Sometimes,often, and always: Exploring the vague meanings of frequency expressions

The article describes a general two-step procedure for the numerical translation of vague linguistic terms (LTs). The suggested procedure consists of empirical and model components, including (1) participants’ estimates of numerical values corresponding to verbal terms and (2) modeling of the empirical data using fuzzy membership functions (MFs), respectively. The procedure is outlined in two studies for data from N = 89 and N = 109 participants, who were asked to estimate numbers corresponding to 11 verbal frequency expressions (e.g., sometimes). Positions and shapes of the resulting MFs varied considerably in symmetry, vagueness, and overlap and are indicative of the different meanings of the vague frequency expressions. Words were not distributed equidistantly across the numerical scale. This has important implications for the many questionnaires that use verbal rating scales, which consist of frequency expressions and operate on the premise of equidistance. These results are discussed for an exemplar questionnaire (COPSOQ). Furthermore, the variation of the number of prompted LTs (5 vs. 11) showed no influence on the words’ interpretations.     

Top-down search for color prevents voluntary directing of attention to informative singleton cues

Visuo-spatial attention can be directed in a top-down controlled way to search for color targets and it can be captured by color contrasts, regardless of color identity. Here we tested whether participants can both search for a particular color target (e.g., red) and make use of a color-contrast cue that predicted the target's most likely position to direct their attention voluntarily. Our results show that this was impossible for the participants. Results support that top-down search for particular colors is incommensurate with directing attention to just any color contrast. The results are discussed in light of the current debates concerning the roles of color and color contrast for visuo-spatial attention.     

Disentangling the influence of attachment anxiety and attachment security in consumer formation of attachments to brands

This research investigates the formation of consumer attachments to brands contingent upon their attachment anxiety and security. An experiment utilizes a consumer sample and real brands across four product categories (apparel, body care, consumer electronics, and soft drinks) to test the relations between consumer–brand identification and brand attachment dependent on attachment anxiety and attachment security. Consistent with previous research, the findings initially confirm that consumer–brand identification relates positively to brand attachment. Prior work is extended, however, by demonstrating that attachment anxiety has a strong influence on this relationship by moderating the effect of consumer–brand identification on brand attachment but only under low attachment security and with women. Implications relate to attachment research and brand management. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Long-term stability of cognitive behavioral therapy effects for panic disorder with agoraphobia: A two-year follow-up study

Objective

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) aims to help patients establish new behaviors that will be maintained and adapted to the demands of new situations. The long-term outcomes are therefore crucial in testing the durability of CBT.

Method

A two-year follow-up assessment was undertaken on a subsample of n = 146 PD/AG patients from a multicenter randomized controlled trial. Treatment consisted of two variations of CBT: exposure in situ in the presence of the therapist (T+) or on their own following therapist preparation (T−).

Results

Both variations of CBT had high response rates and, overall, maintained the level of symptomatology observed at post-treatment with high levels of clinical significance. Effect sizes 24 months following treatment were somewhat lower than at the 6-month follow up. Once patients reached responder status, they generally tended to remain responders at subsequent assessments. Differences were observed for patients that obtained additional treatment during the follow-up period. Expert opinion and subjective appraisal of treatment outcome differed. No robust baseline predictors of 2-year outcome were observed.

Conclusion

Most patients maintain clinically meaningful changes two years following treatment across multiple outcome measures. Approximately 1/3 of patients continued to experience meaningful residual problems.     

Gender constructions from a project on sex offenders

Abstract

The four-year group therapy of 16 sex offenders in prison was videotaped, and 21 sessions were carefully transcribed and analysed by means of conversation analysis and analysis of metaphor and narration. These qualitative methods are apt for verbal data and can be combined with psychoanalytic thinking in a productive way. New forms of process analysis can be developed. The results presented here are selected to relate to the topic of how the imprisoned group therapy participants constructed “gender” by ways of speaking about themselves, women, and their victims, young girls. The results show that it would be a mistake to think of these ways of speaking as if they could be ignored in favour of “deeper” motives, lying “behind” the words. Our results show how unconscious constructions of gender are not beyond language, but in language. “Doing gender” is a conversational practice.     

A behavioral task for the validation of a gaze-contingent simulated scotoma

Gaze-contingent displays provide a valuable method in visual research for controlling visual input and investigating its visual and cognitive processing. Although the body of research using gaze-contingent retinal stabilization techniques has grown considerably during the last decade, only few studies have been concerned with the reliability of the specific real-time simulations applied. Using a Landolt ring discrimination task, we present a behavioral validation of gaze-contingent central scotoma simulation in healthy observers. Importantly, behavioral testing is necessary to show whether the simulation impairs foveal processing of visual information. This test becomes even more crucial when researchers are faced with null results in a task performed with the scotoma, as compared with a control condition. It must be ruled out that the lack of behavioral effects results from a type II error caused by improper implementation before conclusions about foveal contributions to the given task may be drawn. In our experiment, the scotoma effectively prevented foveal processing of the visual stimuli, leading to significantly reduced response accuracies, as compared with unimpaired vision. Moreover, the final fixation at the time of the participants’ responses was placed close to the target position in the unimpaired condition, whereas the distance to the target was enhanced with the scotoma, indicating that the observers were not able to discriminate visual target stimuli from distractors, due to the scotoma. The present work presents a validated behavioral testing method for the efficiency of gaze-contingent scotoma simulations, including code for implementation. In addition, solutions for common methodological problems are discussed.     

Speed limits: orientation and semantic context interactions constrain natural scene discrimination dynamics

The visual system rapidly extracts information about objects from the cluttered natural environment. In 5 experiments, the authors quantified the influence of orientation and semantics on the classification speed of objects in natural scenes, particularly with regard to object-context interactions. Natural scene photographs were presented in an object-discrimination task and pattern masked with various scene-to-mask stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). Full psychometric functions and reaction times (RTs) were measured. The authors found that (a) rotating the full scenes increased threshold SOA at intermediate rotation angles but not for inversion; (b) rotating object or context degraded classification performance in a similar manner; (c) semantically congruent contexts had negligible facilitatory effects on object classification compared with meaningless baseline contexts with a matching contrast structure, but incongruent contexts severely degraded performance; (d) any object-context incongruence (orientation or semantic) increased RTs at longer SOAs, indicating dependent processing of object and context; and (e) facilitatory effects of context emerged only when the context shortly preceded the object. The authors conclude that the effects of natural scene context on object classification are primarily inhibitory and discuss possible reasons.     

Jugendliche Sexualstraftäter: Spezialfälle der Prognoseerstellung?

This study compared a sample of 273 juvenile (aged 14 to under 18), 178 adolescent (aged 18 to under 21) and 273 adult (older than 20 years) male sex offenders modus operandi (or MO, the way in which they committed their offenses), frequency of recidivism and predicted recidivism via the static-99. In terms of the frequencies of the MO aspects we found that juveniles and adolescents differed significantly from adult sexual offenders. However, concerning the frequency of sexual violent behaviors, adolescents committed more severe offenses in contrast to the two other groups. The comparison of recidivism rates indicated that adolescent sexual offenders were significantly less likely to commit a new sexual offense, but were considerably more likely to commit a non-sexual violent offense compared to adult sexual offenders. For juvenile offenders, only few static-99 variables were predictive of future recidivism in comparison to the other groups, suggesting that the static-99 may only have a restricted utility in juvenile offenders. Further, juvenile offenders risk levels were found to fall primarily within the medium risk group making individual differentiation of potential risk difficult. It is suggested that additional predictors, which help to differentiate young sexual offenders must be investigated.     

Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German

Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.