Incompleteness and harm avoidance in OCD symptom dimensions

Incompleteness (INC) and harm avoidance (HA) are motivational core dimensions of OCD. While HA-related concepts (e.g., inflated responsibility, overestimation of threat) are a main focus of current cognitive-behavioural OCD research, there is also a renewed interest in INC feelings and "not just right experiences" with an inability to achieve "closure" concerning actions/perceptions. This study systematically examines the association of OCD symptom dimensions with INC and HA in a large clinical OCD sample (n=202). Hierarchical linear multiple regression analyses controlling for anxiety, depression and symptom severity demonstrated a unique association of symmetry/ordering and checking (but not of contamination/washing and obsessional thoughts) with INC, and of obsessional thoughts and checking with HA. Thus, in contrast with symmetry/ordering (predominantly INC-related) and obsessional thoughts (predominantly HA-related), checking was motivationally heterogeneous, i.e., associated with INC and HA to a comparable and substantial degree. Contamination/washing failed to show a unique association with HA in two of three analyses, and with INC in all three analyses. Symptom severity uniquely contributed to INC in two of three analyses, but not to HA. Clinically, our results indicate that a conceptualization of OCD as an anxiety disorder is too narrow.     

Good fortune but bad luck? Predictable versus unpredictable gains and losses in risky choice

This study examines the effects of two different types of good and bad experiences on risk‐taking preferences: fortune and luck. We define fortune as a relatively stable positive or negative context within which choices are made and luck as a more unpredictable series of better or worse outcomes. With the use of a lottery‐based paradigm, fortune was operationalized as a preponderance of all‐gain or all‐loss two‐outcome option pairs within a larger set of mixed‐outcome control lotteries. Luck was operationalized as the experienced frequency of better versus worse outcomes when playing the lotteries. We predicted that fortune and luck would lead to opposite risk‐taking tendencies within control lotteries. An assimilation effect of fortune was predicted, with risk‐averse preferences for control lotteries when surrounded by good fortune and risk‐seeking preferences when surrounded by bad fortune. In contrast, we expected that high rates of success with good luck would lead to risk‐seeking preferences, whereas low rates of success with bad luck would yield risk‐averse preferences. Our predictions for fortune were confirmed; however, there was no evidence of any effect on risk taking based on experiencing good versus bad luck. Moreover, we observed a striking disconnect between impressions of the experience and risk‐taking behavior. Both identification and attributions of luck and fortune were highly correlated with the number of gain outcomes that participants experienced but were uncorrelated with risk taking. We review these surprising findings considering several prominent theories of risk‐taking behavior, particularly drawing attention to the differential roles of predecisional and postdecisional information in choice.     

Does interview anxiety predict job performance and does it influence the predictive validity of interviews?

Interview anxiety is negatively related to interview performance; however, its relation to job performance is unknown. It could correlate negatively with job performance, and it could moderate the interview performance–job performance relation. In a sample of applicants for Residence Assistant positions, interview anxiety had near‐zero correlations with job performance, rated by supervisors and supervisees. It moderated the relation between interview performance and supervisor‐rated facilitating peer and team performance, such that interview performance did not predict this job performance component for anxious applicants. The moderation was not found for supervisor‐rated task proficiency, or for supervisee ratings of either job performance component, suggesting that the impact of interview anxiety depends on rater source and which job performance component is rated.     

Manager personality, manager service quality orientation, and service climate: test of a model

This article conceptually and empirically explores the relationships among manager personality, manager service quality orientation, and climate for customer service. Data were collected from 1,486 employees and 145 managers in grocery store departments (N = 145) to test the authors' theoretical model. Largely consistent with hypotheses, results revealed that core self-evaluations were positively related to managers' service quality orientation, even after dimensions of the Big Five model of personality were controlled, and that service quality orientation fully mediated the relationship between personality and global service climate. Implications for personality and organizational climate research are discussed.     

Panic as a form of foreclosed experience

Following a discussion of panic states and their relationship to psychosomatic illness and related disorders, the author presents an extended clinical vignette in which he initially viewed the patient's intense anxiety as a manifestation of repressed conflict and, accordingly, used verbal interpretations as the principal mode of intervention. After this approach did not prove effective, the analyst began to make use of nonverbal interventions consistent with his emerging understanding of the patient's distress as a manifestation of the foreclosure (de M'Uzan 2003) and relegation to the body of undreamable experience (Bion 1962).     

A mediational model of trait negative affectivity, dispositional thought suppression, and intrusive thoughts following laboratory stressors

Two studies examined the relationships among trait negative affectivity, dispositional thought suppression, and intrusions in non-clinical samples. In Study 1 (N=87), participants were presented with a series of emotionally evocative images and intrusions were examined 48 h after presentation via self-report. In Study 2 (N=118), intrusions were examined using a behavioral Key-press and self-report at two time points (5 and 20 min) following exposure to a series of emotionally evocative images. In each study, participants were assessed for trait negative affectivity and the tendency to engage in thought suppression in response to unpleasant cognitions. Results from both studies support a model in which chronic thought suppression fully mediates the relationship between negative affectivity and the frequency of intrusions.     

Children's metamemorial judgments in an event recall task

Two studies were conducted in which two different indicators of metacognitive monitoring were investigated in a complex everyday memory task. In the first phase of each experiment, 8- and 10-year-olds as well as adults were shown a short event (video) and gave judgments of learning, that is, rated their certainty that they would later be able to recall specific details correctly. In the second phase of the experiments, participants underwent a memory interview about the event and in Study 2 also gave confidence judgments, that is, rated their certainty that the provided answers to the memory questions were correct. Results revealed significant influences of memory characteristics on monitoring in that delaying judgments and monitoring judgments concerning irretrievable information affected judgments of learning. From 8 years of age onward, there were relatively appropriate metamemorial monitoring abilities in both indicators. Moderate intraindividual consistency was found across the two measures of metacognitive monitoring, with a tendency toward higher consistency in older age groups. The results are discussed in terms of the adequacy of the underlying theoretical construct.     

Still clever after all these years: searching for the homunculus in explicitly cued task switching

Many researchers interpret switch costs in the explicit task-cuing procedure as reflecting endogenous task-set reconfiguration. G. D. Logan and C. Bundesen (2003) challenged this interpretation empirically and theoretically. They argued that many experiments confounded cue encoding benefits with switch costs and they showed that unconfounded switch costs could be vanishingly small. They proposed a theory in which subjects use a single task set in the explicit task-cuing procedure and switch costs reflect cue encoding benefits, not reconfiguration. S. Monsell and G. A. Mizon (2006) responded to these challenges, describing conditions under which substantial switch costs could be observed in the explicit task-cuing procedure and providing a theoretical account of performance in which reconfiguration occurred in G. D. Logan and C. Bundesen's experiments. This article is a response to S. Monsell and G. A. Mizon's challenge that highlights empirical problems with their evidence and reports an experiment that challenges critical assumptions of their theoretical account.     

Retrieving information from a hierarchical plan

Plans give structure to behavior by specifying whether and when different tasks must be performed. However, the structure of behavior need not mirror the structure of the plan. To investigate this idea, the authors studied how plan information is retrieved in the context of a novel sequence-position cuing procedure, wherein subjects memorize two task sequences, then perform trials on which they are randomly cued to perform a task at one of the serial positions in a sequence. Several empirical effects were consistent with retrieval from a hierarchically structured representation (but not a non-hierarchical representation), including large sequence-repetition benefits, position-repetition benefits only for sequence repetitions, and a lack of robust task-repetition benefits. The data were successfully modeled by assuming that retrieval was time-consuming, susceptible to priming, cue-dependent, structurally constrained, and token-specific. In tandem, the empirical data and modeling work provide deeper insight into the representation of and access to information in memory that comprises a plan for guiding behavior.