Posttraumatic stress, difficulties in emotion regulation, and coping-oriented marijuana use

In an effort to better understand factors that may explain prior findings of a positive relation between posttraumatic stress symptom severity and coping-oriented marijuana use motivation, the present study tested whether the association between posttraumatic stress symptom severity and marijuana use coping motives is mediated by difficulties in emotion regulation. Participants were 79 (39 women; M(age) = 22.29 years, SD = 6.99) community-recruited adults who reported (1) lifetime exposure to at least one posttraumatic stress disorder Criterion A traumatic event and (2) marijuana use in the past 30 days. Results indicated that difficulties in emotion regulation, as indexed by the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), fully mediated the association between posttraumatic stress symptom severity and marijuana use coping motives. Implications for the treatment of co-occurring posttraumatic stress and marijuana use are discussed.     

Attention and the right-ear advantage: What is the connection?

Dichotic listening originally was a means of studying attention. Half a century ago Doreen Kimura parlayed the dichotic method into a noninvasive indicator of lateralized cerebral language representation. The ubiquitous right-ear advantage (REA) for verbal material was accepted as a concomitant of left-sided language lateralization and preferential conduction of right-ear messages to the left hemisphere. As evidence has accumulated over the past 50years showing the REA to be dynamic and modifiable, the concept of attention has become essential for interpreting the findings. Progress in understanding the role of attention has been manifested as a transition from efforts to document attention effects to efforts to characterize their mechanisms. We summarize the relevant evidence, trace the evolution of explanatory models, and outline contemporary accounts of the role of attention in dichotic listening.     

Proust revisited: odours as triggers of aversive memories

According to the Proust phenomenon, olfactory memory triggers are more evocative than other-modality triggers resulting in more emotional and detailed memories. An experimental paradigm was used to investigate this in aversive memories, similar to those experienced by patients with posttraumatic stress disorder. Seventy healthy participants watched an aversive film, while simultaneously being exposed to olfactory, auditory and visual triggers, which were matched on intensity, valence, arousal and salience. During a second session one week later, participants were randomly exposed to one of the three triggers, and asked to think back about the film and to rate the resulting memory. Results revealed that odour-evoked memories of aversive events were more detailed, unpleasant and arousing than memories evoked by auditory, but not visual, triggers.     

Vicarious shame

We examined an account of vicarious shame that explains how people can experience a self-conscious emotion for the behaviour of another person. Two divergent processes have been put forward to explain how another's behaviour links to the self. The group-based emotion account explains vicarious shame in terms of an in-group member threatening one's social identity by behaving shamefully. The empathy account explains vicarious shame in terms of empathic perspective taking; people imagine themselves in another's shameful behaviour. In three studies using autobiographical recall and experimental inductions, we revealed that both processes can explain why vicarious shame arises in different situations, what variation can be observed in the experience of vicarious shame, and how all vicarious shame can be related to a threat to the self. Results are integrated in a functional account of shame.     

Time-course of eye movement-related decrease in vividness and emotionality of unpleasant autobiographical memories

The time-course of changes in vividness and emotionality of unpleasant autobiographical memories associated with making eye movements (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, EMDR) was investigated. Participants retrieved unpleasant autobiographical memories and rated their vividness and emotionality prior to and following 96 seconds of making eye movements (EM) or keeping eyes stationary (ES); at 2, 4, 6, and 10 seconds into the intervention; then followed by regular larger intervals throughout the 96-second intervention. Results revealed a significant drop compared to the ES group in emotionality after 74 seconds compared to a significant drop in vividness at only 2 seconds into the intervention. These results support that emotionality becomes reduced only after vividness has dropped. The results are discussed in light of working memory theory and visual imagery theory, following which the regular refreshment of the visual memory needed to maintain it in working memory is interfered with by eye movements that also tax working memory, which affects vividness first.     

Parenting and self‐regulation in preschoolers: a meta‐analysis

A meta‐analysis of 41 studies was conducted to examine the strength of the relation between parenting (positive control, negative control and responsiveness) and self‐regulation in preschoolers. Results revealed significant associations between both types of parental control and self‐regulation, with effect sizes being small in magnitude. There was no significant association between self‐regulation and responsiveness. The strength of the association between parenting and self‐regulation varied with different conceptualizations of self‐regulation; positive and negative control were associated with child compliance, but not with inhibition and emotion regulation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-paced learning in children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity

Attention deficit (ADDH) children self-paced the delivery of response pairs for paired-associate learning at about the rate previously shown to be conducive to relatively good learning in attention deficit. The self-pacing opportunity did not seem either to impair or to enhance the learning performance. On methylphenidate they paced themselves at about the same rate but learned much more. Stimulant therapy does not help by slowing the child down but permits more effective memorizing at the same presentation rate.     

Effects of eye movements on the recognition and localization of dichotic stimuli

Three experiments examined the effect of gaze shifts on overall performance and ear differences in dichotic listening. In the first two experiments, lights were switched on and off so as to induce rightward, leftward, or upward gaze during dichotic stimulation. The dichotic material consisted of musical passages in Experiment 1 and two kinds of verbal material in Experiment 2. Vertical eye movements enhanced the accuracy of identification of music but not verbal material. The lateral direction of eye movements affected subjects' ability to localize targets in Experiment 1: localization was more accurate in the direction toward which subjects were looking. In the third experiment it was found that optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) influenced the asymmetry of performance on a dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) test. The right-ear advantage was greatest when the OKN drum rotated from left to right and least when it rotated from right to left. The effect was due to corresponding variation in left-ear scores. Possible mechanisms through which shifts of gaze affect auditory identification and localization are proposed.     

Nonregulation of food intake in restrained,emotional, and external eaters

In the present study, regulation of ice cream intake after a preload was examined in 20 high and 20 low scorers (median split) on subscales of the Restraint Scale (RS) (Herman, Polivy, Pliner, Threshold, & Munic, 1978) and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) (van Strien, 1986). For each subscale it was hypothesized that low scorers would regulate their ice cream intake. High scorers on disinhibitive scales (i.e., the RS and the DEBQ-emotional and -external subscales) were expected to counterregulate after a preload. In contrast, high scorers on the inhibitive DEBQ-restraint scale were expected to regulate their ice cream intake. A robust effect was found: high scorers never regulated ice cream intake after a preload on either the disinhibitive or the inhibitive scales, while low scorers always did. For the RS a significant interaction effect was found [F(1,39)=4.97, p=.03]. None of the other subscales showed interaction effects. The t tests showed that low scorers on all subscales ate significantly less after a preload than without one, while high scorers on all subscales did not differ in intake after a preload or without one. This nonregulation appears to be characteristic of people preoccupied with caloric intake, regardless of the content of the preoccupation.     

Stutter events and linguistic stress

In the research reporting the concurrence between stuttering and linguistic stress the identification of stress loci has been established regularly through intuitive judgment of the experimenter. The present study reports on a more objective determination of stress loci, and their concurrence with stutter events, which strengthens justification of the usual procedure for identifying stress loci.