Malingering,Perceptions of Illness,and Compensation Seeking in Whiplash Injury: A Comparison of Illness Beliefs Between Individuals in Simulated Compensation Scenarios and Litigation Claimants1

This paper compares beliefs about whiplash injury between individuals in simulated compensation/no compensation scenarios and actual litigant claimants. Comparisons between simulators and the clinical sample revealed that chronic patients reported significantly more symptoms than all simulator groups. The beliefs of the real compensation claimants in the acute phase of the condition were similar to those in the ‘injury only’ simulator group. The analyses identified a trend towards beliefs in the expected timeline of the illness becoming more negative with time, whilst feelings of control over the symptoms improve. The paper discusses indicators of malingering behavior and the possible involvement of litigation and treatment processes in the transition to a chronic state of ill health.     

FOUR THEORIES OF FILIAL DUTY

Children have special duties to their parents: there are things that we ought to do for our parents, but not for just anyone. Three competing accounts of filial duty appear in the literature: the debt theory, the gratitude theory and the friendship theory. Each is unsatisfactory: each tries to assimilate the moral relationship between parent and child to some independently understood conception of duty, but this relationship is different in structure and content from any that we are likely to share with anyone apart from a parent. A more promising account will concentrate on what is unique about the parent-child relationship. I articulate and defend the 'special goods theory', according to which filial duties arise from the distinctive kinds of goods that healthy parent-child relationships typically involve.     

The Importance of Affective Beliefs and Attitudes in the Theory of Planned Behavior: Predicting Intention to Increase Physical Activity1

Standard theory of planned behavior (TPB) questions to elicit salient behavioral beliefs may elicit instrumental consequences of behavior, and overlook affective consequences. Two hundred thirteen English adults (35 to 75 years of age) completed a questionnaire that contained closed measures of TPB constructs, and open‐ended questions that asked not only about advantages and disadvantages, but also what respondents would like or enjoy and dislike or hate about being more physically active. Beliefs elicited by affective questions were associated more strongly with a closed affective attitude scale. Beliefs elicited by instrumental questions were associated more strongly with a closed instrumental attitude scale. Closed measures of the standard TPB variables explained 48% of the variance in intention to increase physical activity, while affective attitude explained an additional 11% of the variance. Applications of the TPB should consider affective and not just instrumental determinants of behavior.     

Negative Thoughts in Children with Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression

This study examined whether negative thoughts are different in anxious, depressed, and chronically ill children. Screening of 1,316 children on anxiety, depression, and asthma resulted in the selection of 118 children. Four groups were formed: (1) a high anxiety group, (2) a high anxiety/depression group, (3) an asthma group, and (4) a low anxiety, low depression, and no chronic disease (control) group. The data yielded no pure depression group. Subsequently, the Negative Affectivity Self-Statement Questionnaire (NASSQ) and a Worry scale were administered. Results showed that cognitive scores were different in all groups. Highest scores were obtained from the high anxiety/depression group, and lowest from the control group. Children with asthma scored high on anxiety, not on depression. High correlations between scores on negative thoughts and conventional measures of negative emotions suggested that negative thoughts provided no unique information about the problems underlying emotional states in different groups of children. Implications for cognitive assessment in emotionally disturbed children are discussed.     

Parallel, independent attentional control settings for colors and shapes

Attentional capture can be contingent on attentional control settings (ACSs), such that peripheral cues influence processing for a subsequent target only when they share a critical feature with the target. Our previous demonstration that two ACSs from within the same feature category can be maintained simultaneously allows us to investigate the processing stage at which such ACSs are implemented. We compared the relative efficacy of ACSs from two different feature categories (shape and color) that are associated with different levels within the visual processing hierarchy. Participants were instructed to respond to one of two colors at one location and one of two shapes at another location, while ignoring the nontarget color and shape. We observed that spatial capture was modulated by whether the cues fit an ACS, with slightly greater contingent capture effects for ACSs defined by color than by shape. Thus, two ACSs from different feature sets (color and shape) can be maintained in parallel, although effectiveness of the control set varied with the type of feature.     

Intergroup Contact and Prejudice Against People With Schizophrenia

There is a growing awareness that responses to mental health disorders differ according to the label. Still, research on contact and prejudice against people with mental health disorders has generally focused on the broader label, “mental illness,” as though various disorders were interchangeable. The present research specifically investigated the relationship between intergroup contact and avoidance of people with schizophrenia—a particularly stigmatized and challenging group—as well as mediators of that relationship. In Study 1, 78 students completed measures of their prior contact with and prejudice against people with schizophrenia. Prior contact predicted less desired avoidance of people with schizophrenia, and this relationship was mediated by more favorable attitudes. Study 2 (N = 122) replicated the results of Study 1, and also found that less fear and less intergroup anxiety mediated the relationship between contact and avoidance. This suggests that contact may effectively reduce prejudice, even against this highly stigmatized group.     

Phonological processing during silent reading in teenagers who are deaf/hard of hearing: an eye movement investigation

There has been considerable variability within the literature concerning the extent to which deaf/hard of hearing individuals are able to process phonological codes during reading. Two experiments are reported in which participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church), pseudohomophones (e.g., cherch), and spelling controls (e.g., charch). We examined both foveal processing and parafoveal pre‐processing of phonology for three participant groups—teenagers with permanent childhood hearing loss (PCHL), chronological age‐matched controls, and reading age‐matched controls. The teenagers with PCHL showed a pseudohomophone advantage from both directly fixated words and parafoveal preview, similar to their hearing peers. These data provide strong evidence for phonological recoding during silent reading in teenagers with PCHL.     

Both-edges representation of letter position in reading

The representations that underlie our ability to read must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also their relative positions. In recent years, many new proposals have been advanced concerning the representation of letter position in reading, but the available data do not distinguish among the competing proposals; multiple theories, each positing a different letter position representation scheme, are compatible with the evidence. In this article, we report two experiments that used the illusory word paradigm (e.g., Davis & Bowers, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30: 923–941, 2004) to distinguish among alternative schemes for representing letter position in reading. The results support a scheme that uses both the beginning and the end of a word as anchoring points. This both-edges scheme has been implicated in letter position representation in spelling (Fischer-Baum, McCloskey, & Rapp, Cognition, 115: 466–490, 2010), as well as in position representation in verbal working memory (Henson, Memory & Cognition, 27: 915–927, 1999), suggesting that it may be a domain-general scheme for representing position in a sequence.