Aging and the psychological refractory period: task-coordination strategies in young and old adults

The apparently deleterious effect of aging on dual-task performance is well established, but there is little agreement about the source of this effect. Studies of the psychological refractory period (PRP) indicate that young adults can flexibly control dual-task performance through task-coordination strategies. Thus, the performance of older adults might differ from young adults because older adults use different task-coordination strategies. To test this hypothesis, the executive-process interactive control (EPIC) architecture was applied to quantify the reaction time data from two PRP experiments conducted with young (age 18-26) and older (age 60-70) adults. The results show that participants' ability to coordinate the processing of two tasks did not decline with age. However, dual-task time costs were greater in the older adults. Three sources for this increase were found: generalized slowing, process-specific slowing, and the use of more cautious task-coordination strategies by the older adults.     

National Registry of Psychotherapies

In the United States, there is a National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), which is a listing of treatments and interventions in psychotherapy. In 2012, NREPP invited our research team to submit an application for registration of our short-term interpretive group therapy for patients experiencing complicated grief, which we had used since 1986. From the beginning, we experienced difficulties that seemed to be largely attributable to a lack of professional skills required of the director. The director and her team used the metaphor of American football to describe parts of application process. Despite continuing difficulties, we finally completed the application process on time. Eventually, the reviews of the application were completed and the application was approved. The information we provide in this article mainly concerns the trials and tribulations associated with the application process. Overall, the process was frustrating and time-consuming. Consideration of additional variables, such as patient personality characteristics, would likely have provided a more useful set of findings.     

Argument Beliefs Mediate Relations Between Attachment Style and Conflict Tactics

This study explores the importance of romantic relationship partners' beliefs about argument. Findings support a model in which a view of argument as threatening to relationships mediates the positive association between both anxious and avoidant attachment and the use of self‐focused conflict tactics such as dominating and denying. A belief that argument is devoid of benefit mediates a negative association between avoidant attachment and the use of other‐oriented tactics such as integrating/compromising and obliging.     

Comorbidity of specific and generalized social anxiety in Spanish adolescents

The comorbidity of the social anxiety disorder, including the specific and generalized subtypes, and other psychopathological problems in adolescents is explored. For this purpose, 961 Spanish young people were evaluated (mean age = 15.63 years) by means of various self-reports that measure sociodemographical variables, competences and clinical indexes. Those with social anxiety were divided into two groups: specific and generalized. The results indicated that the adolescents with social anxiety had a higher percentage of comorbidity in the indexes that refer to anxiety and avoidance in social situations, than did the young people with other psychopathologies. The group of generalized social anxiety had a higher percentage of comorbidity than the specific social anxiety group in the majority of the clinical problems measured by the YSR/11-18 and MMPI-A. Only in eleven of the evaluated clinical indexes was the difference in comorbidity between the two groups of social anxiety significant, and the percentage of comorbidity was lower in the first group.     

Alcohol self-administration by rats in the presence of a tangible object

The authors used the sucrose-substitution procedure to train operant self-administration of a 10% alcohol solution in 8 Long-Evans rats. After they established stable responding, they began a 10-session baseline. A 10-session experimental phase followed the baseline phase. During the experimental phase, the authors placed a large glass marble in the center of the experimental chambers before self-administration sessions. The presence of the marble decreased the rats' responding and alcohol intake significantly. The authors discussed the results in terms of distraction and the effects of concurrently available reinforcers on alcohol self-administration.     

Depersonalization disorder: a functional neuroanatomical perspective

Clinical reports of depersonalization suggest that attenuated emotional experience is a central feature of the condition. Patients typically complain of emotional numbness and some patients ascribe their feelings of unreality to a lack of affective "colouring" in things perceived. Recent neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies support these assumptions as they show both attenuated autonomic responses in depersonalization, and decreased activity within neural regions important for the generation of affective responses to emotive stimuli. Furthermore, findings from neuroimaging studies indicate increased prefrontal cortical activity in depersonalised patients, particularly within regions associated with contextualization and appraisal of emotionally-salient information rather than mood induction per se. Taken together, these finding suggest that symptoms of depersonalization, and in particular emotional numbing, may be related to a reversal of normal patterns of autonomic and neural response to emotive stimuli.     

Virtually perfect time sharing in dual-task performance: uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck

A fundamental issue for psychological science concerns the extent to which people can simultaneously perform two perceptual-motor tasks. Some theorists have hypothesized that such dual-task performance is severely and persistently constrained by a central cognitive 'bottleneck,' whereas others have hypothesized that skilled procedural decision making and response selection for two or more tasks can proceed at the same time under adaptive executive control. The three experiments reported here support this latter hypothesis. Their results show that after relatively modest amounts of practice, at least some participants achieve virtually perfect time sharing in the dual-task performance of basic choice reaction tasks. The results also show that observed interference between tasks can be modulated by instructions about differential task priorities and personal preferences for daring (concurrent) or cautious (successive) scheduling of tasks. Given this outcome, future research should investigate exactly when and how such sophisticated skills in dual-task performance are acquired.     

Ranking 2010 in production and research productivity in Spanish public universities

The creation of the European Higher Education Area has brought the relevance of the scientific quality assessment in higher education. The result of this interest is a growing interest in the development of rankings of universities, both nationally and internationally. To continue the line started two years ago, the goal of this research is to update the ranking of research productivity in Spanish public universities with the data of 2010. We follow the same methodology to data from 2008 and 2009; although this year it includes measures of total production. The same indicators to evaluate research in 2009: journals articles indexed in the JCR, research periods, research + development projects, doctoral dissertations, grants for training university teachers, Doctoral Programs with Quality Mention and patents. From the results obtained show that universities with higher production were Complutense de Madrid, Barcelona and Granada. The most productive were the Pompeu Fabra University, the Pablo de Olavide, and the Autonoma de Barcelona.     

Individual Differences in the Interpretation of Commitment in Argumentation

The present study explored several dispositional factors associated with individual differences in lay adult’s interpretation of when an arguer is, or is not, committed to a statement. College students were presented with several two-person arguments in which the proponent of a thesis conceded a key point in the last turn. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which that concession implied a change in the proponent’s attitude toward any of the previous statements in the argument. Participants designated as ‘liberal’ used the concession to infer substantial change in commitment to earlier statements in the argument. A group designated as ‘conservative’ were reluctant to make any such inferences. A discriminant analysis indicated that variables assessing participants’ attitudes toward argument as well as their cognitive and communication styles jointly predicted their liberal or conservative status. The discriminant function and follow-up group comparisons indicated that liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in argument. This included a greater tendency to use argument as a source of knowledge. Liberals also employed a more sophisticated message design logic than conservatives on a communication task. The groups did not clearly differ with respect to participants’ implicit theory of argument, though trends were present that merit attention in future research. Implications of these findings for future research on lay interpretations of commitment are discussed.