Patterns of attachment and parents' adjustment to the death of their child

The impact of adult attachment on psychological adjustment among bereaved parents and the mediating effect of relationship satisfaction were examined among a sample of 219 couples of parents. Data collection took place 6, 13, and 20 months after loss. Use of the actor partner interdependence model in multilevel regression analysis enabled exploration of both individual as well as partner attachment as predictors of grief and depression. Results indicated that the more insecurely attached parents were (on both avoidance and anxiety attachment), the higher the symptoms of grief and depression. Neither the attachment pattern of the partner nor similarity of attachment within the couple had any influence on psychological adjustment of the parent. Marital satisfaction partially mediated the association of anxious attachment with symptomatology. Contrary to previous research findings, avoidant attachment was associated with high grief intensity. These findings challenge the notion that the avoidantly attached are resilient.     

Construct Validity of Concepts of Attention in Healthy Controls and Patients with CHI

The present study aimed to examine the construct validity of three aspects of attention, namely focused, divided, and supervisory control of attention. Factor-analytic techniques were applied to scores of healthy subjects on a series of neuropsychological tests tapping these aspects of attention. The two components found did not match the hypothesized aspects and were labeled as Memory-driven Action and Stimulus-driven Reaction. The second question was whether the same components could be found in a group of patients with CHI. The pattern of attentional functions found in healthy subjects had changed qualitatively in patients with CHI. A possible explanation for this result in terms of a shift from automatic to controlled processing is discussed.     

Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Earlier research has established that speakers usually fixate the objects they name and that the viewing time for an object depends on the time necessary for object recognition and for the retrieval of its name. In three experiments, speakers produced pronouns and noun phrases to refer to new objects and to objects already known. Speakers looked less frequently and for shorter periods at the objects to be named when they had very recently seen or heard of these objects than when the objects were new. Looking rates were higher and viewing times longer in preparation of noun phrases than in preparation of pronouns. If it is assumed that there is a close relationship between eye gaze and visual attention, these results reveal (1) that speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones and (2) that they allocate visual attention both less often and for shorter periods to objects they will refer to by a pronoun than to objects they will name in a full noun phrase. The experiments suggest that linguistic processing benefits, directly or indirectly, from allocation of visual attention to the referent object.     

The Color-Vision Approach to Emotional Space: Cortical Evoked Potential Data

A framework for accounting for emotional phenomena proposed by Sokolov and Boucsein (2000) employs conceptual dimensions that parallel those of hue, brightness, and saturation in color vision. The approach that employs the concepts of emotional quality. intensity, and saturation has been supported by psychophysical emotional scaling data gathered from a few trained observers. We report cortical evoked potential data obtained during the change between different emotions expressed in schematic faces. Twenty-five subjects (13 male, 12 female) were presented with a positive, a negative, and a neutral computer-generated face with random interstimulus intervals in a within-subjects design, together with four meaningful and four meaningless control stimuli made up from the same elements. Frontal, central, parietal, and temporal ERPs were recorded from each hemisphere. Statistically significant outcomes in the P300 and N200 range support the potential fruitfulness of the proposed color-vision-model-based approach to human emotional space.     

On becoming neutral: effects of experimental neutralizing reconsidered

Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 found that writing out a negative thought produced anxiety and an urge to neutralize the thought, that instructing participants to neutralize the thought reduced anxiety/neutralization urge in the short run (i.e. within 2 min), but that in the control group 20 min without instruction was attended by the same reduction in anxiety/urge to neutralize (“natural decay”). The observations were made with pariticipants who scored high on “thought action fusion” and the experiment was set up as exerimental model of obsessions. We repeated the study with participants that were not selected on thought action fusion. All the findings reported by Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 were replicated. Correlational analysis indicated that the strength of the effect was not related to scores on scales measuring “thought action fusion”. Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 did not assess whether non-neutralizing was followed by immediate reductions in distress. We did assess this and found that the larger part of the immediate reduction of distress after neutralization also occurs when no neutralization instruction is given. The effects of neutralization instructions in the present type of experiment are considerably less powerful than suggested earlier.