The roles of thought suppression and metacognitive beliefs in proneness to auditory verbal hallucinations in a non-clinical sample

In a non-clinical sample (N = 751), we investigated relations among two subscales (self-reported intrusiveness of unwanted thoughts and thought suppression) of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), metacognitive beliefs, and proneness to auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). Both subscales of the WBSI were found to be related to AVH-proneness and strongly positively related to metacognitive beliefs about the uncontrollability and danger of thoughts. Regression analyses were used to test models of the relations among AVH-proneness and a range of metacognitive beliefs. When the WBSI subscale relating to the self-reported intrusiveness of unwanted thoughts was controlled for, the metacognitive style that was the strongest predictor of AVH-proneness was cognitive self-consciousness. Cognitive confidence and beliefs about the uncontrollability of thoughts were also significant predictors of AVH-proneness. These findings are used to revise existing models of the relations between metacognitive beliefs and AVHs. Implications for the management of AVHs are discussed.     

Socratic Questioning and Irony in Psychotherapeutic Practices

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - Socratic questioning is employed in therapeutic interventions when the beliefs that clients express are critically evaluated using reason and logic. In this...     

Evolutionary Explanations of Indicatives and Imperatives

Recently there has been some interest in studying the explanation of meaning by using signaling games. I shall argue that the meaning of signals in signaling games remains sufficiently unclear to motivate further investigation. In particular, the possibility of distinguishing imperatives and indicatives at a fundamental level will be explored. Thereby I am trying to preserve the generality of the signaling games framework while bringing it closer to human languages. A number of convergence results for the evolutionary dynamics of our models will be proved.     

Cognitive-behaviour therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome: comparison of outcomes within and outside the confines of a randomised controlled trial

Outcomes for cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have rarely been compared to those in routine clinical practice. Taking the case of CBT for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), we evaluated the results of a successful RCT against those of the same treatment given in the same setting as part of routine practice. Fatigue and social adjustment scores were compared for patients who received CBT for CFS as part of a RCT (N=30) and patients who received CBT as part of everyday clinical practice (N=384). The results in the RCT were superior to those in routine clinical practice. Between pre-treatment and 6-month follow-up, the RCT showed a larger reduction in fatigue and greater improvement in social adjustment than those in routine treatment. The changes in fatigue scores were similar for both groups during treatment but were greater in the RCT between post-treatment and follow-up. Potential reasons for the superior results of the RCT include patient selection, therapist factors and the use of a manualised treatment protocol. Practitioners need to pay particular attention to relapse prevention and ensuring adequate follow-up in addition to encouraging patients to continue with cognitive-behavioural strategies once treatment has ended.     

The probability of causal conditionals

Conditionals in natural language are central to reasoning and decision making. A theoretical proposal called the Ramsey test implies the conditional probability hypothesis: that the subjective probability of a natural language conditional, P(if p then q), is the conditional subjective probability, P(q/p). We report three experiments on causal indicative conditionals and related counterfactuals that support this hypothesis. We measured the probabilities people assigned to truth table cases, P(pq), P(p notq), P( notpq) and P( notp notq). From these ratings, we computed three independent predictors, P(p), P(q/p) and P(q/ notp), that we then entered into a regression equation with judged P(if p then q) as the dependent variable. In line with the conditional probability hypothesis, P(q/p) was by far the strongest predictor in our experiments. This result is inconsistent with the claim that causal conditionals are the material conditionals of elementary logic. Instead, it supports the Ramsey test hypothesis, implying that common processes underlie the use of conditionals in reasoning and judgments of conditional probability in decision making.     

Onset of illusory figures attenuates change blindness

We examined whether the onset of a new object defined by illusory contours is detected with greater frequency than offset when neither is associated with a unique sensory transient. Observers performed a “one-shot” change detection task in which offsetting or onsetting elements of high luminance contrast circles generated the appearance or disappearance of a Kanizsa figure. Presenting “illusory figures” via this “flicker” method ensures that (1) any unique luminance transients associated with the two types of change are eliminated, and (2) the objects themselves can only be represented at a relatively high level. Results showed that offsets were detected more frequently than onsets only when they generated the onset of a Kanizsa figure. We argue that object appearance dominates object disappearance via mechanisms that operate at the level at which objects are constructed.     

Learned preferences induced by electrical stimulation of a food-related area of the parabrachial complex: effects of naloxone

Electrical stimulation of the External Lateral Parabrachial Subnucleus (LPBe), a food-related area, induced behavioral preferences for associated stimuli in a taste discrimination learning task. Although this stimulation appeared to be ineffective to elicit standard lever press self-stimulation, it induced place preference for one of two training compartments of a rectangular maze in which animals (adult male Wistar rats) received concurrent electrical brain stimulation. In subjects that consistently showed a preference behavior in different trials, administration of the opioid antagonist naloxone (4 mg/ml/kg) blocked concurrent learning when the test was made in a new maze but not in the same maze in which animals had learned the task. These results are discussed in terms of the possible participation of the LPBe subnucleus in different natural and artificial brain reward systems.     

Journeying beyond classical somatosensory cortex.

Visual cortical areas are involved in a variety of somatosensory tasks in the sighted, including tactile perception of two-dimensional patterns and motion, and haptic perception of three-dimensional objects. It is still unresolved whether visual imagery or modality-independent representations can better explain such cross-modal recruitment. However, these explanations are not necessarily in conflict with each other and might both be true, if imagery processes can access modality-independent representations. Greater visual cortical engagement in blind compared to sighted people is commonplace during language tasks, and also seems to occur during processing of tactile spatial information. Such engagement is even greater in the congenitally blind compared to the late blind, indicative of enhanced cross-modal plasticity during early development. At the other extreme, short-term visual deprivation of the normally sighted also leads to cross-modal plasticity. Altogether, the boundaries between sensory modalities appear to be flexible rather than immutable.