The importance of assessing treatment integrity: An example in the anxiety disorders

One purpose of this investigation was to examine the importance of assessing treatment integrity in a study evaluating a treatment for specific anxiety disorders. Three subjects, two social phobics and one simple phobic, received self-instruction training (Phase I) followed by exposure and self-instruction training (Phase II) in a multiple baseline across subjects design. All subjects were assessed during a pretreatment baseline and throughout treatment using measures of treatment integrity and measures of change in phobic severity. Improvement took place at different times for different subjects. Measures of treatment integrity, which consisted of monitoring of self-statements as well as practice outside the session, indicated that treatment was not always received as intended and that improvement was correlated with practice. The usefulness of measures of treatment integrity in both clinical and research settings is highlighted.     

Safety behaviors were associated with greater anxious symptoms during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Research shows that people who use safety behaviors are at greater risk factor for anxiety than people who do not use safety behaviors. However, the perception of some safety behaviors changed during the COVID-19 pandemic; behaviors that were once considered unnecessary or excessive were now commonplace (e.g., monitoring bodily symptoms, avoiding crowds). The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which the pandemic changed the status of health-related safety behaviors as a risk factor for symptoms of anxiety. To this end, we tested the effect of safety behavior use on anxious symptoms during the first year of the pandemic using a longitudinal design with 8 time points and participants (n = 233) from over 20 countries. Despite possible changes in their perception, those engaging in high levels of safety behaviors reported the greatest levels of anxious symptoms throughout the pandemic year. However, the outcomes for safety behavior users were not all negative. Safety behavior use at baseline was the only predictor of participants' willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine (measured one year later).     

The capacity for rapid shifts in level of mental concentration

This investigation continues the exploration of a largely neglected topic in the field of attention, levels of mental concentration, by ascertaining under optimal conditions the capacity for shifting quickly from one level to another. Previous research in our laboratory had applied a set of five post-hypnotically cued levels of concentration or “cognitive arousal”, covering a very wide range, to a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks. In the present study two highly trained undergraduate hypnotic subjects, one male and one female, were given progressively shorter time durations in which to respond to the post-hypnotic cues before viewing tachisto-scopically flashed consonants under cue influence. The results indicate a striking capacity to shift degrees of cognitive arousal very rapidly to one extreme or the other, on the order of 100 ms or less.     

The role of the cs and avoidance period duration in discriminated avoidance conditioning

In an experiment investigating the effect of CS duration on discriminated bar-press conditioning, subjects were assigned to one warning period duration (1.5, 5.0 or 15.0 sec.) on the first day of avoidance training, and to one of the three durations on the second day of training. On each day avoidance behaviour was greatly influenced by the duration of the CS (warning) period, but the duration on day I had no effect on the second day's avoidance performance. Groups receiving no CS during training, although provided an avoidance contingency, showed little conditioning, but produced highly significant amounts of intertrial responding. In a second experiment, subjects receiving CS on day I were shifted to no CS on day II. Avoidance performance on day II was not significantly different from the day II performance of subjects in Experiment I having two training sessions with the CS present or absent on both days.     

Two operations In character recognition: A partial replication

Subjects carried out a choice reaction time experiment in which they were required to press one lever ifa tachistoscopically flashed numeral was a member of a previously memorized list of numerals and a second lever if it was not a member of the list. The number of numerals in the list was varied from one to four. On half of the trials the numeral was partially masked by a pattern of visual noise. For one group a single fixed pattern of noise was used; for a second group four patterns presented in random order were used. Reaction time from the onset of the numeral to the lever press was found to be a linear function of list size, confirming Sternberg’s hypothesis that the list is scanned serially to determine a match. Partial masking was found to add a constant increment to reaction time for both groups, independent of set size. The increment was equal for both groups. The constancy of the reaction time increase contradicts Sternberg’s results in which the increment was found to be, in part, a function of list size. The results of the present study indicate that one cannot dismiss the possibility that Ss identify the character to the point of labeling prior to an attempt to determine list membership.     

Relational perception and modes of perceiver operation

Judgments were made of the size of a small, luminous (inner) square appearing in the center of a somewhat larger, variable (outer) square, the whole pattern appearing in the dark. Accuracy of judgment was greatest when the outer square was constant from trial to trial but deteriorated when the outer square also varied in size, reaching a lower limit less than the accuracy produced under the absolute judgment condition (no outer square presented). An application of multiple discriminant analysis and the use of a maximum likelihood observer model provided estimates of the extent to which Os responded to inner and outer size variation as separate aspects of stimulation. Although Os differed markedly in this respect, their ability to identify inner square size under the various conditions did not reflect this difference.