Intrusive Thoughts and Psychological Adjustment to Breast Cancer: Exploring the Moderating and Mediating Role of Global Meaning and Emotional Expressivity

The aim of this study was to investigate the moderating and mediating role of global meaning and emotional expressivity in the relationship between intrusive thoughts and psychological adjustment (as indicated by mental health status) in a sample of breast cancer patients (N = 153). Coping with cancer was also included as an intervening variable to be tested. Moderating effects were explored using a series of hierarchical regression analysis, while multiple mediated effects were tested through bootstrapping procedures. Results showed that global personal meaning had both direct and indirect (mediating) effects on psychological adjustment. Emotional expressivity had neither moderating nor mediating effects on psychological adjustment. These results indicated that a strong sense of personal meaning and purpose in life, and an integrated understanding of self and life may lessen the impact of intrusive thoughts on breast cancer patients’ psychological adjustment and mental health status. Implications of the findings for clinical practice and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Learning to fear a second-order stimulus following vicarious learning

Vicarious fear learning refers to the acquisition of fear via observation of the fearful responses of others. The present study aims to extend current knowledge by exploring whether second-order vicarious fear learning can be demonstrated in children. That is, whether vicariously learnt fear responses for one stimulus can be elicited in a second stimulus associated with that initial stimulus. Results demonstrated that children's (5–11 years) fear responses for marsupials and caterpillars increased when they were seen with fearful faces compared to no faces. Additionally, the results indicated a second-order effect in which fear-related learning occurred for other animals seen together with the fear-paired animal, even though the animals were never observed with fearful faces themselves. Overall, the findings indicate that for children in this age group vicariously learnt fear-related responses for one stimulus can subsequently be observed for a second stimulus without it being experienced in a fear-related vicarious learning event. These findings may help to explain why some individuals do not recall involvement of a traumatic learning episode in the development of their fear of a specific stimulus.     

Categorical templates are more useful when features are consistent: Evidence from eye movements during search for societally important vehicles

Unlike in laboratory visual search tasks—wherein participants are typically presented with a pictorial representation of the item they are asked to seek out—in real-world searches, the observer rarely has veridical knowledge of the visual features that define their target. During categorical search, observers look for any instance of a categorically defined target (e.g., helping a family member look for their mobile phone). In these circumstances, people may not have information about noncritical features (e.g., the phone’s color), and must instead create a broad mental representation using the features that define (or are typical of) the category of objects they are seeking out (e.g., modern phones are typically rectangular and thin). In the current investigation (Experiment 1), using a categorical visual search task, we add to the body of evidence suggesting that categorical templates are effective enough to conduct efficient visual searches. When color information was available (Experiment 1a), attentional guidance, attention restriction, and object identification were enhanced when participants looked for categories with consistent features (e.g., ambulances) relative to categories with more variable features (e.g., sedans). When color information was removed (Experiment 1b), attention benefits disappeared, but object recognition was still better for feature-consistent target categories. In Experiment 2, we empirically validated the relative homogeneity of our societally important vehicle stimuli. Taken together, our results are in line with a category-consistent view of categorical target templates (Yu, Maxfield, & Zelinsky in, Psychological Science, 2016. doi: 10.1177/0956797616640237), and suggest that when features of a category are consistent and predictable, searchers can create mental representations that allow for the efficient guidance and restriction of attention as well as swift object identification.     

Einstellung defused: Interactivity and mental set

Mental set is observed when a familiar problem-solving strategy is applied to new problems that can be solved in simpler, more efficient ways. It is most famously illustrated in the water jar problems (Luchins, 1942 ). In these volume measurement problems, participants learn a rule to obtain an exact volume of liquid involving a complex combination of liquid transfer. Participants persevere in using this rule for new problems that can be solved with a much simpler rule. In two experiments presented here, participants completed the water jar task either in interactive conditions with actual water jars at a sink or in noninteractive conditions, with the problems presented on paper, as in the original Luchins procedure. Interactivity significantly reduced the degree of perseverance. In addition, participants' visuospatial skills significantly predicted the rate of perseverance (and the latencies to solution) in interactive but not in noninteractive conditions. These results underscore the importance of designing problem-solving experiments that engineer distributed cognitive systems in which participants coordinate internal and external resources in thinking.     

Negotiating control: patients' experiences of unsuccessful weight-loss surgery

Interviews were carried out with 10 men and women who had undergone weight-loss surgery (WLS) up to 10 years ago and felt that it had failed. Seven had had a further successful procedure. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Weight regain following surgery was explained in terms of either the mechanics of the operation or with participants describing ways to 'cheat' as food continued to be used for emotional regulation. Everyone spoke of how surgery neglected their mind. Following the second successful surgery, participants described changes in both their eating behaviour and cognitions emphasising how their mind had been brought 'in gear' through the investment of two invasive procedures. Transcending all accounts was the mind/body relationship and the issue of control with attributions for both failed and successful surgery shifting from the self to the surgical mechanism as the participants negotiated the pathway between self-blame and responsibility and utilised conflicting frameworks in which the mind and body were either divided or united. Whereas failed surgery is characterised by a battle for control, successful surgery involves handing control over to their restricted stomachs or considering WLS as a tool to be worked with.     

Objectification in Heterosexual Romantic Relationships: Examining Relationship Satisfaction of Female Objectification Recipients and Male Objectifying Perpetrators

Sex Roles - Sexual objectification is one of most the common manifestations of discrimination against women in Western societies; however, few studies have examined objectification in the context...     

Effects of fimbria lesions on trace two-way active avoidance acquisition and retention in rats

The fimbria-fornix (FF) is the main subcortical input to the hippocampus. It has been shown that FF lesions facilitate performance on a standard-delay two-way active avoidance task (AA2), thought to involve implicit memory. The hippocampal region is required for explicit or relational memory. It has been proposed that the hippocampus and related structures might associate events that are separated in space or time and detect elements shared in common by such discontiguous episodes. Therefore, FF lesions would be expected to impair performance on a trace paradigm, which introduces an interval between the CS (conditioned stimulus) and the US (unconditioned stimulus) and is generally considered a model of explicit memory. We predicted that FF lesions would impair memory in a trace AA2 procedure, while the same lesions would facilitate memory in a standard delay version of the task. To test this hypothesis, two experiments were carried out in 102 male Wistar rats. The first experiment characterized the trace paradigm using this kind of conditioning and demonstrated that control rats were able to acquire and retrieve (24 h and 11 days postacquisition) the association between the CS (tone) and the US (electric foot shock) when a trace interval (5, 10, or 20 s) was interposed between both stimuli. In the second experiment, we investigated the effects of FF electrolytic lesions on the same task using delay and trace (10-s trace interval) paradigms. Surprisingly, FF lesions facilitated the acquisition and the 24-h retention of the AA2 not only on the standard delay paradigm, but also with the trace paradigm. We suggest that facilitative effects could be a result of impairment in contextual learning.     

Personality disorders in the elderly compared to four younger age groups: a cross-sectional study of community residents and mental health patients

The notion is expressed in the DSM-IV that some personality disorders (PDs) tend to remit with age whereas other types do not. This notion is supported by the literature and the study reported here. Studies published between 1951 and 2000 show that (1) in old age, PDs are prevalent both in normal subjects and to a greater extent in the mentally ill; (2) the evidence for general age-relatedness of PDs is scarce and contradictory; (3) there is evidence for specific age-relatedness of PDs in old age. This empirical study focused on the prevalence of PDs in five different age groups ranging from adolescence to old age. It included both community residents (N = 623, aged 17-87), and mental health patients (N = 315, aged 18-86). Dimensional scores for PDs were assessed by means of the DSM-III-R- and ICD-10- based self-report Questionnaire of Personality Traits (VKP) (Duijsens, Eurelings-Bontekoe & Diekstra, 1996). There was consistent evidence for a specific effect of aging: community residents in the oldest age group reported more schizoid and more obsessive-compulsive characteristics compared to one or more of the younger age groups. Older mental health patients showed more schizoid disorder characteristics and fewer high-energy disorder characteristics compared to one or more of the younger patient groups.     

Distributional Models of Category Concepts Based on Names of Category Members

Cognitive scientists have long used distributional semantic representations of categories. The predominant approach uses distributional representations of category-denoting nouns, such as “city” for the category city. We propose a novel scheme that represents categories as prototypes over representations of names of its members, such as “Barcelona,” “Mumbai,” and “Wuhan” for the category city. This name-based representation empirically outperforms the noun-based representation on two experiments (modeling human judgments of category relatedness and predicting category membership) with particular improvements for ambiguous nouns. We discuss the model complexity of both classes of models and argue that the name-based model has superior explanatory potential with regard to concept acquisition.