Experiences of Patients in Cognitive Behavioural Group Therapy: A Qualitative Study of Eating Disorders

The aim of this study was to investigate whether there was a difference in skin conductance response between 2 groups of military personnel when exposed to emotionally neutral and charged stimuli. The 2 groups were a combat experience group (n?=?10) with prior experience of emotionally charged war situations and a comparison group (n?=?10) with no such experience. Results showed that the comparison group reacted more strongly to exposure to both charged and neutral pictures than did the combat experience group, regardless of exposure time. The results are discussed in terms of emotional numbing and differences in anxiety state between the 2 groups.     

INCREASING OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS

We evaluated the effects of monitoring responses on the acquisition of sight words with 3 children with autism. In the training condition, we taught participants a vocal imitation and matching response related to a peer's reading response. In another condition, participants were exposed only to a peer's reading responses. Participants read the words more accurately during test sessions when the monitoring response was required. Results and discussion highlight the importance of identifying component responses of observational learning and the need for additional research in this area.     

Conflict-induced perceptual filtering

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli associated with the target and with the distractor features). In search of evidence for such a mechanism, we administered a flanker task, in which targets and distractors were defined in terms of stimulus location (Experiment 1) or color (Experiment 2). The efficiency of processing stimuli associated with target and distractor features was assessed in intermixed trials of a visual search task, in which a target had to be detected irrespective of these features. In both experiments search times were shorter for stimuli associated with the target feature than with the distractor feature of the flanker task. This effect was increased under conditions of a reduced congruent/incongruent ratio, thereby providing evidence for conflict-dependent perceptual filtering.     

Behavioral Control Dynamics and Developmental Outcomes in Infants Prenatally Exposed to Cocaine

This study longitudinally examined the associations between mother–infant interactions at 15 months and behavioral and cognitive outcomes at 36 months of age in a sample of at‐risk, young children. Participants for the current study were 58 infants/toddlers prenatally exposed to cocaine and their maternal caregivers. These infants were from a low socioeconomic status background and were part of an intervention setting. When the children were 12, 15, and 36 months, they participated in research sessions with their maternal caregivers. Cognitive development at 12 months and maternal and infant behavior at 15 months were measured to predict behavioral and cognitive outcome at 36 months. Higher levels of maternal control at 15 months were marginally significant in predicting higher levels of problem behavior at 36 months whereas higher levels of infant resistance to control predicted lower levels of problem behavior. Furthermore, control‐resistant behavior displayed by infants was a unique buffer against problem behavior, even after controlling for maternal factors and cognitive abilities. These findings suggest that maternal control attempts and infant reactions to those maternal control behaviors play an important role in the development of adaptive and maladaptive behavior patterns during early childhood.     

Spatial perspective taking: Coordination of left-right and near-far spatial dimensions

Second- and fourth-grade children viewed a cylindrical object in nine positions on a square display board marked with a 3 × 3 grid. As the object was placed in each position, children identified the view from 90, 180, or 270° positions around the display from a set of photographs. Perspectives in which the object differed from the child's view in both left-right and near-far dimensions were more difficult than perspectives that only transformed one dimension. Error rates decreased with age. There were no main effects of left-right vs near-far or of observer position. Rates of egocentric responding were high at both ages. We note that the complementary spatial dimension to left-right is near-far not front-back. Moreover, the relative ease of front-back transformations in previous research resulted from distinctive front-back cues on the display objects which enabled subjects to use nonspatial strategies to identify observer perspectives.     

Some Potential Negative Social Consequences of Cigarette Smoking: Marketing Research in Reverse1

The effects of cigarette smoking on first impressions were examined in an interlocking series of studies. Provided college students evaluated peers who were neither extremely attractive nor unattractive, smoking typically reduced the positivity of evaluations regardless of participants' smoking. Targets photographed with smoking material were rated, for example, to be less considerate, calm, disciplined, honest, healthy, well-mannered, and happy than when smoking material was absent. Replication with apparently older participants evaluating college students did not reveal smoking to influence ratings strongly. Further replication did not reveal smoking material simply to influence college students' ratings of an attractive professional model. These results were compared with earlier studies of the effects of cigarette smoking on interpersonal evaluation and an educational unit for deterring smoking was discussed.     

Memorability functions as an indicator of qualitative age differences in text recall

An analysis in which the probability of text unit recall for older adults [p(Re/O)] is plotted as a function of this probability for the young [p(Re/Y)] is considered as one way to assess whether there are qualitative differences in text recall for young and old. The application of this relative memorability analysis to previously reported data dealing with the immediate recall of spoken sentences (Stine, Wingfield, & Poon, 1986) revealed that although older adults show qualitative recall similar to younger adults when informational density is low, they show less discrimination among text elements when informational density is increased.     

STRATEGY MODIFICATION IN CONCEPT LEARNING AS A FUNCTION OF INTRADIMENSIONAL VARIABILITY

LINDAHL, M.-B. Strategy modification in concept learning as a function of intradimensional variability. Scand. J. Psychol. , 1971, 12, 90–98.–60 subjects took part in a concept-learning-like task, where the independent variable was the intradimensional variability of the instances and the dependent variable was the type of strategy adopted by the subjects. Two main types of strategy were used by the subjects: one based on subtle cues and in principle requiring only one instance to lead to solution (conceptual-deductive strategy) and one based on salient cues and requiring a number of instances for solution (perceptual-inductive strategy). Adoptions of a conceptual-deductive type of strategy were shown to be significantly more frequent, when the variability was large than when it was small. It was concluded that the intradimensional variability of the instances influenced the subjects' choice of strategy in a seemingly rational way. This type of strategy modification was considered to be in line with theories describing concept learning as a sequence of, in principle, rational decisions.     

Comparing means from nonnormal distributions: The bisquare-weighted analysis of variance

A new procedure analogous to the analysis of variance (ANOVA), called the bisquare-weighted ANOVA (bANOVA), is described. When a traditional ANOVA is calculated, using samples from a distribution with heavy tails, the Type I error rates remain in check, but the Type II error rates increase, relative to those across samples from a normal distribution. The bANOVA is robust with respect to deviations from a normal distribution, maintaining high power with normal and heavy-tailed distributions alike. The more popular rank ANOVA (rANOVA) is also described briefly. However, the rANOVA is not as robust to large deviations from normality as is the bANOVA, and it generates high Type I error rates when applied to three-way designs.