When Pain Does Not Heal: The Common Antecedents and Consequences of Chronic Social and Physical Pain

Researchers find that social and physical pain overlap in acute episodes. In this article, we hypothesize that social and physical pain overlap in chronic conditions as well. To support this hypothesis, we reviewed the literature and introduced the Integrated Chronic Pain Model (ICPM), which posits that chronic social and physical pain overlap in their psychological antecedents and consequences. Specifically, the ICPM proposes several common factors that play a role in the onset and maintenance of both social and physical chronic pain and indicates that both forms of pain persistently impair self-regulatory resources and threaten the same basic psychological needs.     

Global Leadership,Education, and Human Survival

Global leadership is the pivotal point for appropriate policies and action to ensure human survival, but a fast-changing world requires a learning leadership. How can potential and serving leaders acquire the necessary skills, abilities, and attributes for them to recognize and address the threats and challenges to our survival in the contemporary world? Serving leaders have little time for formal learning. They learn on the job through reciprocal peer interaction and transactional relationships with their followers. But the global aspect demands another dimension, cybernetic learning, within which an awareness of global ethics is central.     

Attentional bias differences between fear and disgust: Implications for the role of disgust in disgust-related anxiety disorders

Research demonstrates a relation between disgust and anxiety-related pathology; however, research has yet to reveal mechanisms by which disgust may contribute to anxiety. The current experiment examined attentional bias characteristics as one route by which disgust influences anxiety. Eighty undergraduate participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation attention task using fear, disgust, or neutral target stimuli. Task-relevance of the target's presentation was also manipulated. Results revealed that task-relevant disgust targets impaired attention among all participants, but task-irrelevant disgust targets impaired attention only in high disgust prone individuals. Difficulty in disengagement characterised both disgust and fear attentional biases, but the difficulty in disengagement was greater for disgust compared to fear attentional biases. High disgust prone individuals displayed exaggerated difficulty in disengaging attention from disgust targets compared to low disgust prone individuals. The results suggest that disgust attentional biases differ from fear attentional biases. The characteristics of disgust attentional biases are discussed as possible mechanisms by which disgust functions in certain anxiety disorders.     

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview. Results revealed that behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of anxiety disorder displayed a lower threshold for identifying fear relative to anger emotion expressions compared to non-anxious behaviorally inhibited adolescents and non-inhibited adolescents with or without anxiety. These findings were specific to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of social anxiety disorder. Thus, adolescents with a history of both BI and anxiety, specifically social anxiety, are more likely to differ from other adolescents in their identification of fearful facial expressions. This offers further evidence that perturbations in the processing of emotional stimuli may underlie the aetiology of anxiety disorders.     

Examining Visual-Verbal Associations in Children with and Without Reading Disorder

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA) were compared (M = 10 years old). Results demonstrated RD children experienced significantly more difficulties on measures of complex auditory-verbal working memory than their NA peers. The best predictor of reading performance was word recall ability measured after students were provided with semantic training sentences. Findings have important implications for identifying young children with potential reading impairment.     

Development of a Unified Protocol for the Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Youth

This study evaluated the efficacy of the Mind Reading interactive computer software to remediate emotion recognition deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Six unmedicated children with ASD and 11 unmedicated non-clinical control subjects participated in the study. The clinical sample used the software for five sessions. The control sample was evaluated only on pre- and post-test performance to assess practice effects. Results showed that participants with ASD scored significantly higher on the posttest than on the pretest. As level of emotion difficulty increased, mean scores on the pretest decreased, indicating that difficulty level had a valid effect. The Mind Reading computer software appears to significantly improve the emotion recognition abilities in children with ASD.     

All of the above: When multiple correct response options enhance the testing effect

Previous research has shown that multiple choice tests often improve memory retention. However, the presence of incorrect lures often attenuates this memory benefit. The current research examined the effects of “all of the above” (AOTA) options. When such options are correct, no incorrect lures are present. In the first three experiments, a correct AOTA option on an initial test led to a larger memory benefit than no test and standard multiple choice test conditions. The benefits of a correct AOTA option occurred even without feedback on the initial test; for both 5-minute and 48-hour retention delays; and for both cued recall and multiple choice final test formats. In the final experiment, an AOTA question led to better memory retention than did a control condition that had identical timing and exposure to response options. However, the benefits relative to this control condition were similar regardless of the type of multiple choice test (AOTA or not). Results suggest that retrieval contributes to multiple choice testing effects. However, the extra testing effect from a correct AOTA option, rather than being due to more retrieval, might be due simply to more exposure to correct information.     

Age Differences in Reported Recollective Experience are Due to Encoding Effects,Not Response Bias

Abstract

Three experiments examined whether reduced recollective experience reported in old age is due to a criterion shift towards more cautious responses by older subjects. In Experiment 1 Young and Old subjects took a recognition test without specific instructions on how they should encode the presented words. For recognised items subjects indicated whether they recollected the item's previous occurrence or whether they just knew it had been on the list. They then rated their confidence that the word came from the study list. Although overall recognition levels were equivalent, older adults recollected less and reported more know responses than the younger subjects. However, there was no overall difference in confidence, contrary to a criterion shift explanation. In Experiment 2A specific encoding instructions removed the age-related change in recollective experience entirely. Experiment 2B reproduced the test conditions of Experiment 2A, but without specific encoding instructions, and replicated the pattern of know responding found in Experiment 1. Thus the three experiments together suggest that the amount of recollection experienced by the elderly is not explicable in terms of cautiousness, but is driven by the encoding carried out by the elderly at presentation.