Cognitive intrusions in a non-clinical population. I. Response style, subjective experience, and appraisal

The present study identified distinctive response styles to unpleasant cognitive intrusions to further understanding of intrusive phenomena similar to those observed in obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders. Response styles were studied among 125 university students who completed a questionnaire describing and evaluating seven cognitive intrusions and inventories of depressive, anxious, and compulsive symptoms. Almost all subjects (99%) reported intrusions and 92% included effortful strategies in response to intrusions in their repertoire. Large differences were observed in the dominant strategy used. Three distinctive dominant response styles were identified including no effortful response (26%) and two effortful styles, attentive thinking (34%), and escape/avoidance (40%). The two groups using effortful strategies were more anxious and reported more difficulty removing intrusions. The group using escape/avoidance strategies reported more sadness, worry, guilt, and disapproval than subjects reporting no effortful response. The attentive thinking group reported more varied forms and more frequently triggered intrusions then the no effortful response group. Within subject analyses support the group comparisons and showed that intrusions eliciting escape/avoidance strategies were evaluated more disapprovingly than thoughts eliciting attentive thinking. The results are discussed in terms of Salkovskis' (Behavior Research and Therapy, 27, 677–682, 1985) formulation of obsessive-compulsive disorder and Borkovec's (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 23, 481–482, 1985) and Barlow's (Anxiety and its disorders: The nature and treatment of anxiety and panic, 1988) discussions of worry and generalized anxiety.     

Les pratiques d’evaluation utilisees dans les structures de conseil en recrutement : quelques determinants

Referring to the work of Bruchon-Schweitzer & Ferrieux (1991) and Balicco (1999), the present study describes the recruitment practices of different types of organizations (N=327, 134 consulting companies and 193 temporary placement firms). We hypothesised that job position and recruiter characteristics (sex, age, level and type of education, status, and recruitment experience) would influence the use of selection techniques. Results revealed that choice of selection techniques is not based on a scientific evaluation of applicants. Job position seems to strongly determine use of personality assessment techniques. Further, recruiter characteristics only seem to determine choice of less valid techniques. In the discussion, a theoretical model of choices made by recruiters and some courses of action are proposed.     

Parental Influences on University Students’ Mental Help-Seeking Intentions

Parents are thought to play an integral role in adolescents’ and young adults’ help-seeking, yet parental influences on university students’ help-seeking intentions have been largely overlooked. A total of 118 parent-student dyads completed questionnaires. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that increased student attachment to parent and lower levels of student distress were associated with informal help-seeking. Actor-partner interdependence models demonstrated that parent variables had no influence on students’ help-seeking intentions. Counseling and research implications are discussed.     

Information tradeoffs in complex stimulus structure: local and global levels in naturalistic scenes.

An information tradeoff is an increased processing or utilization of information from one stimulus source at the expense of processing or utilization of information from a different source. An experiment was conducted to determine whether information tradeoffs occurred when subjects attended selectively to one of two different structural levels of naturalistic scenes. The subjects' attentional focus was directed to either the global or local structure of a scene (i.e., the scene or an object in the scene, respectively) either before or after presentation of a scene. They then had to use the information obtained from a 100-msec exposure of the scene to choose between two forced-choice alternatives that described one of the levels. The nature of the alternatives was such that both alternatives adequately characterized one of the structural levels on the basis of physical and semantic relations within the scene. Results showed that the subjects were significantly slower and less accurate when their attentional focus and the forced-choice alternatives were at different levels of stimulus structure than when they were at the same level, providing evidence of an information tradeoff when different types of information from a scene were used. When processing information from a particular structural level, information from the other level either was less available or was not used efficiently. Furthermore, the information tradeoffs were more severe in the precue than in the postcue condition, indicating differences in the efficiency of the selectivity process. The results are interpreted with respect to the role of selective attention in processing complex stimuli such as naturalistic scenes.