Life Meaning Following Combat Among Air Force Security Forces Personnel

An active duty Air Force ground combat unit (n = 189) completed surveys about trauma and combat exposure, mood symptoms, and meaning in life. Two dimensions of deployment-related traumas were assessed: combat (e.g., firing weapons, being fired upon) and aftermath (e.g., seeing dead bodies, injury). Results of regression analyses indicated that Airmen who experienced more intense combat reported less presence of meaning in life, although the significant interaction with gender suggested declines in meaning in life were especially pronounced among males with higher combat intensity. In contrast, more intense aftermath exposure was associated with slightly stronger meaning in life, with no differences by gender. Intensity of combat exposure might differentially affect perceived meaning in life for male versus female combatants.     

Flexible Mediation Analysis in the Presence of Nonlinear Relations: Beyond the Mediation Formula

In the social sciences, mediation analysis has typically been formulated in the context of linear models using the Baron &; Kenny (1986) Baron, R. M. and Kenny, D. A. 1986. The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 1173–1182. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] approach. Extensions to nonlinear models have been considered but lack formal justification. By placing mediation analysis within the counterfactual framework of causal inference one can define causal mediation effects in a way that is not tied to a specific statistical model and identify them under certain no unmeasured confounding assumptions. Corresponding estimation procedures using parametric or nonparametric models, based on the so-called mediation formula, have recently been proposed in the psychological literature and made accessible through the R-package mediation. A number of limitations of the latter approach are discussed and a more flexible approach using natural effects models is proposed as an alternative. The latter builds on the same counterfactual framework but enables interpretable and parsimonious modeling of direct and mediated effects and facilitates tests of hypotheses that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to test. We illustrate the approach in a study of individuals who ended a romantic relationship and explore whether the effect of attachment anxiety during the relationship on unwanted pursuit behavior after the breakup is mediated by negative affect during the breakup.     

Size does matter: Women mentally rotate large objects faster than men

Performance in a computerized “mental rotation” task was measured in groups of males and females while they rotated Shepard‐Metzler‐like cube assemblies on either a standard laptop screen (size = 36 cm) or on a large display wall (584 cm) where the stimuli appeared at considerably larger sizes and within a much wider field of view than that typically used in most spatial tasks. Males and females did not differ significantly in performance in the standard size condition with regards to response time but females performed faster than males in the large display condition. Males were also found to be significantly more accurate than females, regardless of display. We found no sign of trading accuracy for speed for either of the sexes or screen size conditions. We surmise that such an effect may be due to differences in task‐solving strategies between the sexes, where a holistic strategy – which may be preferred by males is negatively affected by large object sizes, whereas a piecemeal approach, that may be preferred by females, is virtually unaffected by display size.     

Big Gods and other watcher mechanisms in the formation of large groups

Norenzayan's effort to integrate genetic and cultural evolution is a welcome advance over previous efforts, as is the attention he devotes to different levels of analysis from cognitive mechanisms to large group interactions. The scope of Norenzayan's argument, however, is bound to leave many scholars of religion feeling uneasy. The content of his model, which is most likely over specified, will need further testing in light of historical evidence. Comparison of Big Gods with Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution (2011) highlights some of the choices Norenzayan made in designing his model and suggests ways it could be elaborated. Historians of religion who would like to help test his model could keep an eye out for ‘watcher mechanisms’ that might play more of a role than ‘moralizing Big Gods’ in some traditions and, thus, potentially offer an alternative route to large, anonymous, yet stable groups.     

Anxiety, Sensory Over-Responsivity, and Gastrointestinal Problems in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience high rates of anxiety, sensory processing problems, and gastrointestinal (GI) problems; however, the associations among these symptoms in children with ASD have not been previously examined. The current study examined bivariate and multivariate relations among anxiety, sensory over-responsivity, and chronic GI problems in a sample of 2,973 children with ASD enrolled in the Autism Treatment Network (ages 2–17 years, 81.6 % male). Twenty-four percent of the sample experienced at least one type of chronic GI problem (constipation, abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, and/or nausea lasting three or more months). Children with each type of GI problem had significantly higher rates of both anxiety and sensory over-responsivity. Sensory over-responsivity and anxiety were highly associated, and each provided unique contributions to the prediction of chronic GI problems in logistic regression analyses. The results indicate that anxiety, sensory over-responsivity and GI problems are possibly interrelated phenomenon for children with ASD, and may have common underlying mechanisms.     

Early Adolescent Growth in Depression and Conduct Problem Symptoms as Predictors of Later Substance Use Impairment

Most studies of adolescent substance use and psychological comorbidity have examined the contributions of conduct problems and depressive symptoms measured only at particular points-in-time. Yet, during adolescence, risk factors such as conduct problems and depression exist within a developmental context, and vary over time. Though internalizing and comorbid pathways to substance use have been theorized (Hussong et al. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 25:390-404, 2011), the degree to which developmental increases in depressive symptoms and conduct problems elevate risk for substance use impairment among adolescents, in either an additive or potentially a synergistic fashion, is unclear. Using a school-based sample of 521 adolescents, we tested additive and synergistic influences of changes in depressive symptoms and conduct problems from 6th to 9th grade using parallel process growth curve modeling with latent interactions in the prediction of late adolescent (12th grade) substance use impairment, while examining gender as a moderator. We found that the interaction between growth in depression and conduct disorder symptoms uniquely predicted later substance use problems, in addition to main effects of each, across boys and girls. Results indicated that adolescents whose parents reported increases in both depression and conduct disorder symptoms from 6th to 9th grade reported the most substance use-related impairment in 12th grade. The current study demonstrates that patterns of depression and conduct problems (e.g., growth vs. decreasing) are likely more important than the static levels at any particular point-in-time in relation to substance use risk.     

Smoking,self-regulation and moral positioning: A focus group study with British smokers from a disadvantaged community

Smoking in many Western societies has become a both moral aand health issue in recent years, but little is known about how smokers position themselves and regulate their behaviour in this context. In this article, we report the findings from a study investigating how smokers from an economically disadvantaged community in the East Midlands (UK) respond to concerns about the health impact of smoking on others. We conducted ten focus group (FG) discussions with mixed groups (by smoking status and gender; N?=?58 participants) covering a range of topics, including smoking norms, self-regulation, and smoking in diverse contexts. We transcribed all FG discussions before analysing the data using techniques from discourse anlysis. Smokers in general positioned themselves as socially responsible smokers and morally upstanding citizens. This position was bolstered in two main ways: ‘everyday accommodation’, whereby everyday efforts to accommodate the needs of non-smokers were referenced, and ‘taking a stand’, whereby proactive interventions to prevent smoking in (young) others were cited. We suggest that smoking cessation campaigns could usefully be informed by this ethic of care for others.     

Recall initiation strategies must be controlled in training studies that use immediate free recall tasks to measure the components of working memory capacity across time

There has been great interest in using working memory (WM) training regimens as an alternative treatment for ADHD, but it has recently been concluded that existing training regimens may not be optimally designed because they target the primary memory component but not the secondary component of WM capacity. This conclusion requires the ability to accurately measure changes in primary and secondary memory abilities over time. The immediate free recall task has been used in previous studies to measure these changes; however, one concern with these tasks is that the recall order required on training exercises may influence the recall strategy used during free recall, which may in turn influence the relative number of items recalled from primary and secondary memory. To address this issue, previous training studies have explicitly controlled recall strategy before and after training. However, the necessity of controlling for recall strategies has not been explicitly tested. The present study investigated the effects of forward-serial-order training on free recall performance under conditions in which recall strategy was not controlled using a sample of adolescents with ADHD. Unlike when recall order was controlled, the main findings showed selective improvement of the secondary memory component (as opposed to the primary memory component) when recall order was uncontrolled. This finding advances our understanding of WM training by highlighting the importance of controlling for recall strategies when free recall tasks are used to measure changes in the primary and secondary components of WM across time.     

Implementation of Cognitive Therapy for PTSD in routine clinical care: Effectiveness and moderators of outcome in a consecutive sample

ObjectiveTrauma-focused psychological treatments are recommended as first-line treatments for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but clinicians may be concerned that the good outcomes observed in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) may not generalize to the wide range of traumas and presentations seen in clinical practice. This study investigated whether Cognitive Therapy for PTSD (CT-PTSD) can be effectively implemented into a UK National Health Service Outpatient Clinic serving a defined ethnically mixed urban catchment area.MethodA consecutive sample of 330 patients with PTSD (age 17–83) following a wide range of traumas were treated by 34 therapists, who received training and supervision in CT-PTSD. Pre and post treatment data (PTSD symptoms, anxiety, depression) were collected for all patients, including dropouts. Hierarchical linear modeling investigated candidate moderators of outcome and therapist effects.ResultsCT-PTSD was well tolerated and led to very large improvement in PTSD symptoms, depression and anxiety. The majority of patients showed reliable improvement/clinically significant change: intent-to-treat: 78.8%/57.3%; completer: 84.5%/65.1%. Dropouts and unreliable attenders had worse outcome. Statistically reliable symptom exacerbation with treatment was observed in only 1.2% of patients. Treatment gains were maintained during follow-up (M = 280 days, n = 220). Few of the selection criteria used in some RCTs, demographic, diagnostic and trauma characteristics moderated treatment outcome, and only social problems and needing treatment for multiple traumas showed unique moderation effects. There were no random effects of therapist on symptom improvement, but therapists who were inexperienced in CT-PTSD had more dropouts than those with greater experience.ConclusionsThe results support the effectiveness of CT-PTSD and suggest that trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy can be successfully implemented in routine clinical services treating patients with a wide range of traumas.