The hoarding dimension of OCD: psychological comorbidity and the five-factor personality model

Although hoarding has been associated with several psychological disorders, it is most frequently linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The present study assessed hoarding obsessions and compulsions in 204 individuals with OCD, and evaluated how hoarding was related to obsessive-compulsive symptom severity, psychological comorbidity, and personality as measured by the five-factor model. Results indicated that hoarding in OCD is a dimensional variable that is positively associated with dysphoria, total number of lifetime Axis I disorders, and lifetime histories of bipolar I, PTSD, and body dysmorphic disorder. Hoarding was negatively correlated with the NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) factor of Conscientiousness and positively associated with the NEO-PI-R factor of Neuroticism. When all personality and psychopathology variables were entered into a regression equation, dysphoria, bipolar II disorder, Conscientiousness, age, and Extraversion emerged as significant predictors of hoarding severity. Recommendations are made for clinicians and for future research.     

Development of the false-memory illusion

The counterintuitive developmental trend in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) illusion (that false-memory responses increase with age) was investigated in learning-disabled and nondisabled children from the 6- to 14-year-old age range. Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that because there are qualitative differences in how younger versus older children and disabled versus nondisabled children connect meaning information across the words on DRM lists, certain key effects that are observed in adult studies will be absent in young children and in learning-disabled children. Data on 6 such adult effects (list strength, recall inflation, delayed inflation, delayed stability, thematic intrusion, and true-false dissociation) were used to investigate this hypothesis, and the resulting data were consistent with prediction.     

Evidence for strong dissociation between emotion and facial displays: the case of surprise

Eight experiments examined facial expressions of surprise in adults. Surprise was induced by disconfirming a previously established schema or expectancy. Self-reports and behavioral measures indicated the presence of surprise in most participants, but surprise expressions were observed only in 4%-25%, and most displays consisted of eyebrow raising only; the full, 3-component display was never seen. Experimental variations of surprise intensity, sociality, and duration/complexity of the surprising event did not change these results. Electromyographic measurement failed to detect notably more brow raisings and, in one study, revealed a decrease of frontalis muscle activity in the majority of the participants. Nonetheless, most participants believed that they had shown a strong surprise expression.     

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change

A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, "explicit" attitudes and automatic, "implicit" attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. The proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model makes specific assumptions about the mutual interplay of the 2 processes, implying several mechanisms that lead to symmetric or asymmetric changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. The model integrates a broad range of empirical evidence and implies several new predictions for implicit and explicit attitude change.     

Using dynamic field theory to rethink infant habituation

Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic field model of infant visual habituation, which simulates the known features of habituation, including familiarity and novelty effects, stimulus intensity effects, and age and individual differences. The model is based on a general class of dynamic (time-based) models that integrate environmental input in varying metric dimensions to reach a single decision. Here the authors provide simulated visual input of varying strengths, distances, and durations to 2 coupled and interacting fields. The 1st represents the activation that drives "looking," and the 2nd, the inhibition that leads to "looking away," or habituation. By varying the parameters of the field, the authors simulate the time course of habituation trials and show how these dynamics can lead to different depths of habituation, which then determine how the system dishabituates. The authors use the model to simulate a set of influential experiments by R. Baillargeon (1986, 1987a, 1987b) using the well-known "drawbridge" paradigm. The dynamic field model provides a coherent explanation without invoking infant object knowledge. The authors show that small changes in model parameters can lead to qualitatively different outcomes. Because in typical infant cognition experiments, critical parameters are unknown, effects attributed to conceptual knowledge may be explained by the dynamics of habituation.     

The influence of landmark salience in a navigation task: an additive effect between its components

In 2 experiments, rats were trained in a Morris pool to find a hidden platform in the presence of 1 landmark. After acquisition, the rats were tested without the platform. Experiment 1 tested whether the size of a landmark and its relative distance from the platform are additive effects. On test, the rats' best performance was with a near and big landmark; intermediate performance was with either a near and small landmark or a far and big one; and the worst performance was with a far and small landmark. The results of Experiment 2 suggested that the different distances from the goal of the 2 landmarks might not be sufficient to explain the previous results.     

What the voice reveals: within- and between-category stereotyping on the basis of voice

The authors report research that attempts to shift the traditional focus of visual cues to auditory cues as a basis for stereotyping. Moreover, their approach examines whether gender-signaling vocal cues lead not only to between-category but also to within-category gender stereotyping. Study 1 showed that both men and women vary within category in how feminine their voices sound and that perceptions of vocal femininity are highly consensual. Furthermore, the measured acoustic characteristics that differed between gender were also related to perceptions of within-gender femininity. Subsequent studies demonstrated that variability in vocal femininity affects gender stereotyping when the targets are all of the same gender (Study 2) and when the targets are of different genders (Study 3). In the latter case, evidence of both category-based and feature-based stereotyping was found. Mediation analyses showed that the relationship between acoustics and stereotyping was in part due to femininity.     

Child social skills training in developmental crime prevention: effects on antisocial behavior and social competence

Social skills training for children is becoming increasingly popular as a measure for developmental crime prevention. Although previous reviews of such programs have shown positive effects, they have also revealed problems of research design, outcome measures, and long-term follow up. Accordingly, this article reports on a recent meta-analysis of randomized evaluations of the effect of social skills training in preventing antisocial behavior and promoting social competence. Of 841 retrievable references, 84 research reports with a total of 136 treatment-control comparisons fulfilled the eligibility criteria. Results showed a small but significant overall positive effect of d = .39 at post-intervention and d = .28 at follow-up (3 months and later). Effect sizes were somewhat greater for outcome measures of social competence than for measures of antisocial behavior, particularly when delinquency was assessed. Cognitive-behavioral programs revealed the best results in terms of generalization over time and on outcome criteria. In addition, prevention measures indicated for children and adolescents who already manifested some behavioral problems had higher effect sizes than universal approaches. Because most studies dealt with small sample sizes, non-official outcome data, and measurements after less than one year, the results should be interpreted with caution. Further high-quality studies with long-term empirical outcome criteria are needed, particularly outside the United States.     

Making heads turn: the effect of familiarity and stimulus rotation on a gender-classification task

Recent work has demonstrated that facial familiarity can moderate the influence of inversion when completing a configural processing task. Here, we examine whether familiarity interacts with intermediate angles of orientation in the same way that it interacts with inversion. Participants were asked to make a gender classification to familiar and unfamiliar faces shown at seven angles of orientation. Speed and accuracy of performance were assessed for stimuli presented (i) as whole faces and (ii) as internal features. When presented as whole faces, the task was easy, as revealed by ceiling levels of accuracy and no effect of familiarity or angle of rotation on response times. However, when stimuli were presented as internal features, an influence of facial familiarity was evident. Unfamiliar faces showed no increase in difficulty across angle of rotation, whereas familiar faces showed a marked increase in difficulty across angle, which was explained by significant linear and cubic trends in the data. Results were interpreted in terms of the benefit gained from a mental representation when face processing was impaired by stimulus rotation.     

The simultaneous learning effect: why does simultaneous task learning improve retention?

Despite the prevalence of encoding variables that have been shown to influence the rate of learning, very few affect the rate of forgetting of verbal material. However, when a list of words is learned simultaneously with other lists, the rate of forgetting is markedly lower than that of single-task learning. Although the magnitude of this simultaneous learning effect is large compared with typical list learning effects, it has received little empirical attention. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the hypothesis that the simultaneous learning effect is the result of a differential contribution of short-term memory during encoding. The results showed that the advantage for simultaneous task learning was obtained even under conditions that minimized the potential effects of short-term memory. Experiment 3 revealed that the simultaneous learning effect was larger when the specific items learned simultaneously were the same on each learning trial than when they were different. This finding supported a cuing explanation of the effect: the items from the other lists act as retrieval cues during delayed recall.