Social anxiety in children: social skills deficit, or cognitive distortion?

BACKGROUND: Treatments for childhood social anxiety have traditionally employed social skills training, based on the assumption that effected children have social skills deficits. Recent conceptualisations of social anxiety in adults have questioned this assumption, and have suggested that socially anxious individuals merely believe that they have skill deficits. A recent study using children provided preliminary confirmation of this for younger populations, and also suggested that beliefs about appearing nervous are of particular importance. METHODS: Two groups of children, aged 10-11 years (analogue high social anxiety/low social anxiety), participated in a conversation with an unfamiliar adult. They then rated their performance in a number of domains, after which independent observers also rated their performances. RESULTS: Independent observers were unable to distinguish between the low and high social anxiety groups. However, high socially anxious children rated themselves as appearing significantly less skilled than their low socially anxious counterparts. Notably, high socially anxious children rated themselves particularly poorly in terms of how nervous they looked. CONCLUSIONS: Socially anxious children may not necessarily display social skill deficits. However, they may believe that they appear nervous during social encounters. Clinicians should consider using CBT techniques to address these concerns, rather than relying on social skill remediation.     

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.     

Between Subjugation and Survival: Women, Borderline Personality Disorder and High Security Mental Hospitals

Women in high security mental health care are frequently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Such women commonly report histories of child abuse, in particular child sexual abuse, and the vast majority also self-harm. In this paper, we draw on social constructionist theory to develop a framework for understanding these women, the effects of abuse and the reasons they self-harm. We demonstrate how a social model of intervention provides a comprehensive framework for identifying and exploring relevant factors within therapy. We argue that diagnostic categorisation has limited utility in directing therapeutic work with this particular group of women, because it directs attention away from the social world to internal pathology. We demonstrate that it is with reference to women's past and current relationships that borderline behaviour can be understood to be meaningful and partially adaptive. We conclude that treatment is more usefully organised around and directed towards those factors, such as abuse and self-harm, that are implicated in women's ongoing relationship difficulties.     

Performance-related activity in medial rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10) during low-demand tasks

Neuroimaging studies have frequently observed relatively high activity in medial rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) during rest or baseline conditions. Some accounts have attributed this high activity to the occurrence of unconstrained stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought processes during baseline conditions. Here, the authors investigated the alternative possibility that medial rostral PFC supports attention toward the external environment during low-demand conditions. Participants performed a baseline simple reaction time (RT) task, along with 3 other tasks that differed in the requirement to attend to external stimuli versus stimulus-independent thought. Medial rostral PFC activation was observed in the baseline task and in a condition requiring strong engagement with external stimuli, relative to 2 conditions with a greater requirement for stimulus-independent thought. An important finding was that activity in this region was associated with faster RTs in the baseline task, ruling out an explanation in terms of task-unrelated thought processes during this condition. Thus, at least under certain circumstances, medial rostral PFC appears to support attention toward the external environment, facilitating performance in situations that do not require extensive processing of experimental stimuli.     

Task switching: a PDP model

When subjects switch between a pair of stimulus-response tasks, reaction time is slower on trial N if a different task was performed on trial N - 1. We present a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model that simulates this effect when subjects switch between word reading and color naming in response to Stroop stimuli. Reaction time on "switch trials" can be slowed by an extended response selection process which results from (a) persisting, inappropriate states of activation and inhibition of task-controlling representations; and (b) associative learning, which allows stimuli to evoke tasks sets with which they have recently been associated (as proposed by Allport & Wylie, 2000). The model provides a good fit to a large body of empirical data, including findings which have been seen as problematic for this explanation of switch costs, and shows similar behavior when the parameters are set to random values, supporting Allport and Wylie's proposal.     

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.     

Similarity and attribution in concept combination: Reply to Wisniewski

Wisniewski raises several important points in his comment on our study of the (non)role of similarity in concept combination. He notes that feature diagnosticity is an important factor in property attribution. He also points out that relational interpretations of combined concepts depend on thematic role plausibility, not constituent similarity. We agree with both of these points. Wisniewski further identifies a possible item artifact that might account for our results. However, reexamination of those items fails to support this hypothesis. Wisniewski also claims that an alignment process is necessary to specify how an attributed property should be instantiated in the combined concept. We argue instead that postcomprehension elaboration processes can account for specific property instantiations. Finally, we suggest that the perceived similarity between the constituents of a combined concept is an outcome of the comprehension process, not a prior condition for, or an integral part of, that process.     

Feature accessibility in conceptual combination: Effects of context-induced relevance

In conceptual combinations such aspeeled apples, two kinds of features are potentially accessible: phrase features and noun features. Phrase features are true only of the phrase (e.g., “white”), whereas noun features are true of both the phrase and the head noun (e.g., “round”). When people comprehend such combinations, phrase features are verified more quickly and more accurately than noun features. We examine relevance as an explanation for this phrase feature superiority. If relevance is the critical factor, then contexts that explicitly make noun features relevant and phrase features irrelevant should reverse the phrase feature superiority (i.e., they should make noun features easier to verify than phrase features). Consistent with the relevance hypothesis, brief contexts that made noun features relevant also made those noun features more accessible than phrase features, and vice versa. We conclude that the phrase feature superiority effect is attributable to the discourse strategy of assigning relevance to modifiers in combinations, unless a context indicates otherwise.