Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases

Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.     

Reprint of: technology and the evolution of clinical methods for stuttering

The World Wide Web (WWW) was 20 years old last year. Enormous amounts of information about stuttering are now available to anyone who can access the Internet. Compared to 20 years ago, people who stutter and their families can now make more informed choices about speech-language interventions, from a distance. Blogs and chat rooms provide opportunities for people who stutter to share their experiences from a distance and to support one another. New technologies are also being adopted into speech-language pathology practice and service delivery. Telehealth is an exciting development as it means that treatment can now be made available to many rural and remotely located people who previously did not have access to it. Possible future technological developments for speech-language pathology practice include Internet based treatments and the use of Virtual Reality. Having speech and CBT treatments for stuttering available on the Internet would greatly increase their accessibility. Second Life also has exciting possibilities for people who stutter.Educational objectives: The reader will (1) explain how people who stutter and their families can get information about stuttering from the World Wide Web, (2) discuss how new technologies have been applied in speech-language pathology practice, and (3) summarize the principles and practice of telehealth delivery of services for people who stutter and their families.     

The Relationship between Performance in Near Match-to-Sample Tasks and Fluid Intelligence

Match-to-sample is a timed task in which a subject is presented with a visual stimulus (the probe) and must select a match to that stimulus (the target) from among an array of distractors. These tasks are frequently employed as tests of basic cognitive abilities and demonstrate consistent correlations with measures of intelligence. In the current study, a match-to-sample task was modified to produce near-match conditions (trials for which no exact match existed). Two factors were manipulated: type of discrepancy between the target and probe (additive or subtractive) and degree of discrepancy between target and probe (1 element or 2 elements). It was hypothesized that introducing near-match conditions would change the processing demands of the task, resulting in increased correlations between decision time and fluid intelligence. Degree and type of discrepancy affected decision times: participants required more time for 2 element discrepancies and additive type discrepancies. Contrary to expectations, increased decision time on a task did not correspond to higher correlations with fluid intelligence. For type, correlations were larger when participants needed to mentally subtract elements from the target in order to make it match the probe (mean r_additive = .399; mean r_subtractive = .451). For degree, correlations were larger for trials where the probe and target differed by one element (mean r = .470) than for trials where the probe and target differed by two elements (mean r = .380). These results seem to indicate that the relationship between the complexity of a task and general intelligence is not as straightforward as has been commonly believed.     

Enriching the Genetic Counseling Recruitment Pipeline: A National Cross-Sectional Study of Public High School Counselors

Early awareness of careers is helpful in recruiting students into a career pipeline. School counselors are among the top resources that students turn to when seeking advice about choosing their career. Studies show that high school is the ideal time to generate interest in the genetic counseling career, especially for minorities. This novel study of 291 high school counselors working in ethnically diverse public school districts in the United States examined to what extent members of this important group discuss genetic counseling as a career option with their students. The findings indicate that the majority of school counselors in this study (83%) did not discuss genetic counseling with their students, citing a lack of resources and lack of student interest as the major barriers. Suggestions of ways to increase high school counselors’ awareness of the genetic counseling career in order to enhance the goal of enriching recruitment of ethnic minorities into the genetic counseling pipeline are presented.     

Post‐identification feedback effects: Investigators and evaluators

We investigated the effects of post‐identification feedback and viewing conditions on beliefs and interviewing tactics of participant‐investigators, crime reports of participant‐witnesses and participant‐evaluators' credibility judgments of the witnesses. Study 1 participants assumed the roles of witness and investigator (N = 167 pairs). Witnesses' view of a simulated crime video was manipulated by distance from viewing monitor: 2 or 9 ft. Participants made a line‐up identification and received either positive feedback or no feedback. Significant effects for witnesses and investigators were associated with viewing condition and post‐identification feedback. Interviews between investigator‐witness pairs were videotaped. Investigators asked more positive, leading questions when they were led to believe that the witness had identified the suspect. In Study 2 evaluators (N = 302) viewed the witness‐investigator interviews. Viewing condition had no effect on judgments of witness credibility but positive post‐identification feedback led evaluators to judge witnesses as more credible than witnesses who received no feedback. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A goal-based perspective on eye movements in visual world studies

There is an emerging literature on visual search in natural tasks suggesting that task-relevant goals account for a remarkably high proportion of saccades, including anticipatory eye movements. Moreover, factors such as “visual saliency” that otherwise affect fixations become less important when they are bound to objects that are not relevant to the task at hand. We briefly review this literature and discuss the implications for task-based variants of the visual world paradigm. We argue that the results and their likely interpretation may profoundly affect the “linking hypothesis” between language processing and the location and timing of fixations in task-based visual world studies. We outline a goal-based linking hypothesis and discuss some of the implications for how we conduct visual world studies, including how we interpret and analyze the data. Finally, we outline some avenues of research, including examples of some classes of experiments that might prove fruitful for evaluating the effects of goals in visual world experiments and the viability of a goal-based linking hypothesis.     

Planning in sentence production: Evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit.     

Orthographic error monitoring in old age: lexical and sublexical availability during perception and production

Previous research suggests that older adults suffer declines in producing accurate spellings but retain the ability to accurately detect misspellings. The preservation of perception in the face of impaired production has been used to support a model of aging in which age impairs access to linguistic representations under specific circumstances, while representations themselves remain intact. The current research tests two predictions of this Transmission Deficit Hypothesis (TDH): first, that the differential effect of age on perception and production occurs when tasks are equated on response requirements and underlying representations, and second, that both word and spelling frequency interact to determine the effect of age on performance. Results of two error monitoring tasks supported the predictions of the TDH, demonstrating age-related production impairments that interacted with both word and spelling frequency, but no impairment of older adults' spelling perception, even for low frequency words or spellings.     

Aging and Language Production

Experimental research and older adults' reports of their own experience suggest that the ability to produce the spoken forms of familiar words declines with aging. Older adults experience more word-finding failures, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, than young adults do, and this and other speech production failures appear to stem from difficulties in retrieving the sounds of words. Recent evidence has identified a parallel age-related decline in retrieving the spelling of familiar words. Models of cognitive aging must explain why these aspects of language production decline with aging whereas semantic processes are well maintained. We describe a model wherein aging weakens connections among linguistic representations, thereby reducing the transmission of excitation from one representation to another. The structure of the representational systems for word phonology and orthography makes them vulnerable to transmission deficits, impairing retrieval.     

The effect of providing choices on skill acquisition and competing behavior of children with autism during discrete trial instruction

Discrete trial instruction was carried out for three students with autism. An alternating treatments design was implemented. In one condition, teachers chose the reinforcers to be used and the order in which programs were conducted. In a second condition, students chose the order of programs and the reinforcers to be used. Speed of skill acquisition and the presence of competing behavior such as tantrums, aggression, escape attempts or idiosyncratic noncompliance responses were measured. Speed of skill acquisition did not differ between the two conditions, but competing behavior was markedly reduced during student choice conditions. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.