Improving Identity Matching of Newly Encountered Faces: Effects of Multi-image Training

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Mental patients as computer operators

Tactics of design are described for programs to be used by chronic psychiatric patients on an accounting task in the maintenance of records of token economies at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. To address the patients’ cognitive, motoric, and motivational deficiencies, special attention was paid to display features, branching formats, error detection, feedback, and keyboard utilization.     

The relationship among self-efficacy, negative self-referent cognitions, and social anxiety in children: a multiple mediator model

Evidence suggests that general self-efficacy, an individual's beliefs about his global abilities, and social self-efficacy, an individual's beliefs in his ability to navigate social situations, are strongly connected to levels of social anxiety. Negative self-statements, also known as negative self-referent cognitions, have also been linked with levels of social anxiety. Although self-efficacy and negative self-statements have been shown to be important variables in the phenomenology and maintenance of social anxiety in children, they have yet to be examined in conjunction with one another. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between negative self-referent cognitions and self-efficacy and to examine both general self-efficacy and social self-efficacy as mediator variables in the relationship between negative self-statements and social anxiety. Results were based on a sample of 126 children ages 11 to 14 years. A significant association between negative self-statements and both general self-efficacy and social self-efficacy was established. Results also indicated that general self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between negative self-statements and social anxiety; however, contrary to hypotheses, social self-efficacy did not mediate the relationship between negative self-statements and social anxiety. Implications and future recommendations are discussed.     

The Role of Maternal Illness Perceptions in Family Functioning in Adolescent Girls with Anorexia Nervosa

Family based treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN) requires heavy parental involvement. To be effective, parents must possess a coherent understanding of the illness and believe that it is treatable. Yet we know little of how parents view the illness, nor whether these views are unique to AN. We examined illness perceptions in AN, how they compare to those of individuals with a serious medical illness, and how they relate to adjustment and coping. Twenty-five girls with AN, 24 girls with Type I diabetes, and their mothers completed measures of family functioning and psychological symptoms. Mothers also completed a measure of illness perceptions. Mothers viewed AN as less chronic, understandable, and controllable than mothers of girls with diabetes viewed their daughter’s respective illness. Such negative cognitions were associated with poor family functioning and maternal and adolescent adjustment. These findings have implications for enhancing family based treatments, as well as for modifying public health messages to reduce the pervasive stigma that influences such unhelpful perceptions about the illness.     

Cognition at risk: Gestalt/feature-intensive processing and cigarette smoking in college students

Although previous research has shown the importance of feature-intensive processing of relevant information in the staving off of addictive behaviors, the present study examined the possibility that a more global, gestalt rejection of cigarette smoking may be operating to reduce smoking behavior. The present study addressed this possibility through the use of a decision efficacy rating procedure, in which smoking and nonsmoking respondents were asked to determine whether an individual was justified in smoking in a variety of given situations. Nonsmokers tended to reject smoking under any circumstances, whereas smokers tended to entertain mitigating circumstances more favorably in justifying smoking, especially when smoking could be construed as providing some perceived positive gains in serious situations. Results are discussed in terms of the gestalt/feature-intensive processing theory of cognition, and in terms of the importance of cognitive approaches to the understanding of addictive behaviors.     

Doing cognitive neuroscience: a third way

The “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches have been thought to exhaust the possibilities for doing cognitive neuroscience. We argue that neither approach is likely to succeed in providing a theory that enables us to understand how cognition is achieved in biological creatures like ourselves. We consider a promising third way of doing cognitive neuroscience, what might be called the “neural dynamic systems” approach, that construes cognitive neuroscience as an autonomous explanatory endeavor, aiming to characterize in its own terms the states and processes responsible for brain-based cognition. We sketch the basic motivation for the approach, describe a particular version of the approach, so-called ‘Dynamic Causal Modeling’ (DCM), and consider a concrete example of DCM. This third way, we argue, has the potential to avoid the problems that afflict the other two approaches.     

A neural marker of content-specific active ignoring

The ability to attend to relevant events and to ignore irrelevant stimuli is crucial to survival. Theories disagree on whether this ability is dependent solely on increased neural activation for relevant items or whether active ignoring can also play a role. The authors examined the active ignoring of stimuli using a preview search procedure, where irrelevant faces appeared prior to relevant house stimuli. They found increased activation in brain regions associated with spatial memory and in content-specific face-processing areas when participants ignored the irrelevant faces. Differences arose even on trials when only previewed faces appeared, and the magnitude of these differences predicted how well faces were ignored in search. Activation associated with active ignoring decreased when a secondary task was imposed during the preview. The data reveal a neural marker for the process of actively ignoring the content and locations of irrelevant stimuli.