Implicit interpretation biases affect emotional vulnerability: A training study

Cognitive theories of emotion propose that the interpretation of emotion-eliciting situations crucially shapes affective responses. Implicit or automatic biases in these interpretations may hinder emotion regulation and thereby increase risk for the onset and maintenance of psychological disorders. In this study, participants were randomly assigned to a positive or negative interpretation bias training using ambiguous social scenarios. After the completion of the training, a stress task was administered and changes in positive and negative affect and self-esteem were assessed. The results demonstrate that the interpretation bias training was successful in that participants exhibited a tendency to interpret novel scenarios in accordance with their training condition. Importantly, the positive training condition also had a protective effect on self-esteem. Participants in this condition did not exhibit a decrease in self-esteem after the stress task, whereas participants in the negative condition did. These results demonstrate that implicit cognitive biases can be trained and that this training affects self-esteem. Implications of these findings for research on psychopathology and emotion regulation are discussed.     

The Interim Service Preferences of Parents Waiting for Children’s Mental Health Treatment: A Discrete Choice Conjoint Experiment

Parents seeking help for children with mental health problems are often assigned to a waiting list. We used a discrete choice conjoint experiment to model preferences for interim services that might be used while waiting for the formal assessment and treatment process to begin. A sample of 1,059 parents (92 % mothers) seeking mental health services for 4 to 16 year olds chose between hypothetical interim services composed by experimentally varying combinations of the levels of 13 interim service attributes. Latent Class analysis yielded a four–segment solution. All segments preferred interim options helping them understand how agencies work, enhancing their parenting knowledge and skill, and providing an opportunity to understand or begin dealing with their own difficulties. The Group Contact segment (35.1 %) preferred interim services in meetings with other parents, supported by phone contacts, frequent checkup calls, and wait–time updates. Virtual Contact parents (29.2 %) preferred to meet other parents in small internet chat groups supported by e–mail contact. Membership in this segment was linked to higher education and computer skills. Frequent Contact parents (24.4 %) preferred face–to–face interim services supported by weekly progress checks and wait time updates. Limited Contact parents (11.3 %) were less intent on using interim services. They preferred to pursue interim services alone, with contacts by phone, supported by fewer check–up calls and less frequent wait time updates. All segments were more likely to enroll in interim services involving their child.     

The Health Insurance and Life Satisfaction Connection

Prior studies indicate that perceived health is strongly associated with a sense of well-being. The effect of health insurance is much less clear: there has been little rigorous empirical research assessing whether health coverage has an independent impact on individual happiness. This topic is especially important in the US where recently an estimated 18 % of the non-elderly were uninsured and extension of coverage through means such as the Affordable Care Act has been controversial. The present study addresses this question. Drawing from a large survey that collected comprehensive health and personal information about the US adult population, controlling for a wide variety of factors known to influence well-being, and addressing the possible endogeneity of having health insurance, we find that individuals without health insurance coverage were less likely to be “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with life. This may be because health insurance reduces uncertainty. Regardless of other benefits it may bring, the expansion of health insurance coverage should increase the life satisfaction of American society.     

Match-Action: The Role of Motion and Audio in Creating Global Change Blindness in Film

An everyday example of change blindness is our difficulty to detect cuts in an edited moving-image. Edit blindness (Smith & Henderson, 2008) is created by adhering to the continuity editing conventions of Hollywood, for example, coinciding a cut with a sudden onset of motion (match-action). In this study, we isolated the roles motion and audio play in limiting awareness of match-action cuts by removing motion before and/or after cuts in existing Hollywood film clips and presenting the clips with or without the original soundtrack whilst participants tried to detect cuts. Removing post-cut motion significantly decreased cut detection time and the probability of missing the cut. By comparison, removing pre-cut motion had no effect suggesting, contrary to the editing literature, that the onset of motion before a cut may not be as critical for creating edit blindness as the motion after a cut. Analysis of eye movements indicated that viewers reoriented less to new content across intact match-action cuts than shots with motion removed. Audio played a surprisingly large part in creating edit blindness with edit blindness mostly disappearing without audio. These results extend film editor intuitions and are discussed in the context of the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (Smith, 2012a).     

Co-occurrence frequency evaluated with large language corpora boosts semantic priming effects

In recent decades, many computational techniques have been developed to analyse the contextual usage of words in large language corpora. The present study examined whether the co-occurrence frequency obtained from large language corpora might boost purely semantic priming effects. Two experiments were conducted: one with conscious semantic priming, the other with subliminal semantic priming. Both experiments contrasted three semantic priming contexts: an unrelated priming context and two related priming contexts with word pairs that are semantically related and that co-occur either frequently or infrequently. In the conscious priming presentation (166-ms stimulus-onset asynchrony, SOA), a semantic priming effect was recorded in both related priming contexts, which was greater with higher co-occurrence frequency. In the subliminal priming presentation (66-ms SOA), no significant priming effect was shown, regardless of the related priming context. These results show that co-occurrence frequency boosts pure semantic priming effects and are discussed with reference to models of semantic network.     

Asian American college students' suicide ideation: a mixed-methods study

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the phenomenon of suicide ideation among 293 Asian American college students. Guided by T. Joiner's (2005) interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior, the authors examined the relationships among perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, self-construals, and suicide ideation. Compared with thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness was a more robust predictor of suicide ideation. However, thwarted belongingness moderated the positive association between perceived burdensomeness and suicide ideation. Furthermore, interdependent self-construal and independent self-construal both weakened the link between perceived burdensomeness and suicide ideation and between thwarted belongingness and suicide ideation. The authors also conducted a qualitative analysis of participants' open-ended responses about their perceptions of why Asian American college students might consider suicide. The authors identified a core phenomenon of unfulfilled expectations as well as 2 broad themes related to this core phenomenon: unfulfilled intrapersonal expectations and unfulfilled interpersonal expectations, comprising the subthemes of (a) family, (b) relationship, (c) cultural differences, and (d) racism. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for suicide-related clinical interventions and primary prevention efforts among Asian American college students.     

Subjective distress associated with chronic stuttering

Stuttering is a chronic condition involving involuntary disruption to speech fluency. While elevated social anxiety has been found to be a risk factor for adults who have stuttered all their lives, it is unclear how stuttering influences other negative mood states such as interpersonal sensitivity and depressive mood. Consequently, controlled research was conducted that investigated negative affectivity across a number of domains in adults who stutter. Participants included 200 adults who have stuttered since childhood, with comparisons made to 200 non-stuttering controls of similar age and sex. The adults who stuttered were found to have significantly elevated levels of distress and negative mood states compared to the controls. As expected, significant differences were found for anxiety, however, significant and substantial differences were also found across a broad range of negative affect, including dimensions such as somatization, interpersonal sensitivity, depressive mood, hostility and paranoia. The implications of these findings for the better management of stuttering are discussed.Educational objectives: The reader will be able to describe: (a) the negative impact of a chronic disorder like stuttering on people who have stuttered all their life; (b) the factor structure of the SCL-90-R; (c) the negative affectivity construct, and (d) the difference between psychogenic theories of stuttering and neurological theories of stuttering.     

Die Bindungstheorie als Basis psychotherapeutischer Interventionen in der Terminalphase

Recent attachment research has shown that every person develops, already in early childhood, special attachment strategies activated in cases whenever the person cannot cope on his own with dangers. These strategies are classified into four categories: “secure”, “insecure-avoidant”, “insecure-ambivalent/enmasked” and “disoriented/disorganized” attachment patterns. The death of a next person represents a situation of a unique and final separation causing psychical disturbances for the patient himself and his relatives. It is, therefore, an especially effective trigger for the activation of the attachment system. This article aims on relating attachment theory to an attachment-oriented therapy, that would open, particularly in the field of palliative medicine, possibilities of application which have been neglected. Case studies illustrate how these insights may be applied during the psychotheraputic care for patients and their relatives. As dying patients generally are brought by their family to the clinic, physicians have a particularly favourable situation to observe the attachment patterns in the family and integrate these informations into their treatment strategy: for example in case of “avoidant” attachment patterns, to bring cautiously the denied emotions into the communication and to support hopes for the fulfilment of needs for affection and protection; or in case of so-called “ambivalent/entangled” attachment patterns to help to disentangle too close relationships; or in case of “disorganized” attachment patterns to support emotional regulation and help to clear the relationships. It is obvious that this approach based on attachment theory and offering alleviations during the process of dying, is not only on a palliative board relevant, but may be applied with success in the medical care of dying patients and their relatives.     

Infant mental health programs: Experimenting with innovative models—One center's experience with new program funding

This article describes one child and family treatment center's process of creating a long‐awaited, new infant/child early intervention program. An experimental service model is discussed in the context of the need for empirically validated assessment and intervention for very young clients in high‐risk families. Case examples and illustrations of service flow are provided. Some features of this program, such as the fact that it was set up for a seamless transition to a treatment research project, are highlighted.     

Forum: Quilting as metaphor for theological education

How is quilt‐making both metaphor and pedagogy for early‐career faculty of theology and religion who seek to cultivate critical and creative imagination for teaching, and to probe the challenges and promises of complex identities and vocations within 21st‐century landscapes of theological education? This forum presents essays (with explanatory introduction) by five members of the 2016–2017 Workshop for Early Career Theological School Faculty, who were impelled to story their experience of being “handed over to themselves” by an “arts and craft” project which forced them to think with their hands, speak with found objects, and re‐present themselves in the form of 12 × 12‐inch quilt squares. In self‐reflexive prose, these scholar‐teachers offer through this medium a glimpse of their unexpected moments of revelatory learning, as each was pulled into deeper contemplation of their personhood, experience, know‐how, and practical wisdom, each uncovering valuable hidden sources for more expansive theological query, and each re‐thinking the possibilities for theological education and its pedagogies.