“Watch out!”: Effects of instructed threat and avoidance on human free‐operant approach–avoidance behavior

Approach–avoidance paradigms create a competition between appetitive and aversive contingencies and are widely used in nonhuman research on anxiety. Here, we examined how instructions about threat and avoidance impact control by competing contingencies over human approach–avoidance behavior. Additionally, Experiment 1 examined the effects of threat magnitude (money loss amount) and avoidance cost (fixed ratio requirements), whereas Experiment 2 examined the effects of threat information (available, unavailable and inaccurate) on approach–avoidance. During the task, approach responding was modeled by reinforcing responding with money on a FR schedule. By performing an observing response, participants produced an escalating “threat meter”. Instructions stated that the threat meter levels displayed the current probability of losing money, when in fact loss only occurred when the level reached the maximum. Instructions also stated pressing an avoidance button lowered the threat level. Overall, instructions produced cycles of approach and avoidance responding with transitions from approach to avoidance when threat was high and transitions back to approach after avoidance reduced threat. Experiment 1 revealed increasing avoidance cost, but not threat magnitude, shifted approach–avoidance transitions to higher threat levels and increased anxiety ratings, but did not influence the frequency of approach–avoidance cycles. Experiment 2 revealed when threat level information was available or absent earnings were high, but earnings decreased when inaccurate threat information was incompatible with contingencies. Our findings build on prior nonhuman and human approach–avoidance research by highlighting how instructed threat and avoidance can impact human AA behavior and self‐reported anxiety.     

The implementation of routine outcome measures in a Tier 3 Psychological Therapies Service: The process of enhancing data quality and reflections of implementation challenges

Background: The Newham Psychological Therapies Service (PTS) has been using the CORE System of evaluation to demonstrate effectiveness since 2004. More recently there has been the national and local drive to improve outcomes as outlined by a number of Department of Health policies and the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative. Aims: This paper describes how, as a secondary care complex mental health service, we have engaged with the process of outcome measurement through complementing the usage of the CORE System with additional measures forming the service pilot minimum dataset. The process of implementation is outlined along with reflections on the challenges which the service faced in introducing outcome measurement. Findings: Engagement with outcome measurement by a service requires attention to be paid to the organisational and professional aspects and personal resonances for clinicians if it is to become established as a meaningful enterprise within secondary care services. Despite success at this task, challenges remain to the further development of this area of work.     

THE DREAM'S NAVEL BETWEEN CHAOS AND THOUGHT3

The authors begin by drawing attention to the problem of the transition from the biological to the psychic, noting that Freud himself, with his background in the neurosciences, grappled with it throughout his career. Certain recent paradigms more commonly applied to the natural sciences, such as in particular chaos and complexity theory, can in their view prove fruitful in psychoanalysis too, and it is shown how these notions are inherent in some of Freud's conceptions. The unconscious is stated to operate like a neural network, performing the kind of parallel processing used in the computing of highly complex situations, whereas the conscious mind is sequential. Dreams, in the authors' opinion, are organisers of the mind, imparting order to the turbulence of the underlying wishes and unconscious fantasies and structuring them through the dream work. Through dreams, the structured linearity of conscious thought can emerge out of the non‐linear chaos of the drives. The dream's navel can be seen as the chaotic link, or interface, between the unconscious wish, which constitutes an attractor, and the conscious thought. The attractor may be visualised as having an hourglass or clepsydra shape, the narrow section being the dream's navel, and, being the same at any scale of observation, has the property of fractality.     

The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading

In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read sentences containing a monosyllabic (e.g., grain) or a disyllabic (e.g., cargo) five-letter word. Monosyllabic target words were skipped more often than disyllabic target words, indicating that syllabic structure was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence the decision of saccade target selection. Fixation times on the target word when it was fixated did not show an influence of number of syllables, demonstrating that number of syllables differentially impacts skipping rates and fixation durations during reading. [corrected]     

Discrepancies between patients' and partners' perceptions of unsupportive behavior in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

The literature on chronic diseases indicates that partner support, as perceived by patients, contributes to well-being of patients in either a positive or a negative way. Previous studies indicated that patients' and partners' perceptions of unsupportive partner behavior are only moderately related. Our aim was (1) to investigate whether discrepancies between patients' and partners' perceptions of two types of unsupportive partner behavior-overprotection and protective buffering-were associated with the level of distress reported by patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and (2) to evaluate whether the direction of the differences between patients' and partners' perceptions was associated with distress (i.e., whether patient distress was associated with greater patient or greater partner reports of unsupportive partner behavior). A cross-sectional study was performed using the data of a sample of 68 COPD patients and their spouses. Distress was assessed using the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25. Patients' and partners' perceptions of unsupportive partner behavior were assessed with a questionnaire measuring overprotection and protective buffering. Distress was independently associated with patients' perceptions of protective buffering and discrepancies in spouses' perceptions of overprotection. Regarding the direction of the discrepancy, we found that greater partner reports of overprotection as compared with patient reports were related to more distress in COPD patients. Our study showed that patients' distress was associated not only with patients' perceptions, but also with discrepancies between patients' and partners' perceptions of unsupportive partner behavior.     

What's in a word? A parametric study of semantic influences on visual word recognition

To what extent does semantic information play a functional role in visual word recognition? Theories of word recognition vary in the importance assigned to semantic information in visual lexical decision, with past research suggesting that the nature of the foils is a crucial determinant of semantic reliance. Here, we explored the conditions under which semantic variables influence lexical decision. Normal readers performed visual lexical decision tasks in which imageability and semantic priming were manipulated, with nonword foils varying systematically in their orthographic and phonological similarity to the real words. The effects of imageability and semantic priming increased in magnitude as nonword foils became progressively more wordlike. These findings provide a clear illustration of the flexible use of semantic information to support normal visual word recognition.     

Recovering faces from memory: the distracting influence of external facial features

Recognition memory for unfamiliar faces is facilitated when contextual cues (e.g., head pose, background environment, hair and clothing) are consistent between study and test. By contrast, inconsistencies in external features, especially hair, promote errors in unfamiliar face-matching tasks. For the construction of facial composites, as carried out by witnesses and victims of crime, the role of external features (hair, ears, and neck) is less clear, although research does suggest their involvement. Here, over three experiments, we investigate the impact of external features for recovering facial memories using a modern, recognition-based composite system, EvoFIT. Participant-constructors inspected an unfamiliar target face and, one day later, repeatedly selected items from arrays of whole faces, with "breeding," to "evolve" a composite with EvoFIT; further participants (evaluators) named the resulting composites. In Experiment 1, the important internal-features (eyes, brows, nose, and mouth) were constructed more identifiably when the visual presence of external features was decreased by Gaussian blur during construction: higher blur yielded more identifiable internal-features. In Experiment 2, increasing the visible extent of external features (to match the target's) in the presented face-arrays also improved internal-features quality, although less so than when external features were masked throughout construction. Experiment 3 demonstrated that masking external-features promoted substantially more identifiable images than using the previous method of blurring external-features. Overall, the research indicates that external features are a distractive rather than a beneficial cue for face construction; the results also provide a much better method to construct composites, one that should dramatically increase identification of offenders.     

Mother-infant interaction and children's socio-emotional development with high- and low-risk mothers

Charting the dynamic character of mother-infant interaction requires using observational systems of sequential coding in real time. A longitudinal study was designed to approach maternal sensitivity in a more complex way using sequential analysis. The study was conducted with 20 high- and 20 low-risk mothers and their infants (aged: 3, 12 and 15 months) to examine the relation among mothers' risk status for physical abuse and their maternal interactive profiles, using micro-social sequential analyses, and the subsequent quality of attachment developed by their children at 15 months of age. Results showed significantly different timings in maternal responses in high- and low-risk groups, that the high-risk mothers were less sensitive: more intrusive and less discriminate regarding their infant's behavior. Significant differences between groups were also found after infant difficult behavior. High-risk mothers' infants were significantly more likely to develop insecure attachment. Sensitivity is proposed as a constellation of timings in early mother-infant interaction.