Collateral Reports and Cross-Informant Agreement about Adult Psychopathology in 14 Societies

To advance international mental health assessment, instruments that have been internationally validated are needed. To this end, we analyzed ratings from 14 societies on the Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL), a collateral-report form parallel to the Adult Self-Report (ASR; Achenbach and Rescorla 2003) for ages 18 to 59. Both the ABCL and the ASR assess problems, personal strengths, and adaptive functioning. For a sample of 8322 see note below collaterals, we found strong consistency across societies regarding which ABCL problem items tended to obtain relatively low, medium, or high ratings. Most societal effect sizes (ESs) for problem scale scores were small to medium (< 13.9 %), but the ES for the ABCL Personal Strengths scale was 25 %. For most of the same participants (N = 8,302), we analyzed cross-informant agreement between self-reports on the ASR and collateral reports on the ABCL. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores averaged .47, with considerable societal variation. Problem score means were higher on the ASR than the ABCL in every society, but the size of the difference varied across societies. Mean item ratings on the ABCL and ASR were highly correlated within every society (mean r = .92), but within-dyad item rating agreement varied widely in every society (mean r = .39). In all societies, non-corroboration of self-reported deviance and of collateral-reported deviance was common. Overall findings indicated considerable similarity but also some important differences in collateral-reported problems and adaptive functioning across 14 societies.     

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Interacts with Ambiguity During Sentence Comprehension

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Conventional opinion about using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) for examining sentence comprehension maintains that RSVP taxes working memory (WM),...     

Age-related changes in word retrieval vary by self-reported anxiety but not depression symptoms

Tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) are known to increase in frequency across adulthood, but there is wide variability in older adults’ TOT rates, suggesting that individual difference factors contribute to TOT incidence. We investigated the role of affect by examining the relationship between self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms and the frequency of TOTs during a laboratory task. Participants were young, middle-aged and older adults in a population-based sample of adults aged 18–87. Increased anxiety was associated with fewer TOTs for the middle-aged group but more TOTs for the older adult group. There was no relationship between anxiety and TOTs for younger adults and no relationships between depression symptoms and TOT incidence for any age group. We discuss our results in terms of attentional control theory, which provides an explanation of how age may affect the relationship between anxiety and TOTs.     

Meta‐analysis of behavioral self‐management techniques used by students with disabilities in inclusive settings

This comprehensive review synthesizes findings from 29 studies in which students with disabilities utilized behavioral self‐management techniques in inclusive settings. Findings suggest that consistent with 2 earlier reviews of these types of studies, most behavioral self‐management techniques continue to be adaptable in inclusive settings with moderate to strong efficacy. This review identifies strengths as well common limitations of the studies, provides recommendations for future research and practice, and includes behavioral self‐management resources.     

Three-Year-Old Children Detect Social Exclusion in Third-Party Interactions

Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion—intentionally leaving out others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social-cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect social exclusion. Previous developmental research on social exclusion has focused on children older than 4 years of age, but recent infancy research has suggested younger children may be able to process complex social interactions such as social exclusion. The present study is the first to examine whether 2- to 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and if they prefer to affiliate with individuals who have been excluded over individuals who exclude others. Across 2 experiments, 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 140) viewed exclusive group interactions, in which 2 agents unjustly excluded 1 agent, and children were asked to choose whether they preferred to play with an excluded agent or an exclusive agent. Three-year-old children consistently preferred to play with the excluded agent, whereas 2-year-old children showed no preference. Three-year-old children did not show a preference among agents engaged in inclusive interactions and did not prefer an agent who refused to engage with a group, showing that 3-year-old children distinguish unjust exclusion from other types of interactions. Together, these findings suggest 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and are motivated to affiliate with unjustly excluded agents over those who exclude others, whereas these capacities are still developing in 2-year-old children.     

In Her Own Words: Semi-structured Interviews of Women Veterans Who Experienced Military Sexual Assault

Twenty-one female veterans volunteered to talk about 29 events of military sexual assault (MSA) via semi-structured interviews covering pre-military abuse, during and immediately after the assault and reactions post-assault. The 14 who reported on-going abuse in childhood, also experienced multiple events of MSA. Common themes revealed that most events happened at night (52% specifically referenced night, while 69% most likely occurred at night), 24% in a car, and 24% while the victim was on duty. MSA was associated with a low use of weapons (17% with knives or guns) but a high use (52%) of physical violence (e.g., hitting, choking) and intimidation (59%). 69% knew their perpetrator prior to the assault and 12 of them (60%) were superiors. 34.5% of the perpetrators and 24% of the victims were drinking alcohol prior to the assault. 27.5% reported the MSA; however, 52% had to continue to interact with the perpetrator as part of her job. 67% reported being pregnant or seriously injured as a result of the MSA; however, only 28% received help. 71% disclosed that they had suicidal ideation 14% made suicide attempts while on active duty, and 38% made a suicide attempt some time in their lifetime post-MSA. 52% said the MSA lead to an early discharge from the military. 76% stated MSA interfered with their ability to have an intimate relationship. All participants graduated Warrior Renew sexual trauma treatment and reported positive responses. Although this is a small sample, findings may help generate hypotheses for larger scale studies.     

Novel metaphor comprehension: Semantic neighbourhood density interacts with concreteness

Previous research suggests that metaphor comprehension is affected both by the concreteness of the topic and vehicle and their semantic neighbours (Kintsch, 2000; Xu, 2010). However, studies have yet to manipulate these 2 variables simultaneously. To that end, we composed novel metaphors manipulated on topic concreteness and semantic neighbourhood density (SND) of topic and vehicle. In Experiment 1, participants rated the metaphors on the suitability (e.g. sensibility) of their topic-vehicle pairings. Topic concreteness interacted with SND such that participants rated metaphors from sparse semantic spaces to be more sensible than those from dense semantic spaces and preferred abstract topics over concrete topics only for metaphors from dense semantic spaces. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used presentation deadlines and found that topic concreteness and SND affect the online processing stages associated with metaphor comprehension. We discuss how the results are aligned with established psycholinguistic models of metaphor comprehension.     

Fear Develops to the Conditioned Stimulus and to the Context during Classical Eyeblink Conditioning in Rats

In classical eyeblink conditioning, non-specific emotional responses to the aversive shock unconditioned stimulus (US), which are presumed to coincide with the development of fear, occur early in conditioning and precede the emergence of eyeblink responses. This two-process learning model was examined by concurrently measuring fear and eyeblink conditioning in the freely moving rat. Freezing served as an index of fear in animals and was measured during the inter-trial intervals in the training context and during a tone conditioned stimulus (CS) presented in a novel context. Animals that received CS-US pairings exhibited elevated levels of fear to the context and CS early in training that decreased over sessions, while eyeblink conditioned responses (CRs) developed gradually during acquisition and decreased during extinction. Random CS-US presentations produced a similar pattern of fear responses to the context and CS as paired presentations despite low eyeblink CR percentages, indicating that fear responding was decreased independent of high levels of learned eyeblink responding. The results of paired training were consistent with two-process models of conditioning that postulate that early emotional responding facilitates subsequent motor learning, but measures from random control animals demonstrate that partial CS-US contingencies produce decrements in fear despite low levels of eyeblink CRs. These findings suggest a relationship between CS-US contingency and fear levels during eyeblink conditioning, and may serve to clarify further the role that fear conditioning plays in this simple paradigm.