Attitudes about psychotherapy: A qualitative study of introductory psychology students who have never been in psychotherapy and the influence of attachment style

Design: Interviews about attitudes about psychotherapy with 12 undergraduate students who had never been in psychotherapy were analysed using consensual qualitative research. Results: Participants believed that the client role is to disclose, be receptive, and be motivated; that the therapist role is to listen, support, and give advice; and that the therapeutic relationship should be close and personal. Participants had ideas about the benefits (a healing therapeutic relationship, personal and interpersonal changes) and the barriers (self‐stigma and public stigma, difficulty revealing, need to solve problems on own, cost) associated with seeking therapy, and they disliked the idea of being diagnosed. In contrast with participants who were securely attached, those who were insecurely attached more often wanted a professional therapeutic relationship, wanted the therapist to ask questions, mentioned fewer benefits to therapy, and thought that they would have difficulty disclosing to a therapist. Discussion: Implications for changing attitudes about psychotherapy and improving training programs for practitioners are discussed.     

Contemplative/emotion training reduces negative emotional behavior and promotes prosocial responses

Contemplative practices are believed to alleviate psychological problems, cultivate prosocial behavior and promote self-awareness. In addition, psychological science has developed tools and models for understanding the mind and promoting well-being. Additional effort is needed to combine frameworks and techniques from these traditions to improve emotional experience and socioemotional behavior. An 8-week intensive (42 hr) meditation/emotion regulation training intervention was designed by experts in contemplative traditions and emotion science to reduce "destructive enactment of emotions" and enhance prosocial responses. Participants were 82 healthy female schoolteachers who were randomly assigned to a training group or a wait-list control group, and assessed preassessment, postassessment, and 5 months after training completion. Assessments included self-reports and experimental tasks to capture changes in emotional behavior. The training group reported reduced trait negative affect, rumination, depression, and anxiety, and increased trait positive affect and mindfulness compared to the control group. On a series of behavioral tasks, the training increased recognition of emotions in others (Micro-Expression Training Tool), protected trainees from some of the psychophysiological effects of an experimental threat to self (Trier Social Stress Test; TSST), appeared to activate cognitive networks associated with compassion (lexical decision procedure), and affected hostile behavior in the Marital Interaction Task. Most effects at postassessment that were examined at follow-up were maintained (excluding positive affect, TSST rumination, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia recovery). Findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior, and they support the benefit of integrating contemplative theories/practices with psychological models and methods of emotion regulation.     

Pathways to vocational services: factors affecting entry by veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration mental health services

The current study provides naturalistic data documenting the pathways-to-care to vocational services for 155 veterans who were receiving some form of mental health care from the Veterans Health Administration and had a vocational need but were not currently enrolled in vocational services. Of the participants, 94.2% had recognized their vocational need, 80.6% reported that they or someone else had sought help to alleviate the need, and 77.4% had previously received some form of vocational services. The median length of the participants' vocational need was more than 4.2 years. Delays associated with recognition, help-seeking, and treatment entry all contributed to the overall delay in entering appropriate care. Filtering factors associated with quicker recognition, seeking help, and receiving services included diagnosis, level of disability, type of vocational need, and support from primary providers, family, and friends. The results provide information for designing interventions to improve service entry by adults with mental health problems and vocational needs.     

Eye-contact perception in schizophrenia: relationship with symptoms and socioemotional functioning

Accurately perceiving self-referential social signals, particularly eye contact, is critical to social adaptation. Schizophrenia is often accompanied by deficits in social cognition, but it is unclear whether this includes gaze discrimination deficits. This study investigated whether eye-contact perception is preserved or impaired and if it is related to symptoms and broader socioemotional functioning in schizophrenia. Twenty-six participants with schizophrenia (SCZ) and 23 healthy controls (HC) made eye-contact judgments for faces in varying gaze direction (from averted to direct in ten 10% increments), head orientation (forward, 30° averted), and emotion (neutral, fearful). Psychophysical analyses for forward faces showed that SCZ began endorsing eye contact with weaker eye-contact signal and their eye-contact perception was less of a dichotomous function, as compared with HC. SCZ were more likely than HC to endorse eye contact when gaze was ambiguous, and this overperception of eye contact was modulated by head orientation and emotion. Overperception of eye contact was associated with more severe negative symptoms. Decreased categorical gaze perception explained variance of socioemotional deficits in schizophrenia after taking basic neurocognition into consideration, suggesting the relationship was not solely due to a general deficit problem. These results were discussed in relation to the nature of categorical gaze perception and its significance to clinical and functional presentations of schizophrenia.     

Within-person relationships between mood and creativity

State mood has been proposed as a facilitator of creative behavior. Whereas positive mood compared to neutral mood generally facilitates creative performance, mood effects are weaker and less consistent when positive mood is compared to negative mood. These inconsistent results may be due to focusing only on mood valence, while neglecting or confounding mood activation. The current study is based on the dual-pathway model, which describes separate roles for mood valence and mood activation in facilitating creativity. We used experience sampling methodology to investigate the concurrent and lagged effects of mood valence and activation on creative process engagement (CPE) within-person over time among individuals working on a long-term project requiring creativity. We also investigated the moderating effects of individual differences in goal orientation and supervisory support on within-person mood-creativity relationships. As expected, we found that activating positive and activating negative moods were positively associated with concurrent CPE, whereas deactivating moods of both valences were negatively related to CPE. Activating negative mood had a significant lagged effect on CPE, whereas activating positive mood did not. We also found that activating positive mood was more strongly related to concurrent CPE among individuals with high rather than low learning goal orientation. Further, activating positive mood interacted with prove goal orientation and supervisory support for creativity, such that activating positive mood had the strongest association with CPE when both prove goal orientation and supervisory support were high.     

The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun

Names are rich sources of information. They can signal gender, ethnicity, or class; they may connote personality characteristics ranging from warmth and cheerfulness to morality. But names also differ in a much more fundamental way: some are simply easier to pronounce than others. Five studies provide evidence for the name-pronunciation effect: easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. Studies 1–3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names. Study 4 finds this effect generalizable to ingroup targets. Study 5 highlights an important real-world implication of the name-pronunciation effect: people with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms. These effects obtain independent of name length, unusualness, typicality, foreignness, and orthographic regularity. This work demonstrates the potency of processing fluency in the information rich context of impression formation.     

Youth Group Cliques: How Religious Goals Can Disguise Discriminatory Group Dynamics

This paper provides an in-depth, qualitative analysis of two Christian youth groups. Researchers conducted personal interviews with participating youth and their youth ministers and collected extensive field notes on participant observations of youth group events. Findings indicate the presence of youth group cliques with clear delineations about which participants are youth group insiders and which are outsiders. Results show that insider participants are typically socioeconomically-advantaged youth, while outsiders are typically youth from disadvantaged backgrounds. Despite the existence of these exclusionary practices within both groups, leaders in the two cases demonstrate differing levels of awareness of and response to these dynamics. This paper explores the specifics of both cases, illuminating who is targeted for exclusion within these groups and how this targeting varies across the two congregational contexts. Implications of these findings are that religious youth groups may perpetuate broader socioeconomic divisions. Specifically, the analysis reveals that rather than forming benign cliques, youth group members may be discriminating against others based on their relative socioeconomic advantage.     

The Heterogeneous P-Median Problem for Categorization Based Clustering

The p-median offers an alternative to centroid-based clustering algorithms for identifying unobserved categories. However, existing p-median formulations typically require data aggregation into a single proximity matrix, resulting in masked respondent heterogeneity. A proposed three-way formulation of the p-median problem explicitly considers heterogeneity by identifying groups of individual respondents that perceive similar category structures. Three proposed heuristics for the heterogeneous p-median (HPM) are developed and then illustrated in a consumer psychology context using a sample of undergraduate students who performed a sorting task of major U.S. retailers, as well as a through Monte Carlo analysis.     

Perceptions of Psychopathology in Relation to Socio-cultural Changes Among Ladakhi Youth

It seems likely that an increasing number of young people in the isolated region of Ladakh are experiencing mental problems in relation to the process of acculturation. Ladakh, a Himalayan region situated in the northeast of India, has undergone rapid development. It has been influenced by the opening of the area for tourists in 1974 and from the massive presence of the Indian military. This work explores the discourses among intellectuals, practitioners and young people about psychopathology among the Ladakhi youth in relation to socio-cultural changes. Based on the discourse analysis and a review of relevant theoretical perspectives, it is argued that development is causing a greater diversity in the youth, and that the combination of greater pressure and less cultural support may be causing an increase in psychopathology.