Communication Formats and Their Impact on Patient Perception and Working Mechanisms: A Mixed-Methods Study of Chat-Based vs. Face-to-Face Psychotherapy for Insomnia

The application of Internet-based interventions within stepped-care models raises the question of when patients should receive Internet-based treatment and when patients should receive face-to-face (FtF) treatment. To address this question, the patient perception and effects of working mechanisms were evaluated after brief psychotherapy for insomnia applying a mixed-methods approach. Treatment was either delivered through a text-based chat or it was delivered FtF. Almost half of the patients who received the chat-based treatment indicated that chat-based communication was appropriate for them when dealing with sleep difficulties, but that they would prefer FtF communication for more sensitive topics. Results from the therapists’ evaluations of working mechanisms yielded that these working mechanisms were more strongly associated with treatment outcome in the FtF condition than they were in the chat-based condition. To understand and to interpret the results, media richness theory may be a useful tool: More severely impaired patients and patients with more complex concerns may need more complex (richer) communication formats for treatment delivery. Such heuristics may help to better justify treatment recommendations and optimize media choice in Internet-based interventions, e.g., by defining moments when human interaction is needed and moments when communication could be conducted by nonhuman chatbots.     

Assessing task difficulty for other people: when deeper evaluation means “it’s more about me!”

Empirical studies have revealed that teachers face problems when assessing task difficulty for their students. By drawing on research that focuses on how individuals assess what others know, we argue that these difficulties are a consequence of the imputation of one’s own knowledge to others (i.e., social projection). In particular, we tested the assumption that individuals impute more of their own knowledge to others, the more they elaborate what these others might know. In a first experiment, students were asked to judge task difficulty for their best friend. In the second experiment, teacher trainees were asked to assess task difficulty for 9th graders. Results revealed that individuals, who deeply elaborated when assessing task difficulty for another person, more closely relied on their own rating of task difficulty than individuals with a lower elaboration depth. These findings support the notion that social projection becomes stronger, the deeper individuals elaborate.     

Potential negative consequences of mindfulness in the moral domain

Mindfulness is a state of paying conscious and nonjudgmental attention to present-moment experiences. Previous research relates this state to more effective emotion regulation and less emotion reactivity. We therefore hypothesized an attenuating effect of a mindfulness exercise on moral reactions that usually results from a bad conscience when having caused harm. Across five studies, we experimentally induced mindfulness via a short breathing exercise and then assessed harm-based moral reactions. As hypothesized, participants in the mindfulness (vs. control) exercise condition showed (i) attenuated repair intentions after having read a scenario in which participants caused harm to a friend (Study 3) and (ii) attenuated intentions to change harm-causing eating habits (Study 4). Results of Studies 1, 2 and 5 did not provide evidence for our hypothesis. A following meta-analysis across all five studies yielded an overall significant effect of mindfulness in the harm-condition, providing preliminary evidence for a potential downside to mindfulness.     

The attenuating effect of mortality salience on dishonest behavior

People are easily tempted to engage in dishonest behavior when an incentive is given and when full anonymity is provided. In the present work, we investigated existential threat as a motivational factor that might reduce dishonest behavior. Research based on terror management theory has found that mortality salience increases the motivation to fulfill salient values of one’s cultural worldview. Assuming the concept of honesty is important to human societies, we hypothesized that mortality salience will reduce dishonest behavior when the concept of honesty is salient. In two experiments, we assessed dishonesty under full anonymity by applying a die-under-the-cup paradigm with the expected value serving as a stochastic baseline for honest behavior. Both experiments provided support for our hypothesis. Given an incentive to cheat, when the concept of honesty was cognitively activated by a word-search puzzle (Study 1) or by the name of the dice game (i.e., “honest game”; Study 2), mortality salient participants showed not only less dishonest behavior but actually honest behavior.

     

Measuring emotions during epistemic activities: the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales

Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts (N?=?438 university students from the United States, Canada, and Germany). The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.     

Dream recall, dream length, and sleep duration: state or trait factor

Longer sleep duration should be related to dream recall (longer REM sleep), but previous findings regarding the relationship between habitual sleep duration and dream recall frequency have been conflicting, whereas experimental manipulation of sleep duration yielded a significant effect. The analysis of diaries kept by the 444 participants over 14 days indicated that intra-individual fluctuations and interindividual differences in sleep duration affect dream recall.     

Using the World-Wide Web to obtain large-scale word norms: 190,212 ratings on a set of 2,654 German nouns

This article presents a new database of 2,654 German nouns rated by a sample of 3,907 subjects on three psycholinguistic attributes: concreteness, valence, and arousal. As a new means of data collection in the field of psycholinguistic research, all ratings were obtained via the Internet, using a tailored Web application. Analysis of the obtained word norms showed good agreement with two existing norm sets. A cluster analysis revealed a plausible set of four classes of nouns: abstract concepts, aversive events, pleasant activities, and physical objects. In an additional application example, we demonstrate the usefulness of the database for creating parallel word lists whose elements match as closely as possible. The complete database is available for free from ftp://ftp.uni-duesseldorf.de/ pub/psycho/lahl/WWN. Moreover, the Web application used for data collection is inherently capable of collecting word norms in any language and is going to be released for public use as well.     

The effects of source likeability and need for cognition on advertising effectiveness under explicit persuasion

• While there is evidence that an endorser's likeability plays a determining role in the advertising effectiveness of explicit persuasive appeals, this paper examines the impact of the need for cognition (NFC) as a moderator of this relationship. We find that this effect holds, as predicted, for individuals with lower NFC, but not for those with higher NFC. Furthermore, the effects of explicit persuasion and the endorser's likeability on evaluations of products or services by lower‐NFC consumers were found to be mediated by the attribution of self‐interest. In contrast, advertising effectiveness for higher‐NFC consumers was predictable only by the valence of their cognitive responses to the product.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of practice on the development of motor skills in pianists: a longitudinal study in a selected motor task

A longitudinal study was conducted to investigate the influence of practice on the long-term development of expert pianists' motor skills in a relevant musical context. Temporal evenness in standardized scale playing was assessed twice in 19 pianists within an average time interval of 27 months. Questionnaires were used for retrospective assessment of practice quantity and several qualitative parameters related to practicing of scales. The development of temporal evenness in scale playing over the follow-up period correlated with the practice time accumulated during that period and with the average daily practice time. Expert pianists with an average daily practice time of 3.75h or more showed an improvement of performance in this selected motor skill. No significant association was observed between motor skill development during the follow-up period and the content of practice. Stepwise linear regression revealed a model predicting 43% of the variance of motor skill development, with practice time accumulated during the follow-up period as the only predictor. It was concluded that, in expert pianists, maintenance of motor skills in the selected motor task was strongly influenced by practice quantity.     

Emotions over time: synchronicity and development of subjective, physiological, and facial affective reactions to music

Most people are able to identify basic emotions expressed in music and experience affective reactions to music. But does music generally induce emotion? Does it elicit subjective feelings, physiological arousal, and motor reactions reliably in different individuals? In this interdisciplinary study, measurement of skin conductance, facial muscle activity, and self-monitoring were synchronized with musical stimuli. A group of 38 participants listened to classical, rock, and pop music and reported their feelings in a two-dimensional emotion space during listening. The first entrance of a solo voice or choir and the beginning of new sections were found to elicit interindividual changes in subjective feelings and physiological arousal. Quincy Jones' "Bossa Nova" motivated movement and laughing in more than half of the participants. Bodily reactions such as "goose bumps" and "shivers" could be stimulated by the "Tuba Mirum" from Mozart's Requiem in 7 of 38 participants. In addition, the authors repeated the experiment seven times with one participant to examine intraindividual stability of effects. This exploratory combination of approaches throws a new light on the astonishing complexity of affective music listening.