Processing impairments in OCD: it is more than inhibition!

The study aimed to address a significant gap in the literature on inhibition impairments in OCD, by concurrently studying facilitation and inhibition processes and the effect of threat on these twin mechanisms. Participants were 20 persons with symptomatic OCD, 11 with remitted OCD, 20 with panic disorder and 20 normal control participants. Participants were required to respond to words that were either neutral or personally threatening, which during an immediately preceding trail, were responded to as targets (facilitation) or inhibited as non-targets (inhibition). OCD participants displayed greater facilitation and reduced inhibition, differences that were related to their diagnostic status but unrelated to symptomatic status. Threat had no effect on facilitation, but exacerbated inhibition problems in the symptomatic OCD and panic groups. This research suggests that underlying differences in both facilitation and inhibition, combined with influences of activated threat-schema on inhibition may play a role in the development and maintenance of OCD.     

Judgments of cause and blame: the effects of intentionality and foreseeability

What are the factors that influence everyday attributions of cause and blame? The current studies focus on sequences of events that lead to adverse outcomes, and examine people's cause and blame ratings for key events in these sequences. Experiment 1 manipulated the intentional status of candidate causes and their location in a causal chain. Participants rated intentional actions as more causal, and more blameworthy, than unintentional actions or physical events. There was also an overall effect of location, with later events assigned higher ratings than earlier events. Experiment 2 manipulated both intentionality and foreseeability. The preference for intentional actions was replicated, and there was a strong influence of foreseeability: actions were rated as more causal and more blameworthy when they were highly foreseeable. These findings are interpreted within two prominent theories of blame, [Shaver, K. G. (1985). The attribution of blame: Causality, responsibility, and blameworthiness. New York: Springer-Verlag] and [Alicke, M. D. (2000). Culpable control and the psychology of blame. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 556-574]. Overall, it is argued that the data are more consistent with Alicke's model of culpable control.     

What’s the 411? Assessing the Feasibility of Providing African American Adolescents with HIV/AIDS Prevention Education in a Faith-Based Setting

This study examines African American faith based leaders’ attitudes and beliefs about providing HIV prevention education and services to adolescents. Using a convenience sample, we identified priority adolescent health issues, attitudes about abstinence messages, and willingness to provide and participate in HIV prevention. Leaders identified drugs, gangs, alcohol, sex, and pregnancy as priority health issues affecting youth in their institutions. Leaders’ strongly preferred to emphasize abstinence messages. Although leaders were willing to provide youth with health education, they were not willing to discuss specific behaviors associated with HIV transmission. African American churches provide a venue to reach African American youth; however, there are limitations to relying on faith-based HIV prevention services. HIV prevention education should continue to be supplemented via parents, schools, and public health agencies.

Thin-Ideal Media and Women’s Body Dissatisfaction: Prevention using Downward Social Comparisons on Non-Appearance Dimensions

Exposure to thin-ideal media has adverse effects on the body satisfaction of women with higher levels of body image disturbance. In a study involving 109 UCLA female undergraduates, we examined the effectiveness of an intervention that was based on downward social comparison theory and the selection of alternative comparison dimensions. All participants had higher levels of body dissatisfaction and viewed pictures of fashion models; the intervention group compared downward with the models on non-appearance dimensions in writing, whereas the control group described the models in writing. We hypothesized that the intervention group would experience more positive shifts in body and weight satisfaction, anxiety about appearance, and desire to lose weight than would the control group. The results supported our hypotheses.     

A Newton procedure for conditionally linear mixed-effects models

This article reviews Newton procedures for the analysis of mean and covariance structures that may be functions of parameters that enter a model nonlinearly. The kind of model considered is a mixed-effects model that is conditionally linear with regard to its parameters. This means parameters entering the model nonlinearly must be fixed, whereas those entering linearly may vary across individuals. This framework encompasses several models, including hierarchical linear models, linear and nonlinear factor analysis models, and nonlinear latent curve models. A full maximum-likelihood estimation procedure is described. Mx, a statistical software package often used to estimate structural equation models, is considered for estimation of these models. An example with Mx syntax is provided.     

The bicoherence theory of situational irony

Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda & Thagard, 1996; Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998). On this theory, a situation counts as ironic when it is conceived as having a bicoherent conceptual structure, adequate cognitive salience, and evokes an appropriate configuration of emotions. The theory is applied to a corpus of 250 examples of situational ironies gathered automatically from electronic news sources. A useful taxonomy of situational ironies is produced, new predictions and insights into situational irony are discussed, and extensions of the theory to other forms of irony are examined.     

On Being Found: How Habitual Patterns of Thought Influence Creative Interest,Behavior, and Ability

This study on 138 undergraduate students used path analysis to investigate the relationship between creativity (interest, measured by a creative activities survey; and ability: fluency, originality, and elaboration) and different aspects of thought patterns presumed to influence the preparation and illumination phase of the creative process: habitual patterns of thought (ruminative brooding, ruminative self-reflection), thought suppression, thought intrusion, mind wandering, and associative ability. Such relationship was hinted at in Wallas’s classical model of the creative sequence, but is rarely investigated. We found that creative behavior/interest was driven by self-reflection, thought intrusion, and the lack of a need for thought suppression; creative ability was fueled mainly by associative ability. The only variable that influenced both aspects of creativity was the lack of resistance to thought suppression; this distinguished the creativity variables from dysphoria, which was associated with a desire for thought suppression. The results suggest that what drives the need to create is not creative ability per se, but rather self-focused attention, as well as the feeling or experience of being found by thought, rather than finding it. That is, the need to create is associated with having thoughts that interrupt one’s ordinary stream of consciousness and that are seen as welcome rather than interfering.     

Frontal lobe dysfunction and everyday problem-solving: social and non-social contributions

Everyday problem-solving involves both non-social executive processes, social and emotional processes, and draws upon social and practical knowledge. A series of studies including both adult-acquired lesions and neurodevelopmental disorders is reviewed examining problem-solving on a real-life-type task that involves generating a range of solutions to brief problem scenarios and selecting preferred solutions to solve the problems. Impairments in problem-solving are described in groups of participants with left anterior frontal lobe lesions, Tourette's syndrome and Asperger's syndrome. By contrast, healthy older people did not show problem-solving deficits on the same task. The possible contributions of non-social executive skills, social and emotional skills, and knowledge acquired from experience are each considered in relation to everyday performance. Multiple cognitive/emotional routes to the development of everyday life difficulties pose a complex challenge both in understanding the nature of the relevant processes and in developing adequate methods for management and rehabilitation.     

The effects of mindset on behavior: self-regulation in deliberative and implemental frames of mind

The effects of deliberative and implemental mindsets--cognitive and motivational states associated with predecisional and postdecisional frames of mind, respectively--were examined in the context of the self-regulation of behavior. Participants who had been induced to deliberate the merits of participating in a specified task formulated more pessimistic expectations about this task than did participants who had been induced to imagine implementing a plan to complete the task. Moreover, participants in the deliberation condition underperformed relative to the participants in the implemental condition, demonstrating that deliberative and implemental thinking can influence behavior as well as cognition.