That’s the way the ball bounces: infants’ and adults’ perception of spatial and temporal contiguity in collisions involving bouncing balls

Three experiments investigated the perception of collisions involving bouncing balls by 7- and 10-month-old infants and adults. In previous research, 10-month-old infants perceived the causality of launching collisions (events in which one object moves along a smooth horizontal trajectory toward a second object, apparently launching it into motion) in relatively simple event contexts. In more complex event contexts, infants failed to discriminate among the events or respond to changes in individual features. Experiments 1 and 2 of the present investigation revealed that 7- and 10-month-old infants attended to spatial and temporal contiguity, but not causality, in collisions involving the movement of bouncing balls. In Experiment 3, both spatiotemporal contiguity and general knowledge about movement trajectories influenced adults’ judgments of causality for these collisions. The present results add to a growing understanding of infants’ event perception as constructive and a function, in part, of the complexity of the event context.     

The motivational effects of thinking and worrying about the effects of smoking cigarettes

We tested a strategy to encourage cigarette smokers to think more frequently about the negative consequences of smoking, reasoning that increased thought might lead to greater worry and motivation to quit. College students who smoked daily were randomly assigned to one of three conditions in which they wore watches for one week that sounded an alarm randomly four times each day. When alerted, the students read one of eight cards that either had a written statement about studying (control condition), a statement about the negative effects of smoking behaviour (text condition), or a negative smoking statement accompanied by a picture (e.g., a blackened lung; image condition). Measures collected at week's end revealed that the smoking cards had no effects on perceived risk, but they increased worry and reports of intrusive thoughts, and had a small but reliable effect on plans to quit. Correlational data also supported the relationship between worry and motivation to quit, and we discuss the possible benefits of “normal” worrying and strategies for capitalising on the worry–motivation relationship to encourage smokers to abandon cigarettes.     

The involvement of bottom-up saliency processing in endogenous inhibition of return

Participants are faster at detecting a visual target when it appears at a cued, as compared with an uncued, location. In general, a reversal of this cost-benefit pattern is observed after exogenous cuing when the cue-target interval exceeds approximately 250?ms (inhibition of return [IOR]), and not after endogenous cuing. We suggest that, usually, no IOR is found with endogenous cues because no bottom-up saliency-based orienting processes are claimed. Therefore, we developed an endogenous feature-based split-cue task to allow for endogenous saliency-based orienting. IOR was observed in the saliency-driven endogenous cuing condition, and not in the control condition that prevented saliency-based orienting. These results suggest that usage of saliency-based orienting processes in either endogenous or exogenous orienting warrants the appearance of IOR.     

A standardized behavioral group treatment program for obsessive-compulsive disorder: preliminary outcomes

This paper provides outcome data about the efficacy of a behavioral group therapy program for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Thirty-six patients completed a 7-week outpatient treatment program which provides: (1) education about OCD and its treatment, (2) instruction in a cognitive and behavioral approach to the self-treatment of OCD and (3) guided behavioral treatment. Significant improvement in obsession, compulsion, and depression scores were observed at completion of the group and at 3 month follow-up. Significant improvement in obsessions and compulsions was observed for both patients taking anti-obsessional medications and those who did not.     

The role of competency to stand trial in mental health courts

Concerns have been raised in the literature about the competency to stand trial and competency to make treatment decisions of defendants referred to mental health courts. However, there is little information reported about the evaluation and prevalence of incompetence, characteristics of incompetent mental health court defendants, and disposition of mentally ill defendants too disturbed to be diverted from the criminal justice system through mental health courts. This study reports on the 85 potential mental health court defendants referred for trial competency evaluations during the first three years of operation of the Akron Ohio Mental Health Court. Of the 80 defendants who could be located for evaluation, 77.5% were found incompetent, and 53% of the incompetent defendants were not restored to competence even after an average of 49 days of treatment in a state psychiatric hospital. The implications of these findings in terms of the diversion potential of mental health courts for the severely mentally ill are discussed.     

On near misses and completed tasks: the nature of relief

What is the nature and function of relief? Relief has been studied little in psychological science despite its familiarity and pervasiveness. Two studies revealed that relief can result from two distinct situations: the narrow avoidance of an aversive outcome (near-miss relief) and completion of an onerous or aversive event (task-completion relief). Study 1 found that recollections of near-miss relief were marked by more downward counterfactual thoughts and greater feelings of social isolation than recollections of task-completion relief. Study 2 experimentally elicited the two types of relief and found mediational evidence that relief following near misses elicits feelings of social isolation via its stimulation of counterfactual thinking. That near-miss relief is characterized by counterfactual thinking suggests that it prompts people to contemplate how to avert similar experiences in the future, whereas task-completion relief may serve to reinforce endurance during difficult tasks.