A follow-up study on students attending a university counselling service in Northern Italy

The aims of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of a university counselling service in Northern Italy, to assess the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of students who used counselling service, and to assess the psychological conditions of the students who ended the counselling after a 4 month follow-up period. The study involved 100 students, who filled out the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), the Brief COPE Inventory, and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). The results showed that who received counselling were positively affected by this experience. The areas of benefit were psychological well-being, coping behaviours, ability to positively reframe problems and less sense of guilt. Additional studies are needed to identify which factors influence the outcomes of university counselling services in Italy. These studies would be important to evaluate the services rendered, upgrade the skills of counsellors and visualise priority areas of need.     

Attentional Processing of Threat in Bipolar Disorder: Going Beyond Mood-Congruency

Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) entails a complex attentional pattern not merely restricted to happy or sad biases, but also directed towards threatening information. This study examined threat-related bias on attentional orienting when participants were not instructed about the presentation of emotional stimuli (i.e., implicit instructions). An emotional dot-probe task in which an emotional face (i.e., threat, sad, happy) is simultaneously displayed with a neutral face was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n?=?26), depression (n?=?24), and euthymia (n?=?28) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n?=?28). Symptomatic BD patients (i.e., in a manic or depressive episode) showed an attentional orienting bias toward threatening faces but not for happy or sad faces, while euthymic BD patients did not exhibit any attentional bias for emotional stimuli. A bias toward happy faces was found in the control group. Threat-related bias was not related to the severity of affective and anxiety symptoms in BD. When attention is not explicitly directed to emotional information, threat-related bias may characterize attentional orienting during mania and depression, but may be attenuated during euthymia.

     

The Relationship of Appetitive, Reproductive and Posterior Pituitary Hormones to Alcoholism and Craving in Humans

A significant challenge for understanding alcoholism lies in discovering why some, but not other individuals, become dependent on alcohol. Genetic, environmental, cultural, developmental, and neurobiological influences are recognized as essential factors underlying a person's risk for becoming alcohol dependent (AD); however, the neurobiological processes that trigger this vulnerability are still poorly understood. Hormones are important in the regulation of many functions and several hormones are strongly associated with alcohol use. While medical consequences are important, the primary focus of this review is on the underlying confluence of appetitive/feeding, reproductive and posterior pituitary hormones associated with distinct phases of alcoholism or assessed by alcohol craving in humans. While these hormones are of diverse origin, the involvement with alcoholism by these hormone systems is unmistakable, and demonstrates the complexity of interactions with alcohol and the difficulty of successfully pursuing effective treatments. Whether alcohol associated changes in the activity of certain hormones are the result of alcohol use or are the result of an underlying predisposition for alcoholism, or a combination of both, is currently of great scientific interest. The evidence we present in this review suggests that appetitive hormones may be markers as they appear involved in alcohol dependence and craving, that reproductive hormones provide an example of the consequences of drinking and are affected by alcohol, and that posterior pituitary hormones have potential for being targets for treatment. A better understanding of the nature of these associations may contribute to diagnosing and more comprehensively treating alcoholism. Pharmacotherapies that take advantage of our new understanding of hormones, their receptors, or their potential relationship to craving may shed light on the treatment of this disorder.     

Role of TRPV1 in consolidation of fear memories depends on the averseness of the conditioning procedure

Despite the fact that TRPV1 receptors are widely expressed in brain structures such as the hippocampus, its functions remain largely unknown. In the present study, we have investigated the possible modulatory role of the hippocampal endovanilloid system upon memory consolidation of two different behavioral tasks in rats. Post-training infusion of the TRPV1 antagonist capsazepine disrupted memory consolidation with a strong training protocol, but not with a weak one in the contextual fear conditioning or in the step-down inhibitory avoidance task. These results provide evidence that the modulation of the hippocampal memory consolidation through TRPV1 receptors takes place only in presence of a strong emotional experience, suggesting that a certain aversiveness level is required in order to recruit endovanilloids to exert this function. A possible synergic role of hippocampal endovanilloid and endocannabinoid system on memory consolidation is discussed.     

Fitting a Thurstonian IRT model to forced-choice data using Mplus

To counter response distortions associated with the use of rating scales (a.k.a. Likert scales), items can be presented in a comparative fashion, so that respondents are asked to rank the items within blocks (forced-choice format). However, classical scoring procedures for these forced-choice designs lead to ipsative data, which presents psychometric challenges that are well described in the literature. Recently, Brown and Maydeu-Olivares (Educational and Psychological Measurement 71: 460–502, 2011a) introduced a model based on Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment, which overcomes the problems of ipsative data. Here, we provide a step-by-step tutorial for coding forced-choice responses, specifying a Thurstonian item response theory model that is appropriate for the design used, assessing the model’s fit, and scoring individuals on psychological attributes. Estimation and scoring is performed using Mplus, and a very straightforward Excel macro is provided that writes full Mplus input files for any forced-choice design. Armed with these tools, using a forced-choice design is now as easy as using ratings.     

The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for European Portuguese

This study presents the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999a) for European Portuguese (EP). The EP adaptation of the ANEW was based on the affective ratings made by 958 college students who were EP native speakers. Subjects assessed about 60 words by considering the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in either a paper-and-pencil or a Web survey procedure. Results of the adaptation of the ANEW for EP are presented. Furthermore, the differences between EP, American (Bradley & Lang, 1999a), and Spanish (Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Comesa?a, Behavior Research Methods, 39, 600–605, 2007) standardizations were explored. Results showed that the ANEW words were understood in a similar way by EP, American, and Spanish subjects, although some sex and cross-cultural differences were observed. The EP adaptation of the ANEW is shown to be a valid and useful tool that will allow researchers to control and/or manipulate the affective properties of stimuli, as well as to develop cross-linguistic studies. The normative values of EP adaptation of the ANEW can be downloaded at .     

Detecting Perceiver Expectancies: The Role of Perceiver Distraction in Spontaneously Triggering Identity Negotiation

To examine whether social interaction processes can trigger naturally-occurring identity negotiation, the current research manipulated perceiver distraction and valence of perceivers' expectations about targets. Nondistracted perceivers corrected their behaviors and impressions for the influence of their expectancies. Distracted perceivers corrected their overt information-gathering behaviors, but appeared to exhibit their biases in subtle ways. Targets detected distracted perceivers' negative expectancies, and showed signs of engaging in identity negotiation processes by behaving contrary to their perceivers' expectancies. The results suggest that distraction may facilitate the emergence of subtle expectancy-biased perceiver behaviors, and may trigger targets to intuitively engage in identity negotiation processes.     

La terapia de conducta en el tratamiento de la anorexia nerviosa ¿eficaz o peligrosa?

RESUMEN

Por el peligro físico que supone y los delicados matices de sus alteraciones, la anorexia nerviosa constituye un verdadero reto para los procedimientos tradicionales en la práctica clínica. El uso reciente de técnicas de terapia de conducta se ha visto también contestado por su supuesta peligrosidad para las personas que padecen esta importante alteración. En este artículo se revisan los principios fundamentales que sustentan este tipo de terapia y sus implicaciones en la salud del enfermo. Al final del artículo se presenta un breve estudio de casos tratados con terapia conductual.     

Visual search of emotional faces: The role of affective content and featural distinctiveness

We investigated the source of the visual search advantage of some emotional facial expressions. An emotional face target (happy, surprised, disgusted, fearful, angry, or sad) was presented in an array of neutral faces. A faster detection was found for happy targets, with angry and, especially, sad targets being detected more poorly. Physical image properties (e.g., luminance) were ruled out as a potential source of these differences in visual search. In contrast, the search advantage is partly due to the facilitated processing of affective content, as shown by an emotion identification task. Happy expressions were identified faster than the other expressions and were less likely to be confounded with neutral faces, whereas misjudgements occurred more often for angry and sad expressions. Nevertheless, the distinctiveness of some local features (e.g., teeth) that are consistently associated with emotional expressions plays the strongest role in the search advantage pattern. When the contribution of these features to visual search was factored out statistically, the advantage disappeared.