The relationship between suppression and subsequent intrusions: the mediating role of peritraumatic dissociation and anxiety

Background and objectives: Although previous studies showed that thought and emotion suppression represent risk factors for intrusions development, the mechanisms that explain these relations were less explored. This study aims to examine the relationships between thought and emotion suppression and the symptoms of intrusion following the exposure to a trauma-related event. Moreover, we explored if these relationships would be mediated by peritraumatic state dissociation and state anxiety.

Design and methods: The trauma film paradigm was used and the participants were students (N?=?148) experimentally exposed to an aversive film to model a traumatic experience. Thought and emotion suppression were measured before the trauma exposure. After exposure, the participants completed scales for measuring state dissociation and state anxiety. Intrusive images and thoughts of the film were recorded in the subsequent week using an intrusion diary.

Results: Thought suppression predicted intrusive thoughts frequency, and this effect was mediated by the peritraumatic anxiety. State anxiety predicted both intrusive images and thoughts, while state dissociation only predicted intrusive images.

Conclusions: Intrusive images and intrusive thoughts are different phenomena and they are predicted by different variables. The practical implications of these results for posttraumatic stress disorder treatment and secondary traumatization are discussed.     

Saving for your future self: The role of imaginary experiences

Despite increased longevity, many people fail to save the funds necessary to support their retirement. In an attempt both to elucidate and remedy this failing, research exploring the “future-self continuity” hypothesis has revealed that temporal discounting is decreased and saving increased when connections between one’s current and future self are strengthened. Here, we explored the possibility that a basic component of mental imagery – spatial visual perspective – may be an important determinant of people’s decisions to spend now or save for the future. The results of two experiments supported this prediction. Rates of saving were enhanced when a distant-future event was generated from a third-person vs. first-person vantage point, an effect that was mediated by visual bodily awareness during mental imagery.     

Absolute Time: The Limit of Kant's Idealism

I examine here if Kant can explain our knowledge of duration by showing that time has metric structure. To do so, I spell out two possible solutions: time's metric could be intrinsic or extrinsic. I argue that Kant's resources are too weak to secure any intrinsic, transcendentally‐based temporal metrics; but he can supply an extrinsic metric, based in a metaphysical fact about matter. I conclude that Transcendental Idealism is incomplete: it cannot account for the durative aspects of experience—or it can do so only with help from a non‐trivial metaphysics of material substance.     

Philosophy and the care of the self: A literature survey

This article reviews a number of recent books and practices that address a renewed interest in the role that philosophy might play in the living of a rich and fulfilling life. The review looks at books addressed to the general public as well as books which discuss such classical and Hellenistic philosophers as took their task to be helping people achieve happiness in life. It then turns to contemporary studies of the self and of wisdom and turns finally to some newly emerging philosophical practices such as philosophical counselling and philosophical discussion groups of various kinds in order to explore whether philosophy can still be a source of consolation or guidance in contemporary life.     

Adult attachment and sexual behavior

The relations between adult attachment processes and sexuality were examined in a community sample of 792 young adults (327 men and 465 women) from the Niagara region of Canada. Participants completed questionnaires that included Simpson’s (1990) measure of adult attachment, self‐reported physical attractiveness, erotophilia, and a variety of sexual behavior measures (e.g., number of sexual partners, age of first sexual experience, frequency of sexual behaviors in the past year, whether an affair had occurred in the past year, and consistent condom usage). The sexuality measures were factor analyzed to extract common factors. The results were modest, but a number of significant relationships between sexuality and attachment were observed. For example, people scoring higher on a secure attachment index perceived themselves as more physically attractive, whereas people scoring higher on an anxious attachment index perceived themselves as less physically attractive, had an early first intercourse (and more lifetime partners), more infidelity, and took more sexual precautions (e.g., condom usage). The results were generally stronger in women, with most of the attachment/sexuality associations in the full sample being driven by the results in women. Implications for understanding sexual variability, including high‐risk sexual behavior, are discussed.     

Do dispositional attributions regarding peer endorsers influence product evaluations?

The effect of a peer endorsement advertisement on research participants' attitudes toward the advertised product was examined. An advertisement for a Seiko watch and a questionnaire were administered to participants. The degree of dispositional attributions regarding the endorser's motivation and participants' subsequent attitudes associated with the Seiko watch were measured. In addition, other factors that might affect product evaluation were measured. Whether product evaluation could be accounted for by correspondence bias was investigated. The results showed that the degree of dispositional attributions correlated with product evaluations. There was no correspondence bias. Possible causes for the lack of correspondence bias are discussed and a model suggesting factors accounting for participants' product evaluations is presented.     

Movement parameters that distinguish between voluntary movements and levodopa-induced dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease

It is well known that long-term use of levodopa by patients with Parkinson's disease causes dyskinesia. Several methods have been proposed for the automatic, unsupervised detection and classification of levodopa induced dyskinesia. Recently, we have demonstrated that neural networks are highly successful to detect dyskinesia and to distinguish dyskinesia from voluntary movements. The aim of this study was to use the trained neural networks to extract parameters, which are important to distinguish between dyskinesia and voluntary movements.Thirteen patients were continuously monitored in a home-like situation performing in about 35 daily life tasks for a period of approximately 2.5 h. Behavior of the patients was measured using triaxial accelerometers, which were placed at six different positions of the body. A neural network was trained to assess the severity of dyskinesia. The neural network was able to assess the severity of dyskinesia and could distinguish dyskinesia from voluntary movements in daily life. For the trunk and the leg, the important parameters appeared to be the percentage of time that the trunk or leg was moving and the standard deviation of the segment velocity of the less dyskinetic leg. For the arm, the combination of the percentage of time, that the wrist was moving, and the percentage of time, that a patient was sitting, explained the largest part of the variance of the output. Dyskinesia differs from voluntary movements in the fact that dyskinetic movements tend to have lower frequencies than voluntary movements and in the fact that movements of different body segments are not well coordinated in dyskinesia.     

Catching oriented objects

We have investigated how participants match the orientation of a line, which moves on a vertical screen towards the subject. On its path to the participant, the line could disappear at several positions. Participants were instructed to put a bar on a predefined interception point on the screen, such that the bar touched the screen with the same orientation as the moving line at the very moment when the line passed through the interception point or (in case of line disappearance) when the hidden line would pass through the interception point (like in catching). Participants made significant errors for oblique orientations, but not for vertical and horizontal orientations of the moving line. These errors were small or absent when the moving line was visible all the way along its path on the screen. However, these errors became larger when the line disappeared farther away from the interception point. In the second experiment we tested whether these errors could be related to errors in visual perception of line orientation. The results demonstrate that errors in matching of the bar do not correspond to the last perceived orientation of the line, but rather to the perceived orientation of the moving line near the beginning of the movement path. This corresponds to earlier observations that participants shortly track a moving target and then make a saccadic eye movement to the interception point.     

Correction to: In Search of the Trinity: A Dilemma for Parfit’s Conciliatory Project

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -