Mindful social inferences: Decentering decreases hostile attributions

While research indicates that mindfulness can benefit individual well-being, less is known about its potential impact in the interpersonal domain. In the current research, we examined whether a central element of mindfulness—decentering—decreases hostile attributions in ambiguous social situations. We hypothesized that decentering from experiences—observing and considering them as mental events that arise and disappear—hampers the development of hostile attributions. A series of three laboratory studies, two of which were high-powered and pre-registered, demonstrated that decentering decreases hostile attribution in response to ambiguous social scenarios as compared to immersion instructions, and as compared to baseline. Additionally, the results suggest that decentering may be particularly beneficial in reducing hostile attribution bias among participants high in trait rumination. The current findings provide initial insights into the effect of decentering on the development of hostile attribution bias, and the association between mindfulness and interpersonal responses more generally.     

Attention capture while switching search strategies: Evidence for a breakdown in top-down attentional control

Whereas capture experiments typically repeat a single task many times, real world cognition is characterized by frequent switching. Lien, Ruthruff, and Johnston (2010) reported that the attentional control system can rapidly and fully switch between different search settings (e.g., red to green), with no carryover and no intertrial priming. The present study examined whether this impressive flexibility is possible even when the switch is not between different features along the same dimension, but between mutually incompatible search modes. On each trial, participants were prompted to find and identify the letter that was in a specific colour (feature search mode) or was uniquely coloured (singleton search mode). Within each block, search mode was either pure or mixed; the mixed blocks contained a fixed AABB search sequence (singleton-singleton-feature-feature) in Experiment 1 and a random sequence in Experiment 2. The target display was preceded by a noninformative cue display containing a nontarget colour singleton. In pure feature search blocks, these irrelevant singleton cues were generally unable to capture attention, replicating previous findings of “contingent capture”. In mixed blocks, however, irrelevant colour singletons captured attention on feature search trials. This breakdown indicates a limitation in the sharpness of attentional control following mode switches, which might be common in the real world.     

Existential themes in the treatment of people at suicide risk. Understandings and practices of specialist healthcare professionals

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study focuses on the ways in which existential themes were understood and addressed in therapeutic relationships with patients who had attempted suicide. Health care professionals (HCP) from Norway specialist healthcare participated in focus groups. The interviews were transcribed and analysed by systematic text-condensation through a four-step procedure. We found that the HCPs emphasised the context-specific functions of their departments. They considered these conversations essential but demanding. They indicated existential themes of hope/hopelessness, loneliness, meaning, life/death, shame, religion and suicide. The HCPs’ understandings of themes deemed to be existential and how they should be addressed were primarily based on clinical experience. This appeared to exacerbate the pressure on their personal involvement, leading to the question of whether patients’ existential needs are tackled or instead disappear into a conversational vacuum. The study suggests that HCPs' professional competence of existential themes pertaining to patients at suicide risk needs to be strengthened.     

Managing Stress and Maintaining Well‐Being: Social Support,Problem‐Focused Coping,and Avoidant Coping

This study tested a model that links stress, social support, problem‐focused coping, and well‐being. First, it looks at how high support significantly moderated the association between stress and well‐being. Next, the students' problem‐focused coping was seen as mediating this moderated association. Finally, a 3‐way interaction of stress, social support, and avoidant coping revealed that only frequent use of avoidant coping accelerated the association between stress and well‐being in a negative way at both low and high support.     

Subtyping children and adolescents who are overweight based on eating pathology and psychopathology

Children and adolescents who are overweight can differ on dimensions measuring dietary restraint and psychopathology. Classifying clinical obese children and adolescents based on these psychological characteristics is shown to be useful in making differential prognoses. The present study aimed to research the validity of subtyping children and adolescents with overweight (N?=?138) in a non-clinical sample. Using cluster analysis, results revealed three subtypes: a dietary restraint/internalizing group (DR?+?IN; n?=?41), a pure internalizing group (IN; n?=?20) and a non-symptomatic group (NS; n?=?77). The DR?+?IN group outscored both other groups on measures of eating pathology, whereas the IN group outscored both other groups on measures of negative offect. Interestingly, the three groups did not differ on degree of overweight. The results seem to suggest that different psychological mechanisms can be observed in subgroups of young overweight adolescents. Further research should explore how individual psychological characteristics can be helpful when stipulating weight loss treatment programmes.     

Attentional Limitations in Doing Two Tasks at Once

ABSTRACT— People generally have difficulty doing two tasks at once. To explain this fact, theorists have proposed that central processing—the thought-like stages following perceptual encoding and preceding response processing—takes place for only one task at a time. Because this bottleneck imposes severe limits on human cognitive processes, research has attempted to find exceptions. There is now solid evidence that, at least in the laboratory, the entire bottleneck can be completely bypassed under favorable combinations of circumstances. While these findings provide a ray of hope for enabling parallel multitasking in real-world scenarios, it will not be easy to take advantage of the combination of conditions that appear to be necessary.     

An Examination of Individual Differences and Factor Structure on the LS/CMI: Does This Popular Risk Assessment Tool Measure Up?

The Level of Service/Case Management Index (LS/CMI) is the most commonly used case management tool among frontline criminal justice officials. However, the newest revision has been understudied. Literature suggests significant differences on Level of Service Inventory (LSI) and LSI–Revised subcomponents and total scores among various offender populations. Such differences, along with an overall lack of psychometric information, have significant implications for the use of this instrument. The current study examined the records of 200 consecutively supervised probationers for demographic information, criminal history, most recent crimes, mental health issues, substance use and abuse, and their LS/CMI scores for both offender group differences and factor structure.     

Stroop dilution depends on the nature of the color carrier but not on its location

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether the color to be named was carried by the color word or the neutral word. Neutral words diluted the Stroop effect when they were the color carrier, but not when the color word was the color carrier. We argue that Stroop dilution is due to attentional competition between the color word and neutral word, with priority given to the color carrier.     

Visual word recognition without central attention: evidence for greater automaticity with advancing age

The present experiments examined the automaticity of word recognition. The authors examined whether people can recognize words while central attention is devoted to another task and how this ability changes across the life span. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision Task 2 was combined with either an auditory or a visual Task 1. Regardless of the Task 1 modality, Task 2 word recognition proceeded in parallel with Task 1 central operations for older adults but not for younger adults. This is a rare example of improved cognitive processing with advancing age. When Task 2 was nonlexical (Experiment 2), however, there was no evidence for greater parallel processing for older adults. Thus, the processing advantage appears to be restricted to lexical processes. The authors conclude that greater cumulative experience with lexical processing leads to greater automaticity, allowing older adults to more efficiently perform this stage in parallel with another task.     

Evidence for an activation locus of the word-frequency effect in lexical decision

The authors report a lexical decision experiment designed to determine whether activation is the locus of the word-frequency effect. K. R. Paap and L. S. Johansen (1994) reported that word frequency did not affect lexical decisions when exposure durations were brief; they accounted for this by proposing that data-limited conditions prevented late-occurring verification processes. Subsequently, P. A. Allen, A. F. Smith, M. Lien, T. A. Weber, and D. J. Madden (1997) and K. R. Paap, L. S. Johansen, E. Chun, and P. Vonnahme (2000) reported additional evidence that word-frequency effects do and do not have an activation locus, respectively. The authors further tested this issue in a lexical decision experiment using data-limited procedures--predicted by verification models to eliminate word-frequency effects. The authors observed word-frequency effects using individually determined exposure durations that were only 1 screen cycle longer than the exposure duration that yielded chance performance. Word-frequency effects persisted even when an adjusted measure of performance was used.