Ruminating on Rumination: are Rumination on Anger and Sadness Differentially Related to Aggression and Depressed Mood?

Rumination is a risk factor for aggression and depression, yet few studies have incorporated both aggression and depression in a unitary model that reflects how rumination predicts these distinct conditions. The current study examined rumination on anger and sadness to assess their unique relations with aggression and depressed mood, respectively. Analogous anger rumination and sadness rumination questionnaires were used to minimize measurement variance, and were completed by 226 undergraduate students. Factor analysis suggested one general rumination factor comprised of two distinct sub-factors of anger rumination and sadness rumination. Path analysis confirmed unique relations between anger rumination and aggression, and sadness rumination and depressed mood. Further, anger rumination and anger were independent predictors of aggression. Results supported the conceptualization of anger rumination and sadness rumination as distinct constructs and underscore the importance of pursuing research that incorporates both forms of rumination to better understand how they impact development, mental health, and behavior.     

Change in body image and psychological well-being during behavioral obesity treatment: Associations with weight loss and maintenance

This study reports on outcomes from a behavioral obesity treatment program, evaluating if treatment-related changes in body image and psychological well-being are predictors of weight change during treatment and after follow-up. Participants were 142 overweight/obese women (BMI = 30.2 ± 3.7 kg/m²; age = 38.3 ± 5.8 years) participants in a behavioral treatment program consisting of a 4-month treatment period and a 12-month follow-up. Psychosocial variables improved during treatment and these changes were correlated with 4-month weight reduction. Short-term changes in body size dissatisfaction (p = .002) and mood (p = .003) predicted long-term weight loss. Additional results suggest that there might be a predictive role of short-term changes in body size dissatisfaction and self-esteem on long-term weight loss after accounting for initial weight change (p < .028). We conclude that, along with weight changes, cognitive and affect-related processes influenced during obesity treatment may be related long-term success, in some cases independently of initial weight loss.     

Perceptual grouping operates independently of attentional selection: Evidence from hemispatial neglect

To what extent can human observers process visual information that is not currently the focus of attention? We evaluated the extent to which unattended visual information (i.e., that which appears on the neglected side of space in individuals with hemispatial neglect) is perceptually organized and influences the perceptual processing of information on the attended side. To examine this, patients (and matched controls) judged whether successive, complex checkerboard stimuli (targets), presented entirely to their intact side of space, were the same or different. Concurrent with this demanding task, irrelevant distractor elements appeared on the unattended side and either changed or retained their perceptual grouping on successive displays, independently of changes in the ipsilesional task-relevant target. Changes in the grouping of the unattended task-irrelevant distractor elements produced congruency effects on the attended target-change judgment to the same extent in the neglect patients as in the control participants, and this was true even in those patients with severe attentional deficits. These results suggest that some perceptual processes, such as grouping, can operate in the absence of attention.     

Emotional reactivity and interoceptive sensitivity: Exploring the role of age

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Interoceptive sensitivity (IS) refers to the ability to accurately perceive visceral afferent information, and several prominent theories of emotions suggest...     

Meeting the emotional needs of infants and toddlers in foster care: The collaborative mental health care experience

This paper describes a partnership between an infant mental health consultation program and child welfare authorities, with a special focus on the use of a consultation model to support infants and toddlers in foster care. The authors describe a model of practice that incorporates the transactional model with a developmental perspective to help foster parents understand and address the emotional needs of these children. The clinical implications section reviews strategies for addressing attachment and relationship disturbances, promoting self‐regulation, and enhancing social competence in infants and young foster children.     

Implicit familiarity processing in congenital prosopagnosia

A particularly interesting and somewhat puzzling finding in the face‐processing literature is that, despite the absence of overt recognition of most faces, many patients with acquired prosopagnosia (AP) exhibit evidence of intact covert face recognition of the very same faces. This phenomenon has important implications for the understanding of the mechanism underlying AP and, by extension, the mechanism underlying normal face processing. Here, we set out to examine whether individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) exhibit a similar dissociation between overt and covert face recognition. We first confirmed that all six of our CP individuals were significantly impaired in face recognition in comparison with controls. Participants then completed a matching task with both famous and unknown faces in which they decided whether two consecutive images have the same identity or not. Critically, the level of face familiarity was orthogonal to the task at hand and this enabled us to examine whether the familiarity of a face enhanced identity matching, a finding which would implicate implicit face processing. As expected, the CP individuals were slower and less accurate than the control participants. More importantly, like the controls, the CP individuals were faster and more accurate at matching famous compared with unknown faces. Also, for both groups, matching performance on unrecognized famous faces fell at an intermediate level between performance on explicitly recognized famous faces and faces which are unknown. These results provide the first solid evidence for the existence of implicit familiarity processing in CP and suggest that, despite the marked impairment in explicit face recognition, these individuals still have some familiarity representation which manifests in the form of covert recognition. We discuss possible models to account for the apparent dissociation of overt and covert face processing in CP.     

Youth Action Research for Prevention: A Multi-level Intervention Designed to Increase Efficacy and Empowerment Among Urban Youth

Youth Action Research for Prevention (YARP), a federally funded research and demonstration intervention, utilizes youth empowerment as the cornerstone of a multi-level intervention designed to reduce and/or delay onset of drug and sex risk, while increasing individual and collective efficacy and educational expectations. The intervention, located in Hartford Connecticut, served 114 African-Caribbean and Latino high school youth in a community education setting and a matched comparison group of 202 youth from 2001 to 2004. The strategy used in YARP begins with individuals, forges group identity and cohesion, trains youth as a group to use research to understand their community better (formative community ethnography), and then engages them in using the research for social action at multiple levels in community settings (policy, school-based, parental etc.) Engagement in community activism has, in turn, an effect on individual and collective efficacy and individual behavioral change. This approach is unique insofar as it differs from multilevel interventions that create approaches to attack multiple levels simultaneously. We describe the YARP intervention and employ qualitative and quantitative data from the quasi-experimental evaluation study design to assess the way in which the YARP approach empowered individual youth and groups of youth (youth networks) to engage in social action in their schools, communities and at the policy level, which in turn affected their attitudes and behaviors.     

Intelligence and persisting with medication for two years: Analysis in a randomised controlled trial

The study examined whether verbal intelligence is associated with persisting to take medication for up to two years. The design is a prospective follow-up of compliance with taking medication in high-risk individuals participating in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial set in Central Scotland. Participants were 1993 people aged between 50 and 77 years with an ankle brachial index ≤ 0.95. The medication was 100 mg aspirin or placebo daily.The principal outcome measure was continuing with taking medication or stopping it due to having ‘changed one's mind’. Higher verbal intelligence was associated with a greater likelihood of continuing to take medication up to two years after randomisation. For a standard deviation increase in Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale score, risk of stopping medication in the first two years of the study was 0.75 (95% CI 0.64 to 0.87, p < 0.001). Comparing the highest and lowest quartiles of IQ, the lowest IQ group's relative rate of stopping medication was 2.51 (95% CI 1.52 to 4.22). The effect was not attenuated after adjustment for sex, smoking, or level of deprivation. Verbal intelligence is associated with continuing, medium-to-long term engagement with health self-care, even in the face of uncertainty about whether active treatment is being received, whether the treatment is known to be effective in general, and whether it will be helpful to the individual taking it. Such persisting with potentially helpful health behaviours in the face of uncertainty might partly explain why people with higher intelligence live longer and suffer less morbidity from chronic diseases.     

Accentuating the positive in adolescent patients

One is forced to distinguish ”positive“ transference from ”negative“ transference, the transference of affectionate feeling from that of hostile feeling, and to deal separately with the two varieties of the transference to the physician ? Where the capacity to transfer feeling has come to be of an essentially negative order ? the possibility of influence or cure ceases.     

Spatial probability as an attentional cue in visual search

We investigated the role of spatial probabilities in target location during participants' performance of a visual search task. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that spatial probabilities could serve as a powerful attentional bias that produced faster detection of targets in high-probability locations than of those in low- or random-probability locations. The effect could not be explained by repetition priming alone. Moreover, responses to targets in low-probability locations were slowed only when a distractor was present in the high-probability location. In Experiments 3-5, we compared the effects of spatial probability with an explicit endogenous cue and a salient exogenous cue. Facilitation due to spatial probability was independent of any benefit afforded by the explicit endogenous cue but interacted with the salient exogenous cue, such that the exogenous cue validity effect was compressed for targets in the high-probability location. Together, these results suggest that the spatial probabilities governing target location constitute a potent bias of visual processing and, as such, can be considered an attentional cue that differs from both typical explicit endogenous and salient exogenous cues.