Delay discounting in e-cigarette users,current and former smokers

Background/Objective: Despite the fact that electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are being increasingly used as an alternative to smoking tobacco cigarettes, few studies have explored psychological factors associated with e-cigarette use. Prior studies aimed at exploring correlates of e-cigarette use have focused on sociodemographic and smoking-related characteristics. However, no previous work has examined psychological features such as impulsivity among e-cigarettes users. The main objective of this study was to compare impulsivity rates across four groups of participants: current e-cigarette users who were former smokers; current smokers; former smokers; and controls. Method: A sample of 136 participants completed a computerized delay discounting task for hypothetical monetary values. Results: Delay discounting was greater among e-cigarette users than former smokers. E-cigarette users also showed an intermediate discounting that did not differ from smokers and controls. Moreover, delay discounting was significantly greater among current smokers compared to former smokers and controls. Conclusions: Taken together, our results extend previous research on delay discounting by providing evidence on impulsivity levels among current e-cigarette users for the first time.     

Spicy Adjectives and Nominal Donkeys: Capturing Semantic Deviance Using Compositionality in Distributional Spaces

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective‐noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective‐noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not.     

Evaluating the therapeutic use of photocards in European prisons

This paper focuses on the evaluation of the therapeutic use of photocards by prisoners and facilitators in a counselling psychology led European project, based on responses to open-ended questionnaires. It is part of a wider project, involving seven partner organisations in six European countries (England, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta and Romania), which developed and trialled four different approaches to using photography in the context of counselling in prisons. Of the 51 inmates that participated in the project, 48 (94%) completed the questionnaires; of those, 39 (77%) were available for individual analysis due to prison restrictions in one partner organisation only allowing group data. Of those 39, who returned their completed questionnaires, over 92% found the therapeutic use of photographs either very helpful (56.4%) or helpful (35.9%), and the remaining 7.7% described it as average. From the thematic analysis, main themes emerging regarding inmates’ experiences of working with photocards were that it: facilitates emotional expression and sharing; unlocks memories and reconnects with life outside; fosters insight, reflection and self-growth; breaks the monotony of prison life and, overall aids emotional learning. A thematic analysis of 11 psychological therapists/facilitators’ perspectives showed that the use of photocards: gives clients a voice; provides a safe and collaborative frame and a therapeutic relationship; and, provides a useful icebreaker, helpfully overcoming anxieties of both client and psychotherapist/facilitator. Overall, photocards were considered useful as their projective nature can help facilitate prisoners’ strong need for expression in a context where there are limited opportunities and trust is fragile.     

A Kid-Friendly Tool to Assess Rumination in Children and Early Adolescents: Relationships with Mother Psychopathology and Family Functioning

The early identification of ruminative processes in children and early adolescents is particularly important to prevent the development of a stable ruminative style in later stages of development. The present study first aimed at validating a child-friendly tool, Kid Rumination Interview (KRI), to be used in a sample aged 7–12 years (n?=?100; 50% females). Second, we hypothesized that maternal depression, family functioning and participants’ emotion regulation skills would be associated with children’ levels of rumination. Factor analysis on KRI scores yielded two main factors: personal life-related rumination and school-related rumination. Older and female participants showed higher tendencies to ruminate about school issues compared to their younger and male counterparts. A low-to-moderate correlation emerged between school-related rumination and child/early adolescent’s emotion regulation capacities. Mothers’ depressive rumination and mothers’ depressive symptoms were positively associated with children/early adolescents’ rumination about personal life and rumination about school issues. Conversely, an adequate and positive family functioning was negatively correlated with both school-related rumination and rumination about personal life. Hierarchical regression analyses pointed to a crucial role of maternal rumination and familiar rigidity in both types of rumination. Personal life-related rumination was also specifically predicted by maternal depression and family enmeshment, whereas school-related rumination was significantly associated with children/early adolescents’ emotional control and gender. Overall, the KRI appears as a promising tool to assess rumination in children/early adolescents. Results suggests partially different pathways to specific forms of ruminative thoughts.     

Right-left prevalence effect with horizontal and vertical effectors

We investigated the right-left prevalence effect in spatial compatibility tasks by assessing subjects' performance on a two-dimensional task in which both the horizontal and vertical spatial dimensions were task relevant. Two experiments were performed, in which stimulus-response mappings were one-dimensional (Experiment 1) and two-dimensional (Experiment 2). The subjects responded by using either horizontal or vertical effectors to stimuli appearing in four possible locations. With the one-dimensional mapping, the spatial compatibility effect was present only in the dimension relevant to the mapping. With the two-dimensional mapping, the horizontal compatibility effect was always present, whereas the vertical compatibility effect was present only when vertical effectors were used. This pattern of results indicates that horizontal coding takes place with either horizontal or vertical effectors, whereas vertical coding takes place only when vertical effectors are used.     

The shadow knows: a primer on the informational structure of cast shadows

I list relevant properties of cast shadows that the visual system could exploit (although it may not exploit). The study concerns the various types of information that can be extracted from shadows by systems that are significantly like ours (including embodied artificial systems) in an environment that is significantly like ours.     

Is static spatial performance distinguishable from dynamic spatial performance? A latent-variable analysis

There is disagreement among researchers about the distinction between dynamic and static spatial performance. Given that dynamic spatial performance is supposed to be important for some occupations, such as air traffic control (ATC), it is germane to have evidence about the likelihood of that distinction. In the present study, a battery of printed static spatial and reasoning tests were applied to 480 applicants for an ATC training course. Two dynamic spatial tests were also applied. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed for testing three models. In Model A, static and dynamic spatial tests were grouped, whereas in Model B, spatial tests were separated according to their static or dynamic character, and in Model C, spatial tests were segregated according to the construct they tapped (visualization or spatial relations). The authors found that Model B, which distinguished static and dynamic spatial tests, showed the best fit. They also discuss some implications of the findings.     

Index to Volume 19

Volume Contents

Index to Volume 19     

Is David Lykken's theory of crime likely?

Lykken proposed a model of antisocial behaviour based on the criminal's temperamental difficulties. Personality traits stressed by this model are impulsivity, fearlessness, and sensation seeking. The present study compares one sample taken from the general population with a sample of prison inmates on these traits. The results indicate that prison inmates score higher than the general population on sensation seeking and fearlessness, whereas their scores on impulsivity are lower. Some implications are discussed.     

On the control of visual spatial attention: evidence from human electrophysiology

We used electrophysiological methods to track the deployment of visual spatial attention while observers were engaged in concurrent central attentional processing, using a variant of the attentional blink paradigm. Two visual targets (T₁, T₂) were presented at a stimulus onset asynchrony of either 200 ms or 800 ms. T₁ was a white digit among white letters presented on a dark background using rapid serial visual presentation at fixation. T₂ was another digit that was presented to the left or right of fixation simultaneously with a distractor digit in the opposite visual field, each followed by a pattern mask. In each T₂ display, one digit was red and one was green. Half of the subjects reported the red digit and ignored the green one, whereas the other half reported the green digit and ignored the red one. T₁ and T₂ were reported in one block of trials, and only T₂ in another block (order counterbalanced across subjects). Accuracy of report of T₂ was lower at short SOA than at long SOA when both T₁ and T₂ were reported, but was similar across SOA when only T₂ was reported. The electrophysiological results focused on the N2pc component, which was used as an index of the locus of spatial attention. N2pc was reduced in amplitude when subjects reported T₁, and particularly so at the short SOA. The results suggest that attention to T₁ interfered with the deployment of visual spatial attention to T₂.