Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people—but not others—a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC—but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.     

Complex working memory span tasks and higher-order cognition: A latent-variable analysis of the relationship between processing and storage

Complex span tasks, assumed by many to measure an individual's working memory capacity, are predictive of several aspects of higher-order cognition. However, the underlying cause of the relationships between “processing-and-storage” tasks and cognitive abilities is still hotly debated nearly 30 years after the tasks were first introduced. The current study utilised latent constructs across verbal, numerical, and spatial content domains to examine a number of questions regarding the predictive power of complex span tasks. In particular, the relations among processing time, processing accuracy, and storage accuracy from the complex span tasks were examined, in combination with their respective relationships with fluid intelligence. The results point to a complicated pattern of unique and shared variance among the constructs. Implications for various theories of working memory are discussed.     

The Effects of a Multiple Family Therapy on Adolescents with Eating Disorders: An Outcome Study

Multiple Family Therapy (MFT) has gained increasing popularity in the treatment of eating disorders and many programs have been developed over the past decade. Still, there is little evidence in the literature on the effectiveness on MFT for treating eating disorders. The present study examines the effects of a particular model of Multiple Family Therapy on eating disorder symptoms, quality of life, and percentage of Expected Body Weight (%EBW) in adolescents with eating disorders (ED). Eighty‐two adolescents with ED, aged between 11 and 19 years, were assessed before and after treatment using the Eating Disorders Inventory 2 (EDI‐2), the Outcome Questionnaire 45 (OQ‐45) and %EBW. Results showed a significant increase in %EBW between the beginning and end of treatment, with a large effect size. 52.4% of patients achieved an EBW above 85%. Symptoms relative to all EDI dimensions (except for bulimia) significantly decreased during treatment. The three dimensions related to quality of life assessment also improved over the course of MFT. At the end of treatment, 70.7% of patients had a total OQ‐45 score below clinical significance. This study suggests that Multiple Family Therapy may benefit adolescents with eating disorders, with improvement on several outcome measures (%EBW, ED symptoms, and quality of life). However, the lack of a comparison group entails caution when drawing conclusions.     

The Silent Majority: Understanding and Increasing Majority Group Responses to Discrimination

Although strong norms exist against discrimination, majority group members are surprisingly unlikely to respond assertively to discrimination when they witness it. A number of factors contribute to majority group members' nonresponse, including lack of intergroup contact, motivation not to see discrimination, unsupportive social norms, and the sense that only members of affected groups are entitled to respond to discrimination. This paper reviews the published evidence supporting this pattern and presents a model of targeted social referencing, whereby majority group members look to, and are uniquely influenced by, the opinions of minority group members in the domain of discrimination. This article reviews the causes and implications of targeted social referencing and proposes interventions aimed at increasing majority group responses to discrimination.     

Meaning in Life and Volunteerism in Older Adults

Researchers explored predictors of meaning in life such as physical and mental health and volunteerism in a representative sample of older adults. Measures included the Geriatric Depression Scale and the Life Regard Index. Implications for counseling older adults are discussed.     

Breast and Ovarian Cancer: The Forgotten Paternal Contribution

Five to 10% of all cases of breast and ovarian cancer are attributed to a heritable genetic predisposition. Transmission of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations is equally likely through maternal or paternal lineage; however, fewer referrals to cancer genetics clinics appear to be made for a paternal, than maternal, family history of breast and/or ovarian cancer. To examine this potential bias, a retrospective review of 315 patient and family charts was conducted by one familial cancer clinic in Toronto, Canada. Referral letters, risk estimates, and family histories were analyzed to identify significant differences between patients referred with maternal and paternal family histories. It was determined that patients are approximately five times more likely to be referred with a maternal family history of breast and/or ovarian cancer as compared to those with a paternal family history (p = <.0001). Individuals with a paternal family history were found to have a different, and higher, pattern of risk estimates (p = .00064). No significant difference was seen between the type of referrals sent by general practitioners, oncologists, and gynecologists. Recommendations to increase the awareness of paternal family history in assessing cancer risk are provided.     

Integrating working memory capacity and context-processing views of cognitive control

Individuals low in working memory capacity (WMC) exhibit impaired performance on a variety of cognitive control tasks. The executive-attention theory of WMC (Engle & Kane, 2004) accounts for these findings as failures of goal maintenance and response conflict resolution. Similarly, the context-processing view (Braver et al., 2001) provides an explanation of cognitive control deficits observed in schizophrenia patients and older adults that is based on the ability to maintain context information. Instead of maintenance deficits, the inhibition view (Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, 2007) states that older adults and individuals low in WMC primarily have an impairment in the ability to inhibit information. In the current experiment, we explored the relationships among these theories. Individuals differing in performance on complex span measures of WMC performed the AX-Continuous Performance Test to measure context-processing performance. High-WMC individuals were predicted to maintain the context afforded by the cue, whereas low-WMC individuals were predicted to fail to maintain the context information. Low-WMC individuals made more errors on AX and BX trials and were slower to respond correctly on AX, BX, and BY trials. The overall pattern of results is most consistent with both the executive-attention and context-processing theories of cognitive control.     

Building team adaptive capacity: the roles of sensegiving and team composition

The current study draws on motivated information processing in groups theory to propose that leadership functions and composition characteristics provide teams with the epistemic and social motivation needed for collective information processing and strategy adaptation. Three-person teams performed a city management decision-making simulation (N=74 teams; 222 individuals). Teams first managed a simulated city that was newly formed and required growth strategies and were then abruptly switched to a second simulated city that was established and required revitalization strategies. Consistent with hypotheses, external sensegiving and team composition enabled distinct aspects of collective information processing. Sensegiving prompted the emergence of team strategy mental models (i.e., cognitive information processing); psychological collectivism facilitated information sharing (i.e., behavioral information processing); and cognitive ability provided the capacity for both the cognitive and behavioral aspects of collective information processing. In turn, team mental models and information sharing enabled reactive strategy adaptation.     

Contrasting effects of feature-based statistics on the categorisation and basic-level identification of visual objects

Conceptual representations are at the heart of our mental lives, involved in every aspect of cognitive functioning. Despite their centrality, a long-standing debate persists as to how the meanings of concepts are represented and processed. Many accounts agree that the meanings of concrete concepts are represented by their individual features, but disagree about the importance of different feature-based variables: some views stress the importance of the information carried by distinctive features in conceptual processing, others the features which are shared over many concepts, and still others the extent to which features co-occur. We suggest that previously disparate theoretical positions and experimental findings can be unified by an account which claims that task demands determine how concepts are processed in addition to the effects of feature distinctiveness and co-occurrence. We tested these predictions in a basic-level naming task which relies on distinctive feature information (Experiment 1) and a domain decision task which relies on shared feature information (Experiment 2). Both used large-scale regression designs with the same visual objects, and mixed-effects models incorporating participant, session, stimulus-related and feature statistic variables to model the performance. We found that concepts with relatively more distinctive and more highly correlated distinctive relative to shared features facilitated basic-level naming latencies, while concepts with relatively more shared and more highly correlated shared relative to distinctive features speeded domain decisions. These findings demonstrate that the feature statistics of distinctiveness (shared vs. distinctive) and correlational strength, as well as the task demands, determine how concept meaning is processed in the conceptual system.