An Empirical Evaluation of the Diagnostic Criteria for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: Problems with Sex Specificity and Validity

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a psychiatric disorder that reportedly affects between 3 to 8% of women. Although not an official diagnosis in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, premenstrual dysphoric disorder has received increasing attention in the clinical literature, and considerable debate exists regarding the validity of this proposed condition. This study examined the prevalence of premenstrual dysphoric disorder in a sample of women and men and assessed the construct validity of the disorder. Twenty percent of women met the criteria for provisional diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria. In addition, 4% of men met these criteria when given sex-neutral assessment forms. Self-reported psychological distress and impaired interpersonal functioning did not predict women's likelihood of meeting the criteria for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Results cast doubt on the sex-specificity of the diagnostic criteria of premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the construct validity of the disorder. Limitations of this study are discussed.     

False recollection of the role played by an actor in an event

Two experiments demonstrated that eyewitnesses more frequently associate an actor with the actions of another person when those two people had appeared together in the same event, rather than in different events. This greater likelihood of binding an actor with the actions of another person from the same event was associated with high-confidence recognition judgments and “remember” responses in a remember–know task, suggesting that viewing an actor together with the actions of another person led participants to falsely recollect having seen that actor perform those actions. An analysis of age differences provided evidence that familiarity also contributed to false recognition independently of a false-recollection mechanism. In particular, older adults were more likely than young adults to falsely recognize a novel conjunction of a familiar actor and action, regardless of whether that actor and action were from the same or from different events. Older adults’ elevated rate of false recognition was associated with intermediate confidence levels, suggesting that it stemmed from increased reliance on familiarity rather than from false recollection. The implications of these results are discussed for theories of conjunction errors in memory and of unconscious transference in eyewitness testimony.     

Prediction of toddlers’ expressive language from maternal sensitivity and toddlers’ anger expressions: A developmental perspective

Despite evidence for the importance of individual differences in expressive language during toddlerhood in predicting later literacy skills, few researchers have examined individual and contextual factors related to language abilities across the toddler years. Furthermore, a gap remains in the literature about the extent to which the relations of negative emotions and parenting to language skills may differ for girls and boys. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the associations among maternal sensitivity, children's observed anger reactivity, and expressive language when children were 18 (T1; n = 247) and 30 (T2; n = 216) months. At each age, mothers reported on their toddlers’ expressive language, and mothers’ sensitive parenting behavior was observed during an unstructured free-play task. Toddlers’ anger expressions were observed during an emotion-eliciting task. Using path modeling, results showed few relations at T1. At T2, maternal sensitivity was negatively related to anger, and in turn, anger was associated with lower language skills. However, moderation analyses showed that these findings were significant for boys but not for girls. In addition, T1 maternal sensitivity and anger positively predicted expressive language longitudinally for both sexes. Findings suggest that the relations between maternal sensitivity, anger reactivity and expressive language may vary depending on the child's developmental stage and sex.     

A comparison of human performance in figural and navigational versions of the traveling salesman problem

Performance on a typical pen-and-paper (figural) version of the Traveling Salesman Problem was compared to performance on a room-sized navigational version of the same task. Nine configurations were designed to examine the use of the nearest-neighbor (NN), cluster approach, and convex-hull strategies. Performance decreased with an increasing number of nodes internal to the hull, and improved when the NN strategy produced the optimal path. There was no overall difference in performance between figural and navigational task modalities. However, there was an interaction between modality and configuration, with evidence that participants relied more heavily on the NN strategy in the figural condition. Our results suggest that participants employed similar, but not identical, strategies when solving figural and navigational versions of the problem. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that participants favored global strategies in the figural version and local strategies in the navigational version.     

Symptoms,impairment and illness intrusiveness–their relationship with depression in women with CFS/ME

Chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is an illness in which physiological and psychological factors are believed to interact to cause and maintain CFS/ME in an individual predisposed to it. The various symptoms and impairments associated with CFS/ME have a large impact on quality of life. The purpose of the present study was to identify the extent to which the core symptoms and impairments associated with CFS/ME relate to depression in women with CFS/ME, and to discover whether these relationships were mediated by illness intrusiveness. CFS/ME was found to be a highly intrusive illness, intruding into more life domains and to a greater degree than other illnesses. The effects of both symptoms and impairment on depression were, in part, mediated by illness intrusiveness. Although symptoms severity and impairment had both direct and indirect effects on depression, illness intrusiveness was the strongest predictor of depression.     

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation as transdiagnostic processes in a comorbid sample

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation have been identified as etiologic and maintaining factors for a range of psychopathology and separate literatures support their relationships to anxiety, depression, PTSD, and alcohol dependence (AD) symptom severity. Previous studies have examined these relationships in isolation, failing to account for the high rates of comorbidity among disorders. It is not yet known whether these processes uniquely predict symptom severity in each of these domains. Participants were 220 patients in residential substance abuse treatment, who had experienced a potentially traumatic event and exceeded screening cutoffs for probable PTSD and problematic alcohol use. Controlling for emotion dysregulation and the interrelationships among the outcome variables, insomnia was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .27, p < .001), depression (B = .25, p < .001), PTSD (B = .22, p < .001), and AD (B = .17, p = .01) symptom severity. Similarly, controlling for insomnia, emotion dysregulation was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .40, p < .001), depression (B = .47, p < .001), PTSD (B = .38, p < .001), and AD (B = .26, p < .001) symptom severity. Insomnia and emotion dysregulation appear to be transdiagnostic processes uniquely associated with symptom severity across a number of different domains and might be important treatment targets for individuals with PTSD and AD.     

Spatial behavior in male and female crayfish (Orconectes rusticus): learning strategies and memory duration

Previous studies have demonstrated that animals use multiple strategies to solve spatial tasks. We used a T-maze to examine spatial behavior in crayfish, using visual and tactile stimuli as place cues and a food-scented escape tank as reinforcement to leave the maze. In trials on a single day and across multiple days, crayfish learned to exit the maze with significantly reduced latency and with fewer turns. In addition, we examined place memory in 40-min periods with the maze closed and found that crayfish spent longer in the vicinity of a previously open exit compared to a closed exit. Probe tests were conducted using a forced-choice procedure to determine whether crayfish remembered the route out of the maze using primarily place cues or response learning. We found that approximately equal numbers of animals used each strategy, and individuals were able to switch from one strategy to the other on different test days. Males and females did not differ significantly in their performance in the place memory test, maze exit task, or probe tests. Both sexes displayed place memory for the exit location and reduced latency to exit during trials 24 h, 48 h, 72 h, and 1 week after initial training trials, suggesting that spatial memories in crayfish are relatively enduring.     

A Foreigner in My Own Country: Forgetting the Heterogeneity of Our National Community

The issues of human cloning and stem cell retrieval are inseparable in circumstances in which the rationale of self-preservation may be invoked as a negative right. I apply this rationale to a hypothetical case in which cloning is necessary to preserve the bodily integrity or life of an individual. Self-preservation as moral integrity is examined in a narrower context, i.e., as applicable to those for whom deliberate termination of embryonic life is morally-problematic. This issue is addressed through comparison with two paradigms commonly used in support of clinical practice: the distinction between letting die and killing, and the permissibility of vital organ retrieval after death. Although these paradigms are questionable in their own right, they offer a rationale by which scientists and clinicians may respect the negative right to moral integrity of those with whom they disagree.     

Pupil diameter measurement errors as a function of gaze direction in corneal reflection eyetrackers

Pupil dilation is a useful, noninvasive technique for measuring the change in cognitive load. Since it is implicit and nonverbal, it is particularly useful with preverbal or nonverbal participants. In cognitive psychology, pupil dilation is most often measured by corneal reflection eye-tracking devices. The present study investigates the effect of gaze position on pupil size estimation by three common eye-tracking systems. The task consisted of a simple object pursuit situation, as a sphere rotated around the display screen. Systematic errors of pupil size estimation were found with all three systems. Implications for task-elicited pupillometry, especially for gaze-contingent studies such as object tracking or reading, are discussed.