Comparison between REBT and Visual/Kinaesthetic Dissociation in the Treatment of Panic Disorder: An Empirical Study

The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of two brief treatment methods for panic disorder: Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and Visual/Kinaesthetic Dissociation (VKD), neither of which have been the object of scientific enquiry. The study is a two-way between-groups pre-test/post-test experimental design with baseline and follow-up measures. An innovative four-session treatment protocol was developed for each treatment method. Eighteen participants in North-East Surrey, England, who responded to media advertisements for cognitive-behavioural treatment for panic disorder and who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for panic disorder with or without agoraphobia were randomly assigned to either REBT or VKD. Pre-test/post-test changes in panic were measured using the ACQ, PASQ, and HADS scales and a global panic rating measure. At post-test there was a statistically significant improvement on all measures for both groups, which was maintained at one-month follow-up. Taking into consideration limitations such as the small sample size and a short follow-up period, implications of this study and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Logic, beliefs, and instruction: a test of the default interventionist account of belief bias

According to dual-process accounts of thinking, belief-based responses on reasoning tasks are generated as default but can be intervened upon in favor of logical responding, given sufficient time, effort, or cognitive resource. In this article, we present the results of 5 experiments in which participants were instructed to evaluate the conclusions of logical arguments on the basis of either their logical validity or their believability. Contrary to the predictions arising from these accounts, the logical status of the presented conclusion had a greater impact on judgments concerning its believability than did the believability of the conclusion on judgments about whether it followed logically. This finding was observed when instructional set was presented as a between-participants factor (Experiment 1), when instruction was indicated prior to problem presentation by a cue (Experiment 2), and when the cue appeared simultaneously with conclusion presentation (Experiments 3 and 4). The finding also extended to a range of simple and more complex argument forms (Experiment 5). In these latter experiments, belief-based judgments took significantly longer than those made under logical instructions. We discuss the implications of these findings for default interventionist accounts of belief bias.     

Eye movements of older and younger readers when reading disappearing text

Older and younger readers read sentences in which target words were masked 40 to 60 ms after fixation onset. Masking only the target word caused more disruption than did masking each word in the sentence, and this effect was stronger for the younger readers than for the older readers. Although older readers had longer eye fixations than did younger readers, the results indicated that the masking effect was comparable for the 2 groups. However, for both groups, how long the eyes remained in place was strongly influenced by the frequency of the fixated word (even though it had been rapidly replaced by the mask and was no longer there when the eyes did move). This is compelling evidence that for both older and younger readers, cognitive/lexical processing has a very strong influence on when the eyes move in reading.     

Eye movements and word skipping during reading: effects of word length and predictability

Eye movements were monitored as subjects read sentences containing high- or low-predictable target words. The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: Half of the target words were predictable, and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: The target words were short (4-6 letters), medium (7-9 letters), or long (10-12 letters). Length and predictability both yielded strong effects on the probability of skipping the target words and on the amount of time readers fixated the target words (when they were not skipped). However, there was no interaction in any of the measures examined for either skipping or fixation time. The results demonstrate that word predictability (due to contextual constraint) and word length have strong and independent influences on word skipping and fixation durations. Furthermore, because the long words extended beyond the word identification span, the data indicate that skipping can occur on the basis of partial information in relation to word identity.     

Blaming, praising, and protecting our humanity: the implications of everyday dehumanization for judgments of moral status

Being human implies a particular moral status: having moral value, agency, and responsibility. However, people are not seen as equally human. Across two studies, we examine the consequences that subtle variations in the perceived humanness of actors or groups have for their perceived moral status. Drawing on Haslam's two-dimensional model of humanness and focusing on three ways people may be considered to have moral status - moral patiency (value), agency, or responsibility - we demonstrate that subtly denying humanness to others has implications for whether they are blamed, praised, or considered worthy of moral concern and rehabilitation. Moreover, we show that distinct human characteristics are linked to specific judgments of moral status. This work demonstrates that everyday judgments of moral status are influenced by perceptions of humanness.     

The delay of gratification test for adults: Validating a behavioral measure of self-motivation in a sample of older people

Most previous delay of gratification tests were developed for children and are inappropriate for application in adults. The authors therefore developed the Delay of Gratification Test for Adults (DoG-A), which includes four types of reward that are meaningful to adults, namely snacks, real money, hypothetical money, and magazines. Four subscores and two composite scores can be calculated. This study is the first to evaluate the DoG-A and to investigate its association with external variables. A community sample of 147 cognitively healthy participants aged between 60 and 94 years completed a questionnaire and cognitive tests measuring delay discounting, self-regulation, motivational self-concept, personality, wellbeing, and cognitive function. The intercorrelations of the subscales were low to medium and the internal consistency of the composite scores was moderate (?? = .4), indicating relative domain independence of the four reward types. The nomological net established by investigating the relations of the DoG-A with other constructs proved to be fairly meaningful. The correlations of all subscales with the delay discounting rate were significant and moderate. The Snacks subscale showed the most consistent pattern of results in terms of moderate positive correlations with self-reported motivation regulation, optimism, dutifulness, and deliberation. The Snacks subscale also correlated with various measures of wellbeing. A regression analysis showed that DoG Snacks remained a significant predictor of wellbeing when self-reported self-regulation and other variables were controlled. These findings indicate that the DoG-A yields an interpretable behavioral measure of self-motivation and offers a developmentally adequate extension of the delay of gratification paradigm for use with adults.     

“Sad day for the UK”: The linking of debates about settling refugee children in the UK with Brexit on an anti-immigrant news website

This article uniquely demonstrates how UK debates about supporting child refugees during the “refugee crisis” came to be used as support for leaving the European Union (EU). The research question “how did users of a news website respond to a report about the UK government's decision to allow child refugees into the UK?” is addressed with a rigorous discursive analysis of an internet discussion forum on the anti-immigrant website MailOnline consisting of 2,014 unique posts, with a reach of 30 million viewers. Analysis demonstrated that (1) child refugees were presented as adults, (2) allowing in refugees was presented as a “burden” on taxpayers, (3) the decision was presented as opposed to the public's will, and (4) this was used as a warrant for leaving the EU. The significant implication of this analysis is that political attempts at associating the refugee crisis with the EU may have been successful in this context.     

Do seductive details do their damage in the context of graph comprehension? Insights from eye movements

In educational research, interesting but irrelevant materials are often considered seductive details, which are suspected to have detrimental effects on learning. Although seductive details have been mostly examined in the context of text comprehension, such elements are also used in graphs (e.g., depicting data points). In the present experiment, we investigated both seductive text and seductive pictures in the context of graph comprehension as well as the interaction of seductive details with spatial working memory capacity (SWMC). We recorded N = 68 students' eye movements, while they analyzed bar graphs in a within‐subject design. Data were analyzed with linear mixed‐effects models. Results show that seductive details did not affect students' graph reading performance but prolonged the task processing time. Eye‐fixation measures revealed that additional processing time was best explained by attention distraction towards the seductive material. SWMC did not affect the presence or the extent of the seductive details effect.     

When is an alternative possibility robust?

According to some, free will requires alternative possibilities. But not any old alternative possibility will do. Sometimes, being able to bring about an alternative does not bestow any control on an agent. In order to bestow control, and so be directly relevant qua alternative to grounding the agent's moral responsibility, alternatives need to be robust. Here, I investigate the nature of robust alternatives. I argue that Derk Pereboom's latest robustness criterion is too strong, and I suggest a different criterion based on the idea that what agents need to be able to do is keep open the possibility of securing their blamelessness, rather than needing to directly ensure their own blamelessness at the time of decision.