Irrational and Metacognitive Beliefs Mediate the Relationship Between Content Beliefs and GAD Symptoms: A Study on a Normal Population

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) models show both similarities and differences in conceptualizing anxiety. This work assumes that REBT’s irrational and MCT’s metacognitive beliefs play a mediation role while CBT’s disorder specific content beliefs act as triggers. This hypothesis is tested using a regression model in which metacognitive and irrational beliefs play a mediation role while content disorder beliefs are independent variables. This paper applied this model to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a psychiatric diagnosis in which anxiety is the major feature. In GAD, the specific content beliefs are negative problem orientation and intolerance of uncertainty. Therefore, 149 non clinical subjects completed 4 self-report questionnaires: the Negative Orientation to the Problems Questionnaire and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale as measures for content cognitive beliefs, the Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for irrational beliefs, and the Metacognitive Questionnaire 30 Items Version for metacognitive beliefs. The generalized anxiety disorder questionnaire was chosen in order to measure anxiety as dependent variable. Regression analyses confirmed that irrational and metacognitive beliefs mediate the relation between cognitive content beliefs and GAD. We clinically interpret mediation as a second level regulation.     

Working memory in healthy aging and in Parkinson’s disease: evidence of interference effects

Focusing on relevant information while suppressing the irrelevant one are critical abilities for different cognitive processes. However, their functioning has been scarcely investigated in the working memory (WM) domain, in both healthy and pathological conditions. The present research aimed to study these abilities in aging and Parkinson’s disease (PD), testing three groups of healthy participants (young, older and elderly) and one of PD patients, employing a new experimental paradigm. Results showed that the transient storing of irrelevant information in WM causes substantial interference effects, which were remarkable in elderly individuals on both response latency and accuracy. Interestingly, PD patients responded faster and were equally accurate compared to a matched control group. Taken together, findings confirm the existence of similar mechanisms for orienting attention inwards to WM contents or outwards to perceptual stimuli, and suggest the suitability of our task to assess WM functioning in both healthy aging and PD.     

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes–no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.     

Attachment, assessment, and psychological intervention: a case study of anorexia

Attachment patterns and personality dimensions have always been considered important to the development and adaptation of the individual. The first aim of this article was to address some basic questions about the place of attachment in a multimethod assessment when compiling a complete picture of the patient's personality functioning. The second aim was to present the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP; George & West, 2001) as a valid and productive assessment measure. Based on a single case study of an anorexic young woman, the article demonstrates how the AAP is integrated with the Rorschach Comprehensive System (Exner, 1991, 1993) and other assessment tools in both the assessment and in developing a treatment plan.     

The Affect in Play Scale: confirmatory factor analysis in elementary school children

The aim of this paper was to study the construct validity of the Affect in Play Scale, an empirically based measure of pretend play, in a group of 519 Italian children ages 6 to 10 years. In confirmatory factor analysis, a correlated two-factor structure with a cognitive and an affective factor was identified. Possible differences in factor scores by sex and age were investigated but no significant differences were found.     

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Structure in Chinese Adolescents Exposed to a Deadly Earthquake

This present study examined the structure of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a large sample of Chinese adolescents exposed to a deadly earthquake. A total of 2,800 middle school students aged 12 to 18 years participated in the study 6 months after the “Wenchuan Earthquake”. Results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a five-factor intercorrelated model composed of intrusion, avoidance, numbing, dysphoric arousal, and anxious arousal, fit data significantly better than both the four-factor numbing model King et al. (Psychological Assessment 10:90–96, 1998) and the four-factor dysphoria model Simms et al. (Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111:637–647, 2002). Further examination of the external convergent and discriminant validity revealed that except for the dysphoric arousal factor, the remaining four PTSD factors yielded significantly different correlations with external measures of anxiety vs. depression. The findings add to the limited literature on the factor structure of PTSD in youths and on the five-factor PTSD model. In addition, they provide more detail into the latent psychopathological processes of PTSD, and inform the forthcoming DSM-5.     

Wonder,Guarding Against Thoughtlessness in Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not (in her sense of the term) philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta...     

Measuring Care and Justice Moral Orientation: Italian Adaptation and Revision of the MMO-2 Scale

This study presents the Italian adaptation of the Measure of Moral Orientation, second revision (MMO-2). Based on Carol Gilligan’s theory of the Ethics of Care, the MMO-2 was designed to measure two complementary moral stances, namely, Care and Justice. For this study, questionnaire responses from 683 university students were assessed against an Italian-adapted MMO-2 scale. Data were analyzed through exploratory structural equation modeling first as separate scenarios and then as a single model. The final model comprises 4 intercorrelated pairs of latent variables and shows highly satisfactory goodness of fit indices with moderate construct validity and reliability. Strengths, limitations, and directions for the future developments of the MMO-2 are discussed.     

Suppression history of distractor location biases attentional and oculomotor control

Past selection experience greatly affects the deployment of attention such that targets are more readily selected if their features or locations were more frequently selected in the past. Crucially, recent studies have shown similar experience-dependent effects also for salient task irrelevant stimuli: distractors exerted less interference if they appeared at a location where they were presented more often, relatively to other possible locations. Here we investigated the effects of such suppression history on the immediate behavioural correlates of attentional deployment, i.e., eye movements. Participants were to make saccadic eye movements to a target stimulus, while ignoring a highly distracting irrelevant visual onset appearing abruptly on the screen in a proportion of trials. Crucially, this irrelevant onset occurred more frequently in two locations on the visual display and our results showed that, relatively to distractors elsewhere, onsets presented at these locations became easier to ignore, giving rise to reduced oculomotor capture. Consistent with the notion that experience can alter attentional deployment towards spatial locations, these findings indicate that, through learning, the priority of high frequency locations becomes suppressed, attenuating the intrinsic saliency of distractors appearing therein. Traces left by individual events of attentional suppression decrease the processing priority of coordinates within topographic maps of the visual space.