Interpersonal evaluation bias in borderline personality disorder

Background

The cognitive theory of personality disorders hypothesizes that the emotional dysregulation and interpersonal problems in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are, at least partially, caused by dysfunctional cognitive schemas. These schemas lead to biased evaluation of environmental and interpersonal stimuli.

Method

This study examined the interpersonal evaluations of individuals with BPD, depressive and healthy control participants with the thin-slice judgments paradigm. Participants were asked to evaluate six persons in six film clips, which showed these persons for 10 s, during which these persons entered a room and took a seat. Interpersonal style of the BPD group was investigated with the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-C) questionnaire.

Results

Individuals with BPD judged the persons as being more negative and aggressive and less positive than the healthy participants, and more aggressive than the depressive individuals. In addition, individuals with BPD reported more extreme interpersonal behavior relative to the controls.

Conclusions

The findings indicate an aggressivistic evaluation bias and elevated levels of interpersonal problems in individuals with BPD as suggested in the cognitive theory.     

From the casino to the jungle

Clear-cut cases of decision-making under risk (known probabilities) are unusual in real life. The gambler’s decisions at the roulette table are as close as we can get to this type of decision-making. In contrast, decision-making under uncertainty (unknown probabilities) can be exemplified by a decision whether to enter a jungle that may contain unknown dangers. Life is usually more like an expedition into an unknown jungle than a visit to the casino. Nevertheless, it is common in decision-supporting disciplines to proceed as if reasonably reliable probability estimates were available for all possible outcomes, i.e. as if the prevailing epistemic conditions were analogous to those of gambling at the roulette table. This mistake can be called the tuxedo fallacy. It is argued that traditional engineering practices such as safety factors and multiple safety barriers avoid this fallacy and that they therefore manage uncertainty better than probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). PRA is a useful tool, but it must be supplemented with other methods in order not to limit the analysis to dangers that can be assigned meaningful probability estimates.     

Effects of syntactic expectations on speech segmentation

Although the effect of acoustic cues on speech segmentation has been extensively investigated, the role of higher order information (e.g., syntax) has received less attention. Here, the authors examined whether syntactic expectations based on subject-verb agreement have an effect on segmentation and whether they do so despite conflicting acoustic cues. Although participants detected target words faster in phrases containing adequate acoustic cues ("spins" in take spins and "pins" in takes pins), this acoustic effect was suppressed when the phrases were appended to a plural context (those women take spins/*takes pins [with the asterisk indicating a syntactically unacceptable parse]). The syntactically congruent target ("spins") was detected faster regardless of the acoustics. However, a singular context (that woman *take spins/takes pins) had no effect on segmentation, and the results resembled those of the neutral phrases. Subsequent experiments showed that the discrepancy was due to the relative time course of syntactic expectations and acoustics cues. Taken together, the data suggest that syntactic knowledge can facilitate segmentation but that its effect is substantially attenuated if conflicting acoustic cues are encountered before full realization of the syntactic constraint.     

The Epistemological Approach to Mental Causation

Epistemological approaches to mental causation argue that the notorious problem of mental causation as captured in the question “How can irreducible, physically realized, and potentially relational mental properties be causally efficacious in the production of physical effects?” has a very simple solution: One merely has to abandon any metaphysical considerations in favor of epistemological considerations and accept that our explanatory practice is a much better guide to causal relevance than the metaphysical reasoning carried out from the philosophical armchair. I argue that epistemological approaches to mental causation do not enjoy any genuine advantage over theories which treat the problem of mental causation as a genuinely metaphysical problem.

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Judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors affecting children's testimony about sexual abuse

The authors examined Swedish judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors that may complicate or facilitate children's reports of sexual abuse. Participants (N = 562) rated potential complicating and facilitating factors and freely reported which criteria they considered important when assessing the reliability of child witnesses. The groups had similar opinions regarding which factors are complicating and facilitating. Furthermore, the groups tended to regard emotional factors as more complicating than cognitive factors. When freely reporting criteria that are important when assessing reliability, judges and police officers reported criteria pertaining mainly to the child, whereas lay judges reported mainly criteria pertaining mainly to the police interview. Results indicate that participants believe that children have the capacity to remember and report about abuse but are hindered in doing so by emotional factors. Results also suggest that police officers may underestimate their own influence on the reliability of children's reports.     

A model for predicting behavioural sleep problems in a random sample of Australian pre‐schoolers

Behavioural sleep problems (childhood insomnias) can cause distress for both parents and children. This paper reports a model describing predictors of high sleep problem scores in a representative population‐based random sample survey of non‐Aboriginal singleton children born in 1995 and 1996 (1085 girls and 1129 boys) in Western Australia. Longitudinal repeated data were collected up to age 4 years by caregiver report. Children's sleep rhythmicity levels in their first year, as well as conflicted and lax parenting in their second year, predicted higher scores on the sleep problem scale from the Child Behaviour Checklist/2–3 in the children's third year. Higher scores on the sleep problem scale in the children's third year predicted higher scores on the aggressive behaviour subscale of the Child Behaviour Checklist/4–16. The results support a model in which sleep problems mediated the relationship between parental conflict and aggressive behaviour, even when controlling for maternal depression, which has been associated with children's aggressive behaviour. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stress versus coarticulation: toward an integrated approach to explicit speech segmentation

Although word stress has been hailed as a powerful speech-segmentation cue, the results of 5 cross-modal fragment priming experiments revealed limitations to stress-based segmentation. Specifically, the stress pattern of auditory primes failed to have any effect on the lexical decision latencies to related visual targets. A determining factor was whether the onset of the prime was coarticulated with the preceding speech fragment. Uncoarticulated (i.e., concatenated) primes facilitated priming. Coarticulated ones did not. However, when the primes were presented in a background of noise, the pattern of results reversed, and a strong stress effect emerged: Stress-initial primes caused more pruning than non-initial-stress primes, regardless of the coarticulatory cues. The results underscore the role of coarticulation in the segmentation of clear speech and that of stress in impoverished listening conditions. More generally, they call for an integrated and signal-contingent approach to speech segmentation.     

A single case-study of diagonistic dyspraxia

Diagonistic dyspraxia is a clinical syndrome usually characterized by involuntary and conflicting behaviors between the hands following corpus callosum lesions. In the present study, we report the case of a patient who presents such symptoms, along with a series of complex abnormal behaviors, such as carrying out an action and subsequently doing the exact opposite, or being unable to choose between two alternative decisions. The data reported in this study indicate that, at least in some patients, diagonistic dyspraxia can be associated with abnormal, antagonistic, behaviors not limited to the hands. In our view, diagonistic dyspraxia result from lesion of the posterior corpus callosum while associated complex abnormal behaviors result from concomitant anterior lesions.     

The Rôle of Language In Belief Revision

Analytical tools that give precision to the concept of "independence of syntax" are developed in the form of a series of substitutivity principles. These principles are applied in a study of the rôle of language in belief revision theory. It is shown that sets of sentences can be used in models of belief revision to convey more information than what is conveyed by the combined propositional contents of the respective sets. It is argued that it would be unwise to programmatically restrain the use of sets of sentences to that of representing propositional contents. Instead, the expressive power of language should be used as fully as possible. Therefore, syntax-independence should not be seen as a criterion of adequacy for language-based models of information-processing, but rather as a property that emerges from some but not all the idealization processes through which such models are constructed.