A short form of the metacognitions questionnaire: properties of the MCQ-30

The metacognitions questionnaire (MCQ) measures individual differences in a selection of metacognitive beliefs, judgments and monitoring tendencies considered important in the metacognitive model of psychological disorders. The development and properties of a shortened 30-item version of the MCQ, the MCQ-30, are reported. Construct validity was evaluated by confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis. Overall, the fit indices suggested an acceptable fit to a five-factor model consistent with the original MCQ. Exploratory factor analysis supported a five-factor structure, which was almost identical to the original solution obtained in previous studies with the full MCQ. The five factors are cognitive confidence, positive beliefs about worry, cognitive self-consciousness, negative beliefs about uncontrollability of thoughts and danger, and beliefs about need to control thoughts. The MCQ-30 showed good internal consistency and convergent validity, and acceptable to good test-retest reliability. Positive relationships between metacognitions and measures of worry and obsessive-compulsive symptoms provided further support for the validity of the measure and the metacognitive theory of intrusive thoughts. The psychometric properties of MCQ-30 suggest that the instrument is a valuable addition to the assessment of metacognitions that has the advantage of being more economical to use compared with the original MCQ.     

Is a new version of philosophical pragmatism necessary? A reply to Barnes-Holmes

Barnes-Holmes (2000) discussed certain issues regarding philosophy, pragmatism, and behavior analysis, and offered a "behavioral pragmatism" based on or derived from behavior-analytic perspectives. In a comparison of certain philosophical views, Quine's concept of observation sentences was employed for representing pragmatism, but this concept is not sufficiently representative of the literature of philosophical pragmatism to warrant the broad conclusions drawn by Barnes-Holmes. Further, although the extensive and diverse literature of philosophical pragmatism has been shown by a number of writers to have various themes and perspectives in common with Skinner's radical behaviorism, it is unnecessary to extract a limited, generic version of pragmatism because (a) the latter cannot match the range and depth of the various extant versions and (b) the problems raised by Barnes-Holmes in justification for the new version yield readily to the current versions in philosophy. A set of philosophical views may provide additional verbal support for a given system of science, and the science of behavior analysis may eventually contribute to philosophical discourse. The latter, however, will not be achieved by proposing new versions of old philosophy, but rather by approaching established philosophical issues in new ways.     

Inhibitory deficits and symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: How are they related to effortful control?

Separate studies with clinical and community-based samples have identified an association between symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and inhibitory control deficits and ADHD and weak effortful control. We tested whether differences in effortful control explained the associations between ADHD symptoms and inhibitory control deficits, controlling for conduct problems. In a community sample, parents rated ADHD symptoms, conduct problems, effortful control, surgency and negative affect in 77 4-7-year-olds (47 girls), who performed an inhibitory control task. ADHD symptoms, deficient inhibitory control and low effortful control were correlated. Controlling for conduct problems, path analysis showed the ADHD symptoms – inhibitory control link was mediated statistically by effortful control. This focuses attention on cognitive-energetic factors associated with ADHD-related executive deficits.     

Facial inversion effects: Parts and whole relationship

“Facial inversion effects” refers to the findings that recognition of inverted faces is less accurate than recognition of upright faces. We now report inversion effects for isolated facial features: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. This shows that configurational information extracted from a whole face (i.e., from spatial relationships among the facial features) is not necessary for obtaining the inversion effects. Other factors, such as “upright-orientation,” mental rotation, and feature saliency, account for the inversion effects both in a whole face and in its isolated features. We propose a simple formula that satisfactorily predicts the recognition of a whole face and the inversion effects for that face on the basis of its individual features.     

BEYOND LITERAL MEANINGS: The Psychology of Allusion

When people understand expressions that are intended nonliterally, two kinds of meaning are simultaneously apprehended: the literal meanings of the words themselves and the speaker's intended figurative meaning. Standard models of language comprehension assume that the literal meanings of figurative expressions are rejected in favor of a nonliteral meaning. I propose an alternative approach in which literal meanings are systematically used to convey figurative meanings through the process of allusion: The use of an expression to refer to entities or situations that are prototypical exemplars of culturally shared concepts and symbols. This approach provides an account of how people use and understand figurative language in general, and metaphor and idioms in particular.     

Choice of definite versus indefinite article as a function of sentence voice and reversibility

Subjects were given reversible and nonreversible active and passive sentences, and selected either definite or indefinite articles for the nominals in each sentence. Experiment I used sentences with the first nominal marked for definiteness, and subjects selected the article for the second nominal. Experiment II had subjects select articles for both nominals. It was found in both experiments that sentence voice affected the marking of the second nominal in reversible sentences, but that sentence voice had no effect in nonreversible sentences. Instead, the marking of the second nominal in nonreversible sentences was affected by the article assigned to the first nominal, but there was no similar effect within reversible sentences. These results are related to suggestions of differential depth of processing for reversible and nonreversible sentences, to the stronger topic-comment distinction within passives than within actives, and to the function of articles in explicating case relations.     

Voluntary forgetting before and after learning has been accomplished

Two experiments, in which voluntary forgetting was measured, are reported. In both experiments, lists of randomly mixed syllables and numbers were projected on a screen, and Ss were instructed before projection which part of the lists to remember or to forget. In the first experiment, the syllables were cued as items to be forgotten in one group, and to be remembered in the other one. At the end of the projection, Ss were instructed to recall freely only the syllables. For the former group, this was an unexpected test. The same list was projected for different groups: one, three, five, seven, and fourteen times, with new randomly mixed items each time. Syllable recall increased with an increase of times of projection of the list in the second group, but not in the first one. Recall of syllables in the first group was, however, above the chance level. These results were best interpreted by assuming a voluntary forgetting mechanism, which operates after the verbal items leave the short term store. The second experiment, a variation of the first, was designed to find the locus of voluntary forgetting mechanisms. The question is whether Ss can voluntarily forget syllables only before they are learned, or also after learning has already taken place. Voluntary forgetting after learning has been achieved was found to be ineffective. These results tend to support the hypothesis that voluntary forgetting processes do not operate in the long-term store and that Ss can block the transmission of to be forgotten items from the short-term store to the long-term store.     

Flavor aversions produced by contingent drug injection: Relative effectiveness of apomorphine, emetine, and lithium

Shortly after rats began drinking saccharin solution, different groups of them were injected with different doses of apomorphine, emetine, or lithium. A control group was not injected at all. Six days later, the rats were given free access to saccharin solution and to water. Aversions to saccharin solution were obtained in all injected groups and tended to become more pronounced as the dose level increased. At similar dose levels, lithium produced the most pronounced aversions, apomorphine produced the weakest aversions, and emetine was intermediate. A follow-up study with squirrel monkeys confirmed that lithium produces more pronounced aversions than either emetine or apomorphine. From these results, it seems worthwhile to try lithium in the chemical aversion treatment of alcoholism.     

Linguistic structures and mental operations

The internal representations and mental operations used in verifying a sentence against a pictorial referent are examined in an experiment where the location of the false constituent (subject, verb, or object) varied. The latencies for false sentences were ordered: verb, grammatical subject, grammatical object, with verb mismatches being detected the fastest. An information-processing analysis indicated that both comparison and search operations are employed, and that sentences are represented, in general, as a list of propositions with case-relational information. Context and task demands impose order on the list and lead to different operations on these structures. The depth of processing sentences varies from simple lexical comparisons up to full encoding and usage of syntactic and semantic features and case relations.     

Radical Behaviorism and the Clarification of Causality,Constructs, and Confusions: A Reply to Hayes,Adams, and Dixon

The Psychological Record - In a recent paper by Hayes, Adams, and Dixon (1997), Skinner’s radical behaviorism was criticized on conceptual and philosophical grounds. The criticisms centered...