The Impact of Modifying Interpretive Bias on Contamination-Related Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms

Cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) propose that a tendency to negatively interpret ambiguous thoughts and situations plays a key role in maintaining the disorder. Moreover, some researchers have proposed that negative interpretive biases may share a common processing mechanism with attentional biases, with changes in one predicted to lead to changes in the other. The current study examined whether training positive (i.e., adaptive) interpretive bias of contamination-related OCD concerns using a cognitive bias modification paradigm (CBM-I) would lead to reductions in contamination concerns, as well as changes in contamination-related attentional bias. Undergraduate students with high levels of contamination-related OCD symptoms were randomly assigned to receive either positive (n?=?31) or neutral (n?=?33) CBM-I training. Participants in the positive training condition, relative to the neutral training condition, showed a significantly greater increase in positive interpretive bias, significantly less within-session behavioural avoidance of contaminants, and significantly reduced contamination-related cognitions (at one-week follow-up). Contrary to expectations, CBM-I training did not differentially impact attentional bias nor self-reported contamination-related OCD symptoms. We discuss future directions in applying CBM-I to contamination-related OCD.

     

Risking Everything in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: An Analogue Decision-Making Study

An experiment examined decision-making processes among nonclinical participants with low or high levels of OCD symptomatology (N?=?303). To better simulate the decision environments that are most likely to be problematic for clients with OCD, we employed decision tasks that incorporated “black swan” options that have a very low probability but involve substantial loss. When faced with a choice between a safer option that involved no risk of loss or a riskier alternative with a very low probability of substantial loss, most participants chose the safer option regardless of OCD symptom level. However, when faced with choices between options that had similar expected values to the previous choices, but where each option had some low risk of a substantial loss, there was a significant shift towards riskier decisions. These effects were stronger when the task involved a contamination based, health-relevant decision task as compared to one with financial outcomes. The results suggest that both low and high symptom OC participants approach decisions involving risk-free options and decisions involving risky alternatives in qualitatively different ways. There was some evidence that measures of impulsivity were better predictors of the shift to risky decision making than OCD symptomatology.

     

Intolerance of Uncertainty and Anxiety Symptoms: Examining the Indirect Effect Through Anxiety Sensitivity Among Adults with Anxiety-Related Disorders

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - The conceptual overlap between intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and anxiety sensitivity (AS) has gained recent attention, with researchers...     

Systematic Review of Behavioral Interventions Using Digital Technology to Reduce Problem Behavior in the Classroom

Journal of Behavioral Education - Problem behavior in the classroom leads to challenges for teachers who often feel ill equipped to address such behavior. Behavior analytic interventions have been...     

Altered attention for stimuli on the hands

Attention operates in the space near the hands with unique, action-related priorities. Here, we examined how attention treats objects on the hands themselves. We tested two hypotheses. First, attention may treat stimuli on the hands like stimuli near the hands, as though the surface of the hands were the proximal case of near-hand space. Alternatively, we proposed that the surface of the hands may be attentionally distinct from the surrounding space. Specifically, we predicted that attention should be slow to orient toward the hands in order to remain entrained to near-hand space, where the targets of actions are usually located. In four experiments, we observed delayed orienting of attention on the hands compared to orienting attention near or far from the hands. Similar delayed orienting was also found for tools connected to the body compared to tools disconnected from the body. These results support our second hypothesis: attention operates differently on the functional surfaces of the hand. We suggest this effect serves a functional role in the execution of manual actions.     

Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.     

Shifty talk: knowledge and causation

In this paper, I criticise one main strategy for supporting anti-intellectualism, the view that whether a subject knows may depend on the stakes. This strategy appeals to difficulties with developing contextualist and pragmatic treatments of the shiftiness of our talk about knowledge to motivate anti-intellectualism. I criticise this strategy by drawing an analogy between debates about causation and knowledge. In each case, talk about a phenomenon is shifty and contextualist and pragmatic explanations of the shifty talk face the same objections. However, in the case of causation it would be implausible to argue that difficulties with the relevant contextualist and pragmatic accounts motivate a revisionary metaphysics of causation. I conclude that the defender of anti-intellectualism needs to employ a different strategy to defend her view.     

State-based versus reward-based motivation in younger and older adults

Recent decision-making work has focused on a distinction between a habitual, model-free neural system that is motivated toward actions that lead directly to reward and a more computationally demanding goal-directed, model-based system that is motivated toward actions that improve one’s future state. In this article, we examine how aging affects motivation toward reward-based versus state-based decision making. Participants performed tasks in which one type of option provided larger immediate rewards but the alternative type of option led to larger rewards on future trials, or improvements in state. We predicted that older adults would show a reduced preference for choices that led to improvements in state and a greater preference for choices that maximized immediate reward. We also predicted that fits from a hybrid reinforcement-learning model would indicate greater model-based strategy use in younger than in older adults. In line with these predictions, older adults selected the options that maximized reward more often than did younger adults in three of the four tasks, and modeling results suggested reduced model-based strategy use. In the task where older adults showed similar behavior to younger adults, our model-fitting results suggested that this was due to the utilization of a win-stay–lose-shift heuristic rather than a more complex model-based strategy. Additionally, within older adults, we found that model-based strategy use was positively correlated with memory measures from our neuropsychological test battery. We suggest that this shift from state-based to reward-based motivation may be due to age related declines in the neural structures needed for more computationally demanding model-based decision making.     

Quality of Family Relationships as Protective Factors of Eating Disorders: An Investigation Amongst Italian Teenagers

The study here presented aims to investigate the links between quality of family relationships and some prodromes in eating disorders. A sample of 1,083 subjects took part in the study by filling PBI, FACES and EDI questionnaires. In order to clarify the role played by family relationships in the onset of EDs, two subgroups (high risk–low risk) were individuated by using the EDI cut-offs as discriminator factors and tested separately from the main sample. The results revealed some significant relationships between the analysed dimensions. It was shown that by increasing the values from the parents’ caring style scale and the real family’s cohesiveness scale the probability for subjects to fall into the high risk group decreases. Also, by increasing the family adaptability’s values, an increase of the probability for subjects to fall into the high risk group occurs. These results support the implementation of preventive and therapeutic plans to promote health and quality of life of adolescence.