Children's event reports: Factors affecting responses to repeated questions in vignette scenarios and event recall interviews

When adults repeat questions, children often give inconsistent answers. This study aimed to test the claim that these inconsistencies occur because children infer that their first answer was unsatisfactory, and that the adult expects them to change their answer. Children aged 4, 6, and 8 years (N= 134) were asked about vignettes in which an adult repeated a question, with manipulation of the adult's overt dissatisfaction (high vs. low pressure) and knowledge about the information sought. On a separate occasion, the children were given an unrelated event recall interview containing repeated questions. All age groups showed sensitivity to adult dissatisfaction, interpreting question repetition as an implicit request for answer change more frequently in the high than in the low‐pressure vignettes. Overall, however, these ‘change‐expected’ interpretations were least frequent in the younger children, who were the most prone to shifting. Also there was no evidence that these interpretations were associated with more frequent shifting in the recall interview. The results do not provide clear support for a simple conversational inference account of shifting, especially in younger children.     

The Trauma and Complicated Grief of Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss is a newly identified type of loss that occurs when a loved one is physically present, but psychologically absent. Dementia is just one example. Because the lost person is here, but not here, grief is frozen, life is put on hold, and people are traumatized. With no official verification of death, no possibility of closure, and no rituals for support, there is no resolution of grief (Boss 1999). Clergy, especially pastoral counselors, can witness and provide comfort for such uncanny loss because people rely on them for support, not just from the clear loss of death, but from the ambiguous losses, catastrophic and ordinary, that inevitably will occur across the life course.     

The Effect of Self‐Identified Sexual Orientation on Helping Behavior in a British Sample: Are Lesbians and Gay Men Treated Differently?

In a British sample, the wrong-number technique was used to examine levels of helping behavior shown toward lesbians and gay men. A wrong-number telephone call, from either a man who self-identified as gay or heterosexual, or a woman who self-identified as either lesbian or heterosexual, was made to 232 men and women. The caller requested help by asking the respondent to relay a message to his or her partner by telephone. As predicted, lesbians and gay men were less likely to be given help than were their same-gender heterosexual counterparts. However, lesbians were given a similar amount of help as were heterosexual men. Male participants were less likely to give help to gay men than to lesbians, but female participants were no less likely to help lesbians than gay men. The results suggest that, although lesbians and gay men meet discrimination in everyday life, the level of discrimination may differ.     

Researching consumers in virtual worlds: a cyberspace odyssey

Following Belk's (1991) Consumer Behaviour Odyssey, the authors suggest the need for a new odyssey, one that focuses on consumers in virtual worlds. In this paper the authors discuss the relevance of virtual communities for marketers and how ethnographic research methods can be adapted to the online environment. The unique methodological problems, opportunities and ethical dilemmas for researchers are considered that online ethnography raises before an exploration of how discourse analysis can assist in the interpretation of data collected online. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Cognitive factors in panic disorder, agoraphobic avoidance and agoraphobia

There remains a lack of consensus regarding the possibility that especially high levels of panic-related cognitions characterise panic disorder with agoraphobia. We administered the Anxiety Sensitivity Index, the Agoraphobic Cognitions Questionnaire and the Anxious Thoughts and Tendencies Scale as well as measures of agoraphobic avoidance to patients diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia (n=75) and without agoraphobia (n=26). Patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia did not score significantly higher on any of the cognitive variables than did panic disorder patients without agoraphobia. However, most of the cognitive variables showed small to moderate-strength correlations with self-report measures of agoraphobic avoidance. Our findings suggest that anxiety sensitivity, catastrophising of the consequences of panic and a general anxiety-prone cognitive style, although to some extent associated with agoraphobic avoidance, do not discriminate panic disorder with agoraphobia from panic disorder without agoraphobia.     

The impact of body-part-naming training on the accuracy of imitative performances in 2- to 3-year-old children

A series of three experiments explored the relationship between 3-year-old children's ability to name target body parts and their untrained matching of target hand-to-body touches. Nine participants, 3 per experiment, were presented with repeated generalized imitation tests in a multiple-baseline procedure, interspersed with step-by-step training that enabled them to (i) tact the target locations on their own and the experimenter's bodies or (ii) respond accurately as listeners to the experimenter's tacts of the target locations. Prompts for on-task naming of target body parts were also provided later in the procedure. In Experiment 1, only tact training followed by listener probes were conducted; in Experiment 2, tacting was trained first and listener behavior second, whereas in Experiment 3 listener training preceded tact training. Both tact and listener training resulted in emergence of naming together with significant and large improvements in the children's matching performances; this was true for each child and across most target gestures. The present series of experiments provides evidence that naming--the most basic form of self-instructional behavior--may be one means of establishing untrained matching as measured in generalized imitation tests. This demonstration has a bearing on our interpretation of imitation reported in the behavior analytic, cognitive developmental, and comparative literature.     

The effect of an extinction cue on ABA-renewal: Does valence matter?

The present human fear conditioning study examined whether the valence of an extinction cue has a differential effect on attenuating renewal that is induced by removal of the extinction context. Additionally, the study aimed to assess whether such attenuating effect is based on a modulatory or safety-signal role of the cue. In acquisition, extinction, and test stages of the experiment, human participants received pairings of human faces, presented against a particular background color, with the presence or absence of an aversive auditory stimulus. Experimental groups differed in the valence of a cue that was presented during extinction, in whether or not extinction took place against a different background color than present during acquisition and testing, and in whether the extinction cue was present or absent at test. The conditioned response consisted of auditory-stimulus expectancy ratings. It was hypothesized that a positively valued extinction cue yields faster extinction, stronger attenuation of renewal, and better transfer of its inhibitory power to non-extinguished stimuli than a negatively valued cue. All three hypotheses were confirmed, suggesting that the positive, but not the negative, cue had become a safety signal. The results were discussed in the framework of extinction-based exposure treatments.     

Valence-specific laterality effects in vocal emotion: interactions with stimulus type, blocking and sex

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were dependent on blocked presentation of the emotion conditions, on the naturalness of the emotional stimuli, or on listener sex. We presented happy and sad sentences, paired with neutral counterparts, dichotically in an emotion localisation task, with vocal stimuli being preceded by verbal labels indicating target emotions. The measure was accuracy. When stimuli of the same emotion were presented as a block, a valence-specific laterality effect was demonstrated, but only in original stimuli and not morphed stimuli. There was a separate interaction with listener sex. We interpret our findings as suggesting that the valence-specific laterality hypothesis is supported only in certain circumstances. We discuss modulating factors, and we consider whether the mechanisms underlying those factors may be attentional or experiential in nature.     

The Myth of Closure

Therapies for grief and loss have traditionally focused on the work of grieving. The goal was to reach an endpoint, now popularly called closure. There are, however, many people who, through no fault of their own, find a loss so unclear that there can be no end to grief. They have not failed in the work of grieving, but rather have suffered ambiguous loss, a type of loss that is inherently open ended. Instead of closure, the therapeutic goal is to help people find meaning despite the lack of definitive information and finality. Hope lies in increasing a family's tolerance for ambiguity, but first, professionals must increase their own comfort with unanswered questions. In this article, the authors, one a poet, the other a family therapist and theorist, offer a unique blending of theory, reflection, and poetry to experientially deepen the process of self‐reflection about a kind of loss that defies closure.