How eye movements affect unpleasant memories: support for a working-memory account

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing can reduce ratings of the vividness and emotionality of unpleasant memories-hence it is commonly used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. The present experiments compared three accounts of how eye movements produce these benefits. Participants rated unpleasant autobiographical memories before and after eye movements or an eyes stationary control condition. In Experiment 1, eye movements produced benefits only when memories were held in mind during the movements, and eye movements increased arousal, contrary to an investigatory-reflex account. In Experiment 2, horizontal and vertical eye movements produced equivalent benefits, contrary to an interhemispheric-communication account. In Experiment 3, two other distractor tasks (auditory shadowing, drawing) produced benefits that were negatively correlated with working-memory capacity. These findings support a working-memory account of the eye movement benefits in which the central executive is taxed when a person performs a distractor task while attempting to hold a memory in mind.     

Rethinking therapeutic action

Like other core psychoanalytic constructs, the theory of therapeutic action is currently in flux, as theorists of differing persuasions propose different mechanisms. In this article, the authors attempt to integrate developments within and without psychoanalysis to provide a working model of the multifaceted processes involved in producing change in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A theory of therapeutic action must describe both what changes (the aims of treatment) and what strategies are likely to be useful in facilitating those changes (technique). The authors believe that single-mechanism theories of therapeutic action, no matter how complex, are unlikely to prove useful at this point because of the variety of targets of change and the variety of methods useful in effecting change in those targets (such as techniques aimed at altering different kinds of conscious and unconscious processes). Interventions that facilitate change may be classified into one of three categories: those that foster insight, those that make use of various mutative aspects of the treatment relationship and a variety of secondary strategies that can be of tremendous importance. They propose that, in all forms of psychoanalytic treatment, we would be more accurate to speak of the therapeutic actions , rather than action .     

Extracting the Variance Inflation Factor and Other Multicollinearity Diagnostics from Typical Regression Results

Multicollinearity is a potential problem in all regression analyses. However, the examination of multicollinearity is rarely reported in primary studies. In this article we discuss and show several post hoc methods for assessing multicollinearity. One such multicollinearity diagnostic is the variance inflation factor. We outline the post hoc variance inflation factor method, which computes the variance inflation factor from the standardized regression coefficient and semi-partial correlation, both of which can be calculated from commonly reported regression results. Three examples of computing multicollinearity diagnostics using data from published studies are shown. We conclude with a discussion and practical implications.     

Behavioral Health and Firefighters: An Intervention and Interviews with Canadian Firefighters

The present study described participatory action research regarding behavioral health of firefighters. At the request of the participant fire department, the Veterans’ Affairs Wellness kit was used to provide wellness information to members. During the intervention, qualitative data from the researcher perspective was collected and subsequently coded to reveal themes about lessons learned during provision of the materials. Following the intervention at the department level, individual interviews were completed with a subsample of members and their spouses. The combined outcomes from these two research phases suggest that wellness interventions for firefighters should be informal, firefighter-specific, focused on programs endorsed by firefighter-related organizations, and supported by management and frontline supervisors. From our data, we suggest that the Veterans’ Affairs Wellness kit should be studied further as a potentially meaningful fire service intervention. Further, we propose that this and other interventions should take into account job aspects identified as important by both members and their spouses.     

Youth Responses to Anti‐Smoking Advertisements From Tobacco‐Control Agencies,Tobacco Companies,and Pharmaceutical Companies1

Emotional reactions to anti‐smoking advertising (e.g., fear, sadness, anger) may play an important role in promoting smoking‐related attitudinal and behavioral change. Overall, 278 youth completed response ratings of 16 different elements of 50 anti‐smoking ads made by tobacco‐control agencies, tobacco companies, and pharmaceutical companies. Compared with tobacco‐control ads, tobacco‐company ads were more likely to elicit positive emotions and less likely to elicit negative emotions and to be of interest to youth. Compared with tobacco‐control ads, pharmaceutical company ads were less likely to elicit negative emotional responses or cognitively engage youth and more likely to elicit positive emotions. These findings suggest that youth may be unlikely to respond to tobacco‐company advertising in ways that may lead to a lower likelihood of smoking.     

Collective efficacy and vigilant problem solving in group decision making: A non-linear model

This research explores the relationship between collective efficacy and aspects of analytic or vigilant problem solving (Janis, 1989) in the context of group decision making. We hypothesized that vigilant problem solving would be most evident under conditions of relatively moderate collective efficacy, as opposed to either very high or very low collective efficacy. We investigated this hypothesis with groups of business students who participated in a complex business strategy simulation. Results show a significant curvilinear relationship between collective efficacy and vigilant problem solving, and a significant linear relationship between vigilant problem solving and decision outcomes. There is also evidence that vigilant problem solving mediates the relationship between collective efficacy and decision outcomes. Implications for theory, managerial practice, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Is Virtue Ethics Self-Effacing?

Thomas Hurka, Simon Keller, and Julia Annas have recently argued that virtue ethics is self-effacing. I contend that these arguments are rooted in a mistaken understanding of the role that ideal agency and agent flourishing (should) play in virtue ethics. I then show how a virtue ethical theory can avoid the charge of self-effacement and why it is important that it do so.     

A preliminary study of self-esteem,stigma, and disclosure in adolescents who stutter

This study examined the self-esteem, perceived stigma, and disclosure practices of 48 adolescents who stutter divided into two age cohorts: younger (13, 14, and 15 years) and older (16, 17, and 18 years) adolescents. Results revealed that 41 (85%) of the participants scored within 1 S.D. from the mean on a standardized measure of self-esteem, indicative of positive self-esteem. Results also showed that stuttering did not present a stigmatizing condition for the majority (65%) of adolescents who stutter. However, 60% of participants indicated that they "rarely" or "never" discussed their stuttering. The younger adolescents perceived stuttering as a more negative and stigmatizing condition than older adolescents. Implications for understanding stuttering in adolescents are discussed. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: Readers will learn about and understand (a) the role of stigma, disclosure, and self-esteem in stuttering; (b) the methods used to evaluate stigma, disclosure, and self-esteem in adolescents; and (c) the similarities between adolescents who stutter and normative data on self-esteem and stigma scales.     

Beyond spreading activation: An influence of relatedness proportion on masked semantic priming

Semantic priming in the lexical decision task has been shown to increase when the proportion of related-prime trials is increased. This finding typically is taken as evidence for a conscious, strategic use of primes. Three experiments are reported in which masked semantic primes displayed for only 45 msec were tested in high- versus low-relatedness proportion conditions. Relatedness proportion was increased either by using a high proportion of semantically related primes or a large set of repetitionprimed filler trials. Semantic priming was consistently enhanced relative to a low-relatedness proportion condition. These relatedness proportion effects were not due to conscious, strategic use of primes: Exclusion of prime-aware subjects did not attenuate the effects, and better performance in a prime classification task was not associated with larger semantic priming effects. These results are interpreted within a retrospective account of semantic priming in which recruitment of a prime event is modulated by prime validity.