The Contributing Role of Negative Affectivity and Experiential Avoidance to Increased Cardiovascular Risk

Depression and anxiety are independent risk factors for the onset of cardiovascular disease, independent of classical risk factors, such as smoking, obesity, or hypertension. The present paper argues that the tendency to avoid difficult thoughts and feelings helps explain this relationship. There is a strong positive relationship between experiential avoidance and negative affectivity. Experiential avoidance is also related to several health behaviors recognized for increasing cardiovascular risk and may help functionally explain why individuals engage in problematic behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, and binge eating. Treatments that undermine experiential avoidance could be useful psychosocial approaches to cardiovascular risk reduction.     

Brief Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Exposure for Panic Disorder: A Pilot Study

Cognitive and biobehavioral coping skills are central to psychosocial therapies and are taught to facilitate and improve exposure therapy. While traditional coping skills are aimed at controlling maladaptive thoughts or dysregulations in physiology, newer approaches that explore acceptance, defusion, and values-based direction have been gaining interest. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) involves creating an open, nonjudgmental stance toward whatever thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations arise in a given moment, experiencing them for what they are, and moving toward them while inner experiences such as anxiety are present. This approach can be seen as consistent with exposure therapies and may be utilized to organize and facilitate engagement in exposure exercises. This study examines the feasibility and efficacy for combining a brief ACT protocol with traditional exposure therapy. Eleven patients with panic disorder with or without agoraphobia received 4 sessions of ACT followed by 6 sessions of exposure therapy, with data collected on a weekly basis. Acquisition of ACT skills and their application during exposure was monitored using a novel “think-aloud” technology. Treatment was associated with clinically significant improvements in panic symptom severity, willingness to allow inner experiences to occur, and reductions in avoidant behavior. Although preliminary, results suggest that our brief training in ACT only (as assessed prior to exposure exercises) and in combination with exposure therapy was acceptable to patients and offered benefits on the order of large effect sizes. Clinical and research implications are discussed.     

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Self-Stigma Around Sexual Orientation: A Multiple Baseline Evaluation

This study evaluated the effectiveness of 6 to 10 sessions of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for self-stigma around sexual orientation linked to same-sex attraction (what has generally been referred to as internalized homophobia; IH) in a concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants design. Three men and 2 women showed sizeable reductions from baseline to posttreatment and to 4- and 12-week follow-ups in daily reports of the degree to which thoughts about sexual orientation interfered in their lives; distress associated with these thoughts also decreased. Positive changes were observed in self-report measures of IH, depression, anxiety, stress, quality of life, and perceived social support. Consistent with the theory underlying ACT, reductions in daily ratings of the believability of thoughts about same-sex attraction (a process variable) were greater than those observed for frequency of such thoughts. Improvements were also observed in questionnaires measuring ACT processes. Mixed regression analyses confirmed outcome and process effects that were apparent through visual inspection. Implications and the distinctiveness of ACT as an approach are discussed.     

Adding Types,But Not Tokens,Affects Property Induction

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from a sample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on the sample composition. Previous property induction experiments have only used samples consisting of novel types (unique entities). Because real-world evidence samples often contain redundant tokens (repetitions of the same entity), we studied the effects on property induction of adding types and tokens to an observed sample. In Experiments 1–3, we presented participants with a sample of birds or flowers known to have a novel property and probed whether this property generalized to novel items varying in similarity to the initial sample. Increasing the number of novel types (e.g., new birds with the target property) in a sample produced tightening, promoting property generalization to highly similar stimuli but decreasing generalization to less similar stimuli. On the other hand, increasing the number of tokens (e.g., repeated presentations of the same bird with the target property) had little effect on generalization. Experiment 4 showed that repeated tokens are encoded and can benefit recognition, but appear to be given little weight when inferring property generalization. We modified an existing Bayesian model of induction (Navarro, Dry, & Lee, 2012) to account for both the information added by new types and the discounting of information conveyed by tokens.     

Infants' ability to categorise on the basis of rhyme

Two experiments are described, which investigated 7 - to 13-month-old infants' abilities to categorise syllables according to their ending sounds, or rhymes. Using the Conditioned Headturn (CHT) Procedure, infants were conditioned to turn their head when one set of rhyming CVCs changed to another set of rhyming CVCs. Even the 7 -month-old infants demonstrated an ability to categorise according to rimes. The infants could be separated into three different groups: those who conditioned but did not succeed in a rhyming task; those who succeeded at one rhyming task but not a second; and those infants who succeeded on two rhyming tasks. The infants in the second group were showing an early sensitivity to rhyme. However, they appeared to be learning a very specific rule, listening only for one category of rhyme. The third group of infants was able to extend the initial rule they learned to include new rhymes. This group learned not only to highlight one particular rhyme, but were also able to abstract the previously learned rule to new rhymes, thereby demonstrating a higher level of sophistication in their categorisation of rhymes. These results are discussed in relation to the ontogeny of language learning, and work demonstrating a relationship between rhyming ability and competence in reading and writing.     

Children's visual descriptions

The aim of the experiments described below was to elucidate aspects of children's mental representations of what they see, through studying their drawings of simple geometric forms when copying from standard models. Two specific questions were studied: (a) Do children produce symbolic representations based, as in machine perception, on decomposition of the visual object into features or properties, subsequently reaggregated to a greater or lesser degree, rather than attempts to copy the visual appearance of the model? The answer was affirmative, though the phenomenon is relatively rare, (b) Does a child's drawings of simple geometric drawings improve if he can watch an adult do the same drawings first? This has been asserted in the literature and bears on the question of static versus procedural representation. In a sample of 499 drawings made by children aged from 2½ to 5 years we showed that such an effect is absent or very small.