A “spoon full of sugar” helps the medicine go down: How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement,performance and data quality in a typical adult sample

Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.     

Prospective writing: Randomized controlled trial of an intervention for facilitating growth after adversity

Little is known about how posttraumatic growth (PTG) can be fostered and controversy surrounds how it is best measured. We designed and tested an intervention, prospective writing, to facilitate PTG by encouraging people to explore new possibilities after adversity. Adults (N = 188) with recent adverse experiences were randomly assigned to do prospective writing, factual writing, or no writing weekly for one month. PTG was assessed with both retrospective and current-standing measures. Hierarchical linear modeling and response profile analysis were used to assess the intervention’s impact, and latent growth curve modeling was used to test mediation. Prospective writing participants showed the greatest gains in PTG as assessed by the current-standing measure, but did not reliably show greater retrospective PTG than controls. Although large effect sizes for the mediation paths suggested that engagement with new possibilities may be a plausible mechanism, this result fell short of statistical significance. Prospection-based interventions merit further investigation.     

Representational momentum in dynamic facial expressions is modulated by the level of expressed pain: Amplitude and direction effects

Humans have developed a specific capacity to rapidly perceive and anticipate other people’s facial expressions so as to get an immediate impression of their emotional state of mind. We carried out two experiments to examine the perceptual and memory dynamics of facial expressions of pain. In the first experiment, we investigated how people estimate other people’s levels of pain based on the perception of various dynamic facial expressions; these differ both in terms of the amount and intensity of activated action units. A second experiment used a representational momentum (RM) paradigm to study the emotional anticipation (memory bias) elicited by the same facial expressions of pain studied in Experiment 1. Our results highlighted the relationship between the level of perceived pain (in Experiment 1) and the direction and magnitude of memory bias (in Experiment 2): When perceived pain increases, the memory bias tends to be reduced (if positive) and ultimately becomes negative. Dynamic facial expressions of pain may reenact an “immediate perceptual history” in the perceiver before leading to an emotional anticipation of the agent’s upcoming state. Thus, a subtle facial expression of pain (i.e., a low contraction around the eyes) that leads to a significant positive anticipation can be considered an adaptive process—one through which we can swiftly and involuntarily detect other people’s pain.     

Multiple layers of information processing in deductive reasoning: combining dual strategy and dual-source approaches to reasoning

The idea that inferential performance cannot be analyzed within a single model has been suggested within two theoretical contexts. The dual strategy model suggests that people reason using different approaches to processing statistical information. The dual-source model suggests that people reason probabilistically using both statistical information and some intuition about logical form. Each model suggests that people have different approaches to processing information while making inferences. The following studies examined whether these different forms of information processing were equally present during reasoning. Participants were given a series of problems designed to distinguish counterexample from statistical reasoners. They were then given a series of MP or AC inferences for which identical statistical information was provided. Results show that MP inferences were considered to be deductively valid more often than equivalent AC inferences. The effect of logical form was independent of reasoning strategy, and of relatively equivalent size for both counterexample and statistical reasoners. The second study examined explicitly probabilistic inferences, and showed smaller effects of logical form and of reasoning strategy, although with a complex set of interactions. These results show that understanding the way that people use information when making inferences requires a multidimensional approach.     

Rumination, Inhibition and Stress: The Construction of A New Scale for Assessing Emotional Style

Emotional rumination and inhibition were identified in the Emotion Control Questionnaire (ECQ—Roger and Nesshoever 1987; Roger and Najarian 1989) as two relatively independent dimensions of emotional style, and the two measures have subsequently been shown to be important moderator variables in a range of health and forensic settings. Two other dimensions that emerged in the ECQ, labelled aggression control and benign control, have been shown to form part of the extraversion constellation, and the present paper describes the construction and validation of a new scale focusing exclusively on rumination and inhibition. Revised and expanded item pools for the scales were subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which endorsed the two-factor structure. The new scales were validated concurrently against related scales in different samples, and were shown to be systematically related to two independent indices of health status.     

Assessing adolescent mindfulness: validation of an adapted Mindful Attention Awareness Scale in adolescent normative and psychiatric populations

Interest in mindfulness-based interventions for children and adolescents is burgeoning, bringing with it the need for validated instruments to assess mindfulness in youths. The present studies were designed to validate among adolescents a measure of mindfulness previously validated for adults (e.g., Brown & Ryan, 2003), which we herein call the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent (MAAS-A). In 2 large samples of healthy 14- to 18-year-olds (N = 595), Study 1 supported a single-factor MAAS-A structure, along with acceptably high internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and both concurrent and incremental validity. In Study 2, with a sample of 102 psychiatric outpatient adolescents age 14-18 years, participants randomized to a mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention showed significant increases in MAAS-A scores from baseline to 3-month follow-up, relative to nonsignificant score changes among treatment-as-usual participants. Increases in MAAS-A scores among mindfulness-based stress reduction participants were significantly related to beneficial changes in numerous mental health indicators. The findings support the reliability and validity of the MAAS-A in normative and mixed psychiatric adolescent populations and suggest that the MAAS-A has utility in mindfulness intervention research.     

Immediate and long-term priming effects are independent of prime awareness

Subliminal primes are assumed to produce weaker and short-lived effects on subsequent behavior compared to clearly visible primes. However, this difference in priming effect may be due to differences in signal strength, rather than level of awareness. In the present study we manipulated prime discriminability by using metacontrast masks and pseudomasks, while keeping the prime strength equal. This manipulation resulted in large differences in discriminability of the primes. However, both immediate response priming and long-term response priming (measured with conflict adaptation) was equal for the poorly discriminable and well discriminable primes, and equal for groups that differed markedly in terms of how well they could discriminate the primes. Our findings imply that discriminability of information is independent of both the immediate and long-term effects that information can have on behavior.     

Functional Impairment in Latino Children with ADHD: Implications for Culturally Appropriate Conceptualization and Measurement

Conceptualizing and measuring functional impairment related to childhood ADHD, particularly within the rapidly growing, yet underserved, Latino population, is an important area of research that is in its infancy in the field of psychology. The functional impairments related to academic achievement, social competence, and familial relations experienced by children with ADHD lead to long-lasting and debilitating difficulties that adversely affect the individuals themselves, their families, and society. In addition, limited available research suggests that Latino children are at a great or greater risk for developing ADHD, although they are much less likely to be identified by their parents as displaying problematic behavior and subsequently are less likely to receive proper assessment and treatment due to several practical and cultural factors. Fortunately, initial evidence suggests that the construct of functional impairment may be a more universal notion than the potentially culturally biased measurement of symptomatology. Therefore, in order to provide the best possible outcomes for all children with ADHD, research needs to be expanded to include examination of functional impairment related to ADHD, particularly when working with Latino children and their families. Thus, the primary aim of the current review is to examine and critique how the field of psychology has understood and measured functional impairment in school-aged Latino children with ADHD to date. Based on information reviewed, suggestions for moving toward a culturally modified assessment of functional impairment related to ADHD in Latino children will be proposed. This work is a necessary step toward providing culturally appropriate services for a currently underserved, yet rapidly growing, Latino population in our country.