Life review therapy using autobiographical retrieval practice for older adults with depressive symptomatology

The aim of this study was to examine the efficacy of life review based on autobiographical retrieval practice for treating depressed older adults. Forty-three adults aged 65-93 with clinically significant depressive symptomatology and no dementia were randomly assigned to treatment or to no treatment. The results indicated significant differences between experimental and control groups after 4 weeks of autobiographical retrieval practice. At posttest, those in the treatment condition showed fewer depressive symptoms, less hopelessness, improved life satisfaction, and retrieval of more specific events. The findings suggest that practice in autobiographical memory for specific events may be among the components of life review that account for its effectiveness and could be a useful tool in psychotherapy with older adults.     

Self regulation processes measurement through self-report methodology

Nowadays the evaluation of self-regulated learning processes is having a critical time due to the problems concerning the assessment instruments. This paper presents the outcomes of a research study having a main goal: evaluate to what extent student's consciousness of his/her own self-regulated learning and study processes (and the involved strategies and activities) has a significant impact on the quality of his/her answers on self-report type instruments. In order to prove this hypothesis an experimental study was designed and built including a pre and a post-test, having no control group, using a sample of 90 college students from different degree courses. The intervention program lasted 45 hours, divided into 8 work sessions of 5 hours each. The developed work included both theoretical and practical tasks dealing with strategies and activities involved in the self-regulated learning and study processes. The results show that the collected data using a self-report instrument is much more significant and accurate after the intervention program has taken place and that the intervention greatly improves the obtained information using these kind of instruments.     

Success in chess mediated by mental molds

Research has revealed the impact of cognitive-affective strategies (Molds of the Mind) on subjective well-being, interpersonal relationships, or school achievement. However, it seems odd that such strategies could influence the success of chess players, because this game is usually considered to be influenced mainly by technical and cognitive skills. To examine the influence of cognitive-affective molds, 53 chess players, ages from 9 to 16 years old, enrolled in sport competitions, were assigned to two groups, high and low success. They responded to the MOLDES, designed to evaluate individuals' molds. The results show that the "Mental Molds" of the most successful players are more realistic, positive and regulators of the emotions, while the molds of the less successful players are more evasive, magical, defensive and inoperative.     

The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11 Among a School Sample of Portuguese Male and Female Adolescents

Few personality traits are as socially relevant as impulsivity, but few self-report measures have been specifically developed for adolescents and children. The aim of the present study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale version 11 (BIS-11) among a mixed-gender sample of 782 Portuguese youth (M = 15.87 years; SD = 1.72), in a school context. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed the expected 6-factor first-order structure, but the 3-factor second-order factorial structure did not present a good fit. Cross-gender measurement invariance was demonstrated only in terms of weak invariance. Nonetheless, the Portuguese adaptation of the BIS-11 demonstrated some generally acceptable psychometric properties of internal consistency, mean inter-item correlation, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity of statistically significant associations with conduct disorder symptoms, alcohol abuse, drug use, and unprotected sex. The use of the BIS-11 among the male and female youth population is psychometrically justified, and it can be a useful measure to identify impulsive adolescents who are at considerable risk of personal injury and present a potential source of injury to others.     

Social stimuli increase physiological reactivity but not defensive responses

Emotional reactions are crucial in survival because they provide approach and withdrawal behaviors. However, an unsolved question is whether the social content of the affective stimuli has a specific effect on emotional responses. We studied whether the social content of affective pictures influenced the defensive response and response mobilization. For this purpose, we recorded startle blink reflex (a defensive response) and skin conductance responses (a measure of unspecific physiological reactivity or arousal) in 73 participants while they viewed a series of 81 pictures of varying affective valence and social content. Our results revealed that defense response, as indicated by increases in the magnitude of the startle blink reflex, was mainly dependent on threatening or unpleasant cues, but was unrelated to the social content of the pictures. The social content, however, had an influence on pleasant stimuli, provoking an increase in resource mobilization, as reflected by changes in electrodermal activity. Hence, the social content of the affective stimuli may increase the physiological arousal elicited by pleasant stimuli, and it appears to be unrelated to the defense reactivity provoked by unpleasant stimuli.     

Interference between cues requires a causal scenario: Favorable evidence for causal reasoning models in learning processes

In an interference-between-cues design (IbC), the expression of a learned Cue A–Outcome 1 association has been shown to be impaired if another cue, B, is separately paired with the same outcome in a second learning phase. The present study examined whether IbC could be caused by associative mechanisms independent of causal reasoning processes. This was achieved by testing participants in two different learning situations. In the Causal Scenario condition, participants learned in a diagnostic situation in which a common cause (Outcome 1) caused two disjoint effects, namely Cues A and B. In the Non-Causal Scenario condition, the same IbC design and stimulus conditions were used. However, instructions provided no causal frame to make sense of how cues and outcomes were related. IbC was only found in the Causal Scenario condition. This result is consistent with Causal Reasoning Models of causal learning and raises important difficulties for associative explanations of IbC.     

Portuguese category norms for children

This study presents Portuguese category norms for children of three different age groups: preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds), second graders (7- to 8-year-olds), and preadolescents (11- to 12-year-olds). Three hundred Portuguese children (100 in each group) completed an exemplar-generation task. Preschoolers generated exemplars for 13 categories, second graders generated exemplars for 17 categories, and preadolescents generated exemplars for 21 categories. For each group, responses within each category were organized according to frequency of production in order to derive exemplar-production norms for sets of tested categories. The results also included information about the number of responses and exemplars, idiosyncratic and inappropriate responses, and commonality and diversity indexes for all the categories. A comparison of these children's norms with the Portuguese adult norms was also presented. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

What is behind a summary-evaluation decision?

Research in psychology has reported that, among the variety of possibilities for assessment methodologies, summary evaluation offers a particularly adequate context for inferring text comprehension and topic understanding. However, grades obtained in this methodology are hard to quantify objectively. Therefore, we carried out an empirical study to analyze the decisions underlying human summary-grading behavior. The task consisted of expert evaluation of summaries produced in critically relevant contexts of summarization development, and the resulting data were modeled by means of Bayesian networks using an application called Elvira, which allows for graphically observing the predictive power (if any) of the resultant variables. Thus, in this article, we analyzed summary-evaluation decision making in a computational framework.     

Reaction time normative data for the IAPS as a function of display time, gender, and picture content

This study aimed to extend the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005) norms by obtaining reaction time (RT) normative data for 308 selected photographs. Pictures were presented one at a time for 33, 100, or 250 msec, or under free-time display, to 96 women and 48 men. The participants’ task involved assessing the emotional valence of each picture and responding as quickly as possible as to whether it was unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant. RTs provided an index of processing efficiency. The manipulation of display time served to estimate the time course in the valence identification of each picture. Some categories of depicted scenes (e.g., erotica and mutilations) were classified more consistently and efficiently than were others as pleasant or unpleasant. There were minimal differences between men and women. Overall, the present data provide researchers investigating cognition/emotion relationships with an objective criterion to select pictorial stimuli on the basis of RTs. Data for all pictures may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.