Prolonged Exposure Therapy for a Vietnam Veteran With PTSD and Early-Stage Dementia

Although prolonged exposure therapy (PE) is considered an evidence-based treatment for PTSD, there has been little published about the use of this treatment for older adults with comorbid early-stage dementia. As the number of older adults in the United States continues to grow, so will their unique mental health needs. The present article describes the successful coordination of care and application of PE in the assessment and treatment of a Vietnam veteran with comorbid PTSD and early-stage dementia. Measures related to the patient's cognitive and psychological functioning were obtained before, during, and after treatment. PE was associated with significant declines in PTSD and depression symptoms. Moreover, the patient's cognitive functioning was made clearer in the absence of severe psychiatric symptoms. Factors contributing to the patient's positive response are discussed.     

Time to guide: Evidence for delayed attentional guidance in contextual cueing

Contextual cueing experiments show that, when displays are repeated, reaction times (RTs) to find a target decrease over time even when the observers are not aware of the repetition. Recent evidence suggests that this benefit in standard contextual cueing tasks is not likely to be due to an improvement in attentional guidance (Kunar, Flusberg, Horowitz, & Wolfe, 2007). Nevertheless, we ask whether guidance can help participants find the target in a repeated display, if they are given sufficient time to encode the display. In Experiment 1 we increased the display complexity so that it took participants longer to find the target. Here we found a larger effect of guidance than in a condition with shorter RTs. Experiment 2 gave participants prior exposure to the display context. The data again showed that with more time participants could implement guidance to help find the target, provided that there was something in the search stimuli locations to guide attention to. The data suggest that, although the benefit in a standard contextual cueing task is unlikely to be a result of guidance, guidance can play a role if it is given time to develop.     

IRB and Research Regulatory Delays Within the Military Health System: Do They Really Matter? And If So,Why and for Whom?

Institutional review board (IRB) delays may hinder the successful completion of federally funded research in the U.S. military. When this happens, time-sensitive, mission-relevant questions go unanswered. Research participants face unnecessary burdens and risks if delays squeeze recruitment timelines, resulting in inadequate sample sizes for definitive analyses. More broadly, military members are exposed to untested or undertested interventions, implemented by well-intentioned leaders who bypass the research process altogether. To illustrate, we offer two case examples. We posit that IRB delays often appear in the service of managing institutional risk, rather than protecting research participants. Regulators may see more risk associated with moving quickly than risk related to delay, choosing to err on the side of bureaucracy. The authors of this article, all of whom are military-funded researchers, government stakeholders, and/or human subject protection experts, offer feasible recommendations to improve the IRB system and, ultimately, research within military, veteran, and civilian populations.     

Cultural influences for college student language brokers

Children from immigrant families often translate communication for parents, a process known as language brokering (LB). LB begins in childhood, but may continue through emerging adulthood, even when individuals are in college. We surveyed 1,222 university students with two immigrant parents and compared non-language brokers, infrequent language brokers, and frequent language brokers on a variety of ethnic, cultural, and identity measures. Significant differences emerged for cultural heritage value orientation, ethnic identity, and dimensions of acculturation with frequent language brokers scoring highest, infrequent language brokers scoring in the middle, and non-language brokers scoring the lowest on these measures. There were no significant differences on acculturative stress among these three groups. These results suggest that LB experiences may contribute to the development of psychological assets for ethnic minority, emerging adults from immigrant families.     

Television Use,Sexual Behavior,and Relationship Status at Last Oral Sex and Vaginal Intercourse

The current longitudinal study explores the relationship between adolescent television use at time 1 and sexual experience and relationship status (i.e., committed/romantic versus casual) 1 year later. The sample (N = 824) comprised youth aged 14–18. Multinomial logistic regressions predicting group membership from television exposure variables were conducted controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and prior sexual behavior. Results indicate that sexually inexperienced youth watched more television overall than sexually experienced youth, but less adult, premium and music television on cable networks. Premium cable exposure predicted group membership among sexually active youth. Youth who watched more premium cable at time 1 were more likely to be in casual relationship at last intercourse than a committed one. A more complete understanding of media effects on adolescent sexual relationships can help guide policy development, media education/literacy efforts, and contribute to the design of interventions to reduce the negative consequences associated with adolescent sexual behavior.     

Telephone conversation impairs sustained visual attention via a central bottleneck

Recent research has shown that holding telephone conversations disrupts one’s driving ability. We asked whether this effect could be attributed to a visual attention impairment. In Experiment 1, participants conversed on a telephone or listened to a narrative while engaged in multiple object tracking (MOT), a task requiring sustained visual attention. We found that MOT was disrupted in the telephone conversation condition, relative to single-task MOT performance, but that listening to a narrative had no effect. In Experiment 2, we asked which component of conversation might be interfering with MOT performance. We replicated the conversation and single-task conditions of Experiment 1 and added two conditions in which participants heard a sequence of words over a telephone. In the shadowing condition, participants simply repeated each word in the sequence. In the generation condition, participants were asked to generate a new word based on each word in the sequence. Word generation interfered with MOT performance, but shadowing did not. The data indicate that telephone conversation disrupts attention at a central stage, the act of generating verbal stimuli, rather than at a peripheral stage, such as listening or speaking.     

Method effects due to social desirability as a parsimonious explanation of the deviation from unidimensionality in LOT-R scores

Dispositional optimism measured by the Life Orientation Test (Revised; LOT-R, Scheier et al., 1994) was originally proposed as a unidimensional construct pertaining to individual differences in positive outcome expectancies. However, factor analytic research has suggested two separate “optimism” and “pessimism” factors associated with positively and negatively worded items respectively. Using confirmatory factor analysis with data from N = 658 students it is shown that a general optimism model with method effects of the positively worded items fits even better than the “optimism–pessimism” model in terms of the AIC statistic, which accounts for both model parsimony and model fit. Furthermore, an attempt is made to explain the method effects by social desirability: impression management, one of two components of socially desirable responding, correlates significantly with the method factor whereas the other component, self-deceptive enhancement, is related to the general optimism factor. Thus it is shown that the deviation from unidimensionality of observed scores does not imply deviation from unidimensionality of optimism when method effects are incorporated in the model.     

Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability: Paths to college student risk-taking

This study examines the roles of sensation seeking and invulnerability as predictors of health compromising behaviors in a multiethnic sample of 1690 emerging adult college students (mean age = 19.8, range 18–25 years) from nine US colleges and universities. Participants completed the Arnett Sensation Seeking Inventory and the Adolescent Invulnerability Scale; and reported how often they had participated in a set of health compromising risk behaviors (i.e., substance use, impaired driving, and sexual behaviors) in the 30 days prior to assessment. Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability scores were moderately correlated (r = .30). Findings from a series of multivariate Poisson regression analyses suggest that when considered simultaneously as predictors, sensation seeking appears to be a general risk factor associated with engagement in a variety of risk behaviors, whereas danger invulnerability is primarily a factor in those risk behaviors that are less common among peers (e.g., hard drug use, casual sex, and driving while intoxicated).     

Locating targets from imagined perspectives: comparing labelling with pointing responses

Participants in two experiments adopted imagined perspectives in a perceptually available spatial scene and located targets by using either verbal terms (labelling) or arrows (pointing). Results revealed that performance was faster and more accurate for labelling than for pointing and more so when the adopted perspectives were misaligned with the physical orientation of the participant. This finding was obtained even when an orientation cue allowed participants to adopt the imagined perspective in advance of target presentation. A third experiment replicated these findings using traditional pointing and verbal responding. We argue that performance from misaligned perspectives in perspective-taking tasks suffers due to reference frame conflicts and that these conflicts are more pronounced with pointing and other manual responses that rely more on the reference frame of the physical body.     

Psychosocial Predictors of Young Adolescent Cigarette Smoking: A Sixteen-Month,Three-Wave Longitudinal Study1

Understanding the psychosocial factors that predict cigarette smoking onset in young people is of crucial importance for prevention efforts. The present study examined prospective psychosocial predictors of smoking in a three-wave longitudinal data set. Similar in design to an earlier study by Chassin, Presson, Sherman, Corty, and Olshavsky (1984), the present study replicated their work, and extended it by (a) using composite predictors derived from exploratory factor analysis, (b) including prior behavior as a predictor, (c) using a design extended over three waves of data collection, and (d) using a sample composed primarily of urban teenagers. Subjects were 3295 7th-grade students at the beginning of the study. The subjects completed a questionnaire containing items tapping cigarette smoking behavior and psychosocial items that have previously been shown to predict smoking behavior. Forty-one psychosocial items on the Wave 1 (initial) questionnaire were factor analyzed, and five factors were retained. Subscale scores were constructed based on these factors and were used as predictors. Regression analyses were performed using the subscales and pretest smoking frequency to predict a continuous measure of smoking, and discriminant analyses were performed to predict transitions between qualitative levels of smoking. Prior smoking behavior was the most important predictor of future smoking. Four of the subscales, Social Disapproval, Risk Taking/Rebelliousness, Perceived Smoking Prevalence, and Motivation to Comply, were significant predictors. One subscale, Physical Consequences from Smoking, was not predictive of smoking in any of the analyses. The effect sizes cross-validated well. It is suggested that an integrative model of smoking initiation developed by Flay, d'Avernas, Best, Kersell, and Ryan (1983) best summarizes the results of the present study.