of treatments for social phobia in an applied field

Social phobia is one of the most common disorders and one that requires the most attention from psychological clinics. The aim of this article was to study the effectiveness of psychological treatments in a University Psychological Clinic. Seventy-one social phobia patients requested psychological assistance. The average number of assessment sessions was 3.8 and the average number of treatment sessions was 16.1. Therapeutic success reached 64.2%, withdrawal percentage was 11.3%, and drop-out percentage was 24.5%. The effect size (Cohen's d) achieved in the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD) and Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNE) were 1.96 and 1.78, respectively. Comparing these results with efficacy research (particularly meta-analysis), it has been shown that the treatment effectiveness achieved is very similar. It is concluded that cognitive behavioural treatments for social phobia can be transferred from research settings to clinical practice.     

Accuracy of diagnosis of depression in patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus

This study assesses the clinical accuracy of physicians (Specialists in Endocrinology and Nutrition: SEN) to make the diagnosis of depression in patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM1). This study involved 11 SEN physicians, and 153 patients with DM1. The diagnosis of depression was performed using the SCID-1 structured interview and clinical assessment. From the initial sample, 50 patients were randomly selected (imposing the condition that it was included 25 patients with depression and 25 without depression). The results show that clinicians performed a higher percentage of negative diagnoses (patients without depression) than positive ones (patients with depression). A significant percentage of patients with depression were not diagnosed (25%). It therefore seems necessary to provide adequate clinical protocols to evaluate the presence of this disorder in DM1, as well as continuing research into the diagnostic process for clinical decision making.     

Alexithymia and experimentally induced emotion recognition in people with somatizations

This study is part of an investigation aimed at assessing the cognitive-emotional process of emotional recognition in somatizing patients. The specific objective was to verify whether there were differences in the self-assessment of emotional reaction among patients with somatization and non-clinical controls. To obtain the self-assessment of their emotional reaction in the affective dimensions of valence and activation in clinical and control participants, we resorted to a procedure that minimizes the use of verbal skills and comprehension. Participants were 119 people, 47 patients and 72 non-clinical participants. The prevalence of alexithymia in the clinical group was 42.55%, whereas in non-clinical controls, it was 30.55%. Results showed the existence of a deficit in the clinical group's self-assessment of activation in response to the corresponding images with high levels of the affective dimension of activation and high valence images, associated with the clinical condition but not with alexithymia. Alexithymia has a modulatory effect on the clinical participants' and controls' evaluation of the valence of the unpleasant images or of low valence pictures.     

Dirty liberals! Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes

Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In Study 1, individuals in a public setting who were given a reminder of physical cleansing reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder. In Study 2, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.     

Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound’s novelty per se but from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.     

Cross-domain analogies as relating derived relations among two separate relational networks

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in analyzing analogy as the establishment of a relation of coordination among common types of trained or derived relations. Previous studies have been focused on within-domain analogy. The current study expands previous research by analyzing cross-domain analogy as relating relations among separate relational networks and by correlating participants' performance with a standard measure of analogical reasoning. In two experiments, adult participants first completed general intelligence and analogical reasoning tests. Subsequently, they were exposed to a computerized conditional discrimination training procedure designed to create two relational networks, each consisting of two 3-member equivalence classes. The critical test was a two-part analogical test in which participants had to relate combinatorial relations of coordination and distinction between the two relational networks. In Experiment 1, combinatorial relations for each network were individually tested prior to analogical testing, but in Experiment 2 they were not. Across both experiments, 65% of participants passed the analogical test on the first attempt. Moreover, results from the training procedure were strongly correlated with the standard measure of analogical reasoning.     

Effect of first ball possession on partial and final scores in 2003, 2005, and 2007 Water Polo World Championships

The purpose was to analyze the influence of winning the first ball possession on the partial and final score in male and female water polo. The 288 matches disputed by the teams participating in the 2003, 2005, and 2007 Water Polo World Championship were recorded. The results reflect statistically significant differences for the influence of gaining the first ball possession on the partial and final scoreboard of each period and for the influence between the total number of first possessions obtained and the final result.     

The Profinite Hull of Special Groups and Local-Global Principles

We introduce the Profinite Hull functor of special groups, showing that it gives rise to a new (and strong) local-global principle, the subform reflection property. We also indicate applications of this principle to the abstract algebraic theory of quadratic forms.     

Higher-order structure in the trajectories of depression and anxiety following sudden involuntary unemployment

Recent work on comorbidity finds evidence for hierarchical structure of mood and anxiety disorders and symptoms. This study tests whether a higher-order internalizing factor accounts for variation in depression and anxiety symptom severity and change over time in a sample experiencing a period of major life stress. Data on symptoms of depression, chronic worry, and social anxiety were collected five times across seven months from 426 individuals who had recently lost jobs. Growth models for each type of symptom found significant variation in individual trajectories. Slopes were highly correlated across symptom type, as were intercepts. Multilevel confirmatory factor analyses found evidence for a higher-order internalizing factor for both slopes and intercepts, reflective of comorbidity of depression and anxiety, with the internalizing factor accounting for 54% to 91% of the variance in slopes and intercepts of specific symptom sets, providing evidence for both a general common factor and domain-specific factors characterizing level and change in symptoms. Loadings on the higher order factors differed modestly for men and women, and when comparing African American and White participants, but did not differ by age, education, or history of depression. More distal factors including gender and history of depression were strongly associated with internalizing in the early weeks after job loss, but rates of change in internalizing were associated most strongly with reemployment. Findings suggest that stressors may contribute in different ways to the common internalizing factor as compared to variance in anxiety and depression that is independent of that factor.     

Tolerance towards dating violence in Spanish adolescents

The study of intimate partner violence among adolescent and young couples in Spain remains unattended, although such abuses are well known and more frequent than in adulthood. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to provide epidemiological information on dating relationships, and on the other hand, to identify attitudes towards violence. 2205 women enrolled in schools in diverse provinces of Spain, participated in the study. Average age was near 19 years (SD= 2.25). The Dating Violence Questionnaire (DVQ, in Spanish, CUVINO), a questionnaire that assesses both frequency and distress associated with violent behavior, was used. The DVQ allowed differentiating between groups of women self-labeled as abused and not abused on the basis of the frequency of sustained violence, although the levels of distress in the face of violence were statistically similar in both groups. Implications for future research and prevention programs are discussed.