Effectiveness of a short audiovisual emotion recognition training program in adults

The ability to recognize emotions from others’ nonverbal behavior (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is crucial to successful social functioning. However, currently no self-administered ERA training for non-clinical adults covering multiple sensory channels exists. We conducted four studies in a lifespan sample of participants in the laboratory and online (total N?=?531) to examine the effectiveness of a short computer-based training for 14 different emotions using audiovisual clips of emotional expressions. Results showed that overall, young and middle-aged participants that had received the training scored significantly higher on facial, vocal, and audiovisual emotion recognition than the control groups. The training effect for audiovisual ERA persisted over 4 weeks. In older adults (59–90 years), however, the training had no effect. The new, brief training could be useful in applied settings such as professional training, at least for younger and middle-aged adults. In older adults, improving ERA might require a longer and more interactive intervention.     

Identity Development in Adulthood: A Longitudinal Study

Identity status interviews involving five domains of life (religious beliefs, political ideology, occupational career, intimate relationships, and lifestyle) were conducted with 249 women and men at ages 27 and 36. The results on overall identity and domain-specific identities confirmed our general hypothesis as to the strengthening of the commitment process: (1) stability was higher in the identity statuses involving commitment (identity achievement and foreclosure) than in the statuses not involving commitment (identity diffusion and moratorium); (2) an increase in the salience of identity domains could be attributed to an increase in the commitment process; (3) transitions into identity statuses involving commitment were more frequent than transitions into statuses not involving commitment; indicating that both identity achievement and foreclosure might be end points of identity development. It was concluded that the results pointed to identity development in adulthood rather than to a random fluctuation in identity statuses over time.     

QUAID: A questionnaire evaluation aid for survey methodologists

QUAID (question-understanding aid) is a software tool that assists survey methodologists, social scientists, and designers of questionnaires in improving the wording, syntax, and semantics of questions. The tool identifies potential problems that respondents might have in comprehending the meaning of questions on questionnaires. These problems can be scrutinized by researchers when they revise questions to improve question comprehension and, thereby, enhance the reliability and validity of answers. QUAID was designed to identify nine classes of problems, but only five of these problems are addressed in this article: unfamiliar technical term, vague or imprecise relative term, vague or ambiguous noun phrase, complex syntax, and working memory overload. We compared the output of QUAID with ratings of language experts who evaluated a corpus of questions on the five classes of problems. The corpus consisted of 505 questions on 11 surveys developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. Analyses of hit rates, false alarm rates,d′ scores, recall scores, and precision scores revealed that QUAID was able to identify these five problems with questions, although improvements in QUAID’s performance are anticipated in future research and development.     

Cool and Hot Aspects of Executive Function in Childhood Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Aspects of executive functioning (EF) have been put forward as endophenotypes in obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) and meta-analyses support EF underperformance in adult samples. Childhood-onset OCD has been suggested to constitute a separate neurodevelopmental subtype of the disorder but studies on neuropsychological functioning in childhood OCD are limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate performance-based EF in pediatric OCD using observed and latent variable analyses. A case-control design was applied including 50 unmedicated children and adolescents with OCD aged 7–17 years of which 70% were female, 50 pairwise age and gender matched non-psychiatric controls (NP) and 38 children and adolescents with mixed anxiety disorders (MA). Participants underwent structured diagnostic interviews and assessment with a battery encompassing cool EF tasks of working memory, set shifting, inhibition, and planning, and hot EF tasks of decision making and dot probe paradigm affective interference. First, groups were compared on observed variables with multilevel mixed-effects linear regression and analysis of variance. Then the latent structure of cool EF was tested with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and groups were compared on the CFA scores. No significant differences between groups appeared on individual cool EF tasks. On the hot EF tasks the OCD group displayed significant interference effects on the dot probe paradigm OCD-specific stimuli relative to NP, but not compared to MA and no group differences emerged for decision making. In the CFA a one-factor solution showed best fit, but the groups did not differ significantly on the resulting latent variable. The present study does not support cool or hot EF impairments in childhood OCD.