Bending perception to desire: Effects of task demands,motivation, and cognitive resources

Determinants of motivated judgments were examined in this research. Three experiments investigated how dominant motivation, biasing difficulty and mental resources combine to produce motivationally congruent judgments. Studies 1 and 2 showed that where a biasing motivation is dominant the presence of resources can augment a motivational bias in judgment. Study 3 replicated that result and showed that resources contribute to the formation of biased judgments only where biasing is difficult to accomplish, but not where it is relatively easy to accomplish. In addition, Study 3 showed that where the accuracy motivation is dominant and biasing is the easy default, unbiased judgments will occur only in the presence (vs. absence) of resources. In contrast, where unbiased judgments are easy to come by, such judgments occur irrespective of resources.     

A Pain to Practice: Attitudes of Medical Family Therapists Working With Patients With Opioid Use Disorder

ABSTRACT

The prevalence of patients with opioid misuse in medical settings continues to rise, and it is unknown how much exposure medical family therapists (MedFTs) have in treating this issue. This study explored the attitudes of MedFTs (n = 58) when working with patients struggling with opioid use disorder in clinical practice. Results revealed that 43% of MedFTs had a low comfort level in working with this population and preferred to make referrals to primary care providers. Given that opioid use disorder cases are rising in healthcare settings, emerging mental health professionals would benefit from additional training to effectively treat this population.     

Target–target similarity and the attentional blink: Task-relevance matters!

Studies of the attentional blink (AB) indicate that similarity modulates the magnitude of the impairment in reporting the second of two masked targets. The present experiments tested whether similarity-based modulations of the AB are determined by all object dimensions or by task-relevant dimensions only. Similarity between target faces was manipulated on two dimensions, only one of which was task relevant. The results indicated that similarity on the task-relevant dimension modulated the AB, whereas similarity on task-irrelevant dimension did not. These results suggest that selection during the AB can occur on the level of task-relevant dimensions.     

Modeling the effects of repetitions, similarity, and normative word frequency on old-new recognition and judgments of frequency

Judgments of frequency for targets (old items) and foils (similar; dissimilar) steadily increase as the number of times a target is studied increases, but discrimination of targets from similar foils does not steadily improve, a phenomenon termed registration without learning (D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran, 1995; D. L. Hintzman, T. Curran, & B. Oppy, 1992). The present experiment explores this phenomenon with words of differing normative word frequency. The retrieving-effectively-from-memory model (REM; R. M. Shifrrin & M. Steyvers, 1997, 1998) predicts that low-frequency words will be better recognized than high-frequency words because low-frequency words have more distinctive memory representations. A corollary of this assumption predicts that the typical recognition word-frequency effect will be disrupted when similar foils are tested. These predictions were confirmed, but to fit both the recognition and the judgment-of-frequency data, the authors used a "dual-process" extension of the REM model.     

Modeling relations between hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms in adolescents: a four-year prospective study

This study examined the relations between hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms across 4 years in adolescents who varied with regard to their risk for psychopathology. The sample comprised 240 adolescents assessed in 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grades regarding their level of peer and academic hassles and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Structural equation modeling was used to construct latent variables of hassles and internalizing and externalizing syndromes. Results varied by informant about the teens' symptoms. For adolescent report, the stress exposure model fit the data best for internalizing syndromes; that is, higher levels of stressors predicted significantly higher levels of self-reported symptoms 1 year later. For mother report of adolescents' symptoms, the stress generation model fit the data best for both internalizing and externalizing syndromes; that is, higher levels of adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms, as reported by their mothers, significantly predicted higher levels of hassles 1 year later.     

Recognition of faces and complex objects in younger and older adults

We examined whether (1) age-associated impairments in face recognition are specific to faces or also apply to within-category recognition of other objects and (2) age-related face recognition deficits are related to impairments in encoding second-order relations and holistic information. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found reliable age differences for recognition of faces, but not of objects. Moreover, older adults (OAs) and younger adults (YAs) displayed similar face inversion effects. In Experiment 3, unlike YAs, OAs did not show the expected decline in performance for recognition of composites (Young, Hellawell, and Hay, 1987). In Experiment 4, both OAs and YAs showed a whole/part advantage (Tanaka and Farah, 1993). Our results suggest that OAs have spared function for processing of second-order relations and holistic information. Possible explanations for the finding that OAs have greater difficulty recognizing faces than recognizing other objects are proposed.     

Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical ambiguity resolution in reading: an eye movement analysis

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words whose meanings share a single syntactic category (e.g., calf), lexically ambiguous words whose meanings belong to different syntactic categories (e.g., duck), or unambiguous control words. Information provided prior to the target always unambiguously specified the context-appropriate syntactic-category assignment for the target. Fixation times were longer on ambiguous words whose meanings share a single syntactic category than on controls, both when prior context was semantically consistent with the subordinate interpretation of a biased ambiguous word (Experiment 1) and when prior context was semantically neutral as to the intended interpretation of a balanced ambiguous word (Experiment 2). These ambiguity effects, which resulted from differences in difficulty with meaning resolution, were not found when the ambiguity crossed syntactic categories. These data indicate that, in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, syntactic-category information mediates the semantic-resolution process.     

The recognition and categorization of upright and inverted emotional expressions by 7-month-old infants

Upright and inverted faces were used to determine whether 7-month-old infants discriminate emotional expressions on the basis of affectively relevant information. In Experiment 1, infants recognized the similarity of happy faces over changing identities and discriminated this expression from fear and anger when the stimuli were presented upright, but not when they were inverted. In Experiment 2, infants were able to discriminate happiness from fear and anger posed by a single model, regardless of the orientation of the stimuli. From these studies it was suggested that categorizing emotional expressions depends upon attending to affectively relevant, orientation-specific information, whereas the discrimination of emotional expressions can be done on a featural basis, something that remains invariant regardless of the orientation of the stimuli. In Experiment 3, infants discriminated toothy happiness posed by several models from nontoothy happiness and nontoothy anger when the stimuli were presented upright and inverted. Thus, when salient features were available, the infants based their discriminations on perceptual aspects rather than on conceptual aspects such as categories of emotions.     

AN ALTERNATING TREATMENTS COMPARISON OF TWO INTENSIVE INTERVENTIONS FOR FOOD REFUSAL

We compared two treatment packages involving negative reinforcement contingencies for 3 children with chronic food refusal. One involved physically guiding the child to accept food contingent on noncompliance, whereas the other involved nonremoval of the spoon until the child accepted the presented food. Subsequent to baseline, an alternating treatments comparison was implemented in a multiple baseline design across subjects. After each child had been exposed to at least nine sessions of each treatment condition and percentage of bites accepted had increased to at least 80%, the child's caregivers selected the preferred treatment package. The results indicated that both treatments were effective in establishing food acceptance. However, physical guidance was associated with fewer corollary behaviors, shorter meal durations, and parental preference.     

Stability of Q-sort attachment security from age two to five

The current report demonstrates reliability and stability of Q-sort attachment security in a sample of 46 mothers and their children seen by two observers at age two and again at age four to six years. Security scores were correlated between ages (r=.44), and a high proportion of item-by-item correlations between ages were also significant.