Nonnormality and divergence in posttreatment alcohol use: reexamining the Project MATCH data "another way."

Alcohol lapses are the modal outcome following treatment for alcohol use disorders, yet many alcohol researchers have encountered limited success in the prediction and prevention of relapse. One hypothesis is that lapses are unpredictable, but another possibility is the complexity of the relapse process is not captured by traditional statistical methods. Data from Project Matching Alcohol Treatments to Client Heterogeneity (Project MATCH), a multisite alcohol treatment study, were reanalyzed with 2 statistical methodologies: catastrophe and 2-part growth mixture modeling. Drawing on previous investigations of self-efficacy as a dynamic predictor of relapse, the current study revisits the self-efficacy matching hypothesis, which was not statistically supported in Project MATCH. Results from both the catastrophe and growth mixture analyses demonstrated a dynamic relationship between self-efficacy and drinking outcomes. The growth mixture analyses provided evidence in support of the original matching hypothesis: Individuals with lower self-efficacy who received cognitive behavior therapy drank far less frequently than did those with low self-efficacy who received motivational therapy. These results highlight the dynamical nature of the relapse process and the importance of the use of methodologies that accommodate this complexity when evaluating treatment outcomes.     

Social Identity and Social Exchange: Identification, Support, and Withdrawal From the Job

Integrating insights from the social exchange perspective and the social identity perspective, we propose that evaluations of support received from the organization and its representatives and organizational identification interact to predict withdrawal from the job. The relationship of support with withdrawal is proposed to be weaker the more strongly employees identify with the organization. This prediction was confirmed in 2 samples focusing on different operationalizations of support and withdrawal. Study 1 explored the interaction between organizational support and organizational identification in predicting turnover intention; Study 2 investigated the link between supervisor support and organizational identification and absenteeism. The present study thus yields evidence that may lay the groundwork for further integration of social exchange and social identity analyses of organizational behavior.     

Towards better computational models of the balance scale task: a reply to Shultz and Takane

In contrast to Shultz and Takane [Shultz, T.R., & Takane, Y. (2007). Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task. Cognition, in press, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.004.] we do not accept that the traditional Rule Assessment Method (RAM) of scoring responses on the balance scale task has advantages over latent class analysis (LCA): RAM is similar to a very restricted form of LCA. The apparent shortcomings of LCA are also less severe than they suggest. Via new simulations we show that LCA detects small classes reliably. We also counter their concerns regarding the torque difference effect and we underline the problems connectionist models have with correctly responding to balance items. Despite these differences in opinion we agree with Shultz and Takane on the possible avenues for future research.     

The absence of an auditory-visual attentional blink is not due to echoic memory

The second of two targets is often missed when presented shortly after the first target--a phenomenon referred to as the attentional blink (AB). Whereas the AB is a robust phenomenon within sensory modalities, the evidence for cross-modal ABs is rather mixed. Here, we test the possibility that the absence of an auditory-visual AB for visual letter recognition when streams of tones are used is due to the efficient use of echoic memory, allowing for the postponement of auditory processing. However, forcing participants to immediately process the auditory target, either by presenting interfering sounds during retrieval or by making the first target directly relevant for a speeded response to the second target, did not result in a return of a cross-modal AB. Thefindings argue against echoic memory as an explanation for efficient cross-modal processing. Instead, we hypothesized that a cross-modal AB may be observed when the different modalities use common representations, such as semantic representations. In support of this, a deficit for visual letter recognition returned when the auditory task required a distinction between spoken digits and letters.     

Nonlinear principal components analysis: introduction and application

The authors provide a didactic treatment of nonlinear (categorical) principal components analysis (PCA). This method is the nonlinear equivalent of standard PCA and reduces the observed variables to a number of uncorrelated principal components. The most important advantages of nonlinear over linear PCA are that it incorporates nominal and ordinal variables and that it can handle and discover nonlinear relationships between variables. Also, nonlinear PCA can deal with variables at their appropriate measurement level; for example, it can treat Likert-type scales ordinally instead of numerically. Every observed value of a variable can be referred to as a category. While performing PCA, nonlinear PCA converts every category to a numeric value, in accordance with the variable's analysis level, using optimal quantification. The authors discuss how optimal quantification is carried out, what analysis levels are, which decisions have to be made when applying nonlinear PCA, and how the results can be interpreted. The strengths and limitations of the method are discussed. An example applying nonlinear PCA to empirical data using the program CATPCA (J. J. Meulman, W. J. Heiser, & SPSS, 2004) is provided.     

Executive disorders and perceived socio‐emotional changes after traumatic brain injury

Although socio‐emotional changes are very frequently encountered after traumatic brain injury (TBI), the psychological mechanisms underlying these disorders are still poorly understood. This study aimed to explore the relationships between dysexecutive syndrome (assessed with the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome [BADS]) and socio‐emotional changes assessed by the Iowa scales of personality change (ISPC) in patients with TBI. The BADS was thus administered to 25 patients with TBI and to 25 healthy controls. Simultaneously, a close relative of each patient was given the ISPC in order to assess socio‐emotional changes. Results indicated that patients displayed significantly lower executive performances than controls and experimented significant socio‐emotional changes. The Modified Six Elements Test was the only subtask of the BADS to be significantly related to behavioural changes, and more specifically to externalizing disorders. It is concluded that executive functions, and especially multitasking, encompass processes whereby one can consciously control one's emotional reactions and behaviours.     

Evaluating a dual‐process model of risk: affect and cognition as determinants of risky choice

In three studies we addressed the impact of perceived risk and negative affect on risky choice. In Study 1, we tested a model that included both perceived risk and negative affect as predictors of risky choice. Study 2 and Study 3 replicated these findings and examined the impact of affective versus cognitive processing modes. In all the three studies, both perceived risk and negative affect were shown to be significant predictors of risky choice. Furthermore, Study 2 and Study 3 showed that an affective processing mode strengthened the relation between negative affect and risky choice and that a cognitive processing mode strengthened the relation between perceived risk and risky choice. Together, these findings show support for the idea of a dual‐process model of risky choice. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Social Are Task Representations?

ABSTRACT— The classical Simon effect shows that actions are carried out faster if they spatially correspond to the stimulus signaling them. Recent studies revealed that this is the case even when the two actions are carried out by different people; this finding has been taken to imply that task representations are socially shared. In work described here, we found that the "interactive" Simon effect occurs only if actor and coactor are involved in a positive relationship (induced by a friendly-acting, cooperative confederate), but not if they are involved in a negative relationship (induced by an intimidating, competitive confederate). This result suggests that agents can represent self-generated and other-generated actions separately, but tend to relate or integrate these representations if the personal relationship between self and other has a positive valence.     

The Self-Organization of Explicit Attitudes

ABSTRACT— How do minds produce explicit attitudes over several hundred milliseconds? Speeded evaluative measures have revealed implicit biases beyond cognitive control and subjective awareness, yet mental processing may culminate in an explicit attitude that feels personally endorsed and corroborates voluntary intentions. We argue that self-reported explicit attitudes derive from a continuous, temporally dynamic process, whereby multiple simultaneously conflicting sources of information self-organize into a meaningful mental representation. While our participants reported their explicit (like vs. dislike) attitudes toward White versus Black people by moving a cursor to a "like" or "dislike" response box, we recorded streaming x - and y -coordinates from their hand-movement trajectories. We found that participants' hand-movement paths exhibited greater curvature toward the "dislike" response when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward Black people than when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward White people. Moreover, these trajectories were characterized by movement disorder and competitive velocity profiles that were predicted under the assumption that the deliberate attitudes emerged from continuous interactions between multiple simultaneously conflicting constraints.