Enhancing treatment effectiveness through social modelling: A pilot study

Objective: Medical treatments take place in social contexts; however, little research has investigated how social modelling might influence treatment outcomes. This experimental pilot study investigated social modelling of treatment effectiveness and placebo treatment outcomes.

Design: Fifty-nine participants took part in the study, ostensibly examining the use of beta-blockers (actually placebos) for examination anxiety. Participants were randomly assigned to observe a female confederate report positive treatment effects (reduced heart rate, relaxed, calm) or feeling no different.

Main outcome measures: Heart rate, anxiety and blood pressure were assessed, as were symptoms and attributed side effects.

Results: Heart rate decreased significantly more in the social modelling compared to control condition, p = .027 (d = .63), and there were trends towards effects in the same direction for both anxiety, p = .097 (d = .46), and systolic blood pressure, p = .077 (d = .51). Significant pre-post placebo differences in heart rate, anxiety and diastolic blood pressure were found in the social modelling group, ps < .007 (ds = .77–1.37), but not the control condition, ps > .28 (ds = .09–.59).

Conclusions: Social observation of medication effectiveness enhanced placebo effectiveness in heart rate, and showed a trend towards enhancing treatment effectiveness in both anxiety and systolic blood pressure. Social modelling may have utility in enhancing the effectiveness of many active medical treatments.     

Concreteness of positive, negative, and neutral repetitive thinking about the future

Consistent with assertions that the adaptiveness of repetitive thinking is influenced by both its valence and style, Stöber (e.g., Stöber &; Borkovec, 2002) has argued that worry is characterized by a reduced concreteness of thought content and that the resulting abstractness contributes to its inhibition of some aspects of anxious responding. However, extant research does not provide a direct test of Stöber's reduced concreteness theory of worry. We sought to test Stöber's theory and to examine the adaptiveness of repetitive worrisome thinking by randomly assigning 108 participants to engage in five consecutive periods of repetitive thinking about positively, negatively, or neutrally valenced potential future events. Results based on coding of thought data indicated that (a) repetitive thinking became increasingly less concrete as periods progressed; (b) contrary to Stöber's theory, both negative and positive repetitive future thinking were more concrete than neutral repetitive future thinking (and did not differ from each other); and (c) abstractness of thought during negative repetitive future thinking was associated with reduced reports of imagery-based activity. Results based on self-reported affect indicated that negatively valenced repetitive future thinking was uniquely associated with initial decreases in anxious affect, followed by increased anxious affect that coincided with increased imagery-based activity. This suggests that worry is associated with a sequential mitigation of anxious meaning followed by a strengthening of anxious meaning over time. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Religiosity,coping, and suicidality within the religious Zionist community of Israela thematic qualitative analysis

The relationship between religion and mental health has been the subject of extensive research, particularly in recent years. The issues of coping and suicidality have also been widely studied. Significantly, however, how religious people cope with harsh life situations is an area which has been overlooked. The present study based on 18 semi-structured interviews, analyses have members of the Religious Zionist community in Israel cope with harsh life situations. Although the study confirms the conclusions of previous research – in general religion creates a buffer to suicide – the results showed a relatively low impact of religiosity on coping: in general these religious interviewees found it difficult to access their religiosity during harsh life situations. The paper suggests a range of explanations, for example the complexity of personal and collective identities which characterise this group, or – more significantly – the possibilty that religious coping is not actually absent but is only available in a second, later stage of coping.     

The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.     

Why 8-year-olds cannot tell the difference between Steve Martin and Paul Newman: factors contributing to the slow development of sensitivity to the spacing of facial features

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing cues with that of adults under a variety of conditions. In the first two experiments, participants made same/different judgments about faces differing only in the spacing of facial features, with the variations being kept within natural limits. To measure the effect of attention, we reduced the salience of featural information by blurring faces and occluding features (Experiment 1). To measure the role of encoding speed and memory limitations, we presented pairs of faces simultaneously and for an unlimited time (Experiment 2). To determine whether participants' sensitivity would increase when spacing distortions were so extreme as to make the faces grotesque, we manipulated the spacing of features beyond normal limits and asked participants to rate each face on a "bizarreness" scale (Experiment 3). The results from the three experiments indicate that low salience, poor encoding efficiency, and limited memory can partially account for 8-year-olds' poor performance on face processing tasks that require sensitivity to the spacing of features, a kind of configural processing that underlies adults' expertise. However, even when the task is modified to compensate for these problems, children remain less sensitive than adults to the spacing of features.     

Co-localisation of abnormal brain structure and function in specific language impairment

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior frontal cortex and decreased in the right caudate nucleus and superior temporal cortex bilaterally. The unaffected siblings also showed reduced grey matter in the caudate nucleus relative to controls. In an auditory covert naming task, the SLI group showed reduced activation in the left inferior frontal cortex, right putamen, and in the superior temporal cortex bilaterally. Despite spatially coincident structural and functional abnormalities in frontal and temporal areas, the relationships between structure and function in these regions were different. These findings suggest multiple structural and functional abnormalities in SLI that are differently associated with receptive and expressive language processing.