Interviewing a Therapist in the Presence of a Couple: A Description of the Therapeutic Process

A therapy research team interviewed a therapist in the presence of a couple. Following each of six consecutive sessions with a couple, an interviewer posed questions to the therapist and couple. While one question was standard to each interview, other questions were generated by team members who tracked the entire process via live observation. These questions were directed first at the therapist, then at the couple, and then focused on therapeutic process and outcome. Findings of this process for the therapy system included decreasing the hierarchy within the client/therapist relationship; increasing the client ownership and energy in the therapy process; discovering the presence of parallel processes between the systems; and informing the direction of future therapy sessions. Practical, clinical implications are discussed for a variety of therapy settings.     

Antecedents of causal uncertainty and perceived control: a prospective study

Perceptions of lack of control have been thought to be closely related to causal uncertainty, or uncertainty about the causes of events (Weary and Edwards, 1994). A 6-week prospective study tested the notion that perceived lack of control results in higher levels of later causal uncertainty. This prediction was confirmed. It also was found that time 1 causal uncertainty was associated with higher levels of time 2 perceptions of lack of control. Feelings of lack of control, causal uncertainty, and levels of depressive symptomatology were concurrently related at both time periods. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotion regulation and mood brightening in daily life vary with depressive symptom levels

Naturalistic studies of emotional reactivity in depression have repeatedly found larger decreases in negative affect (NA) among depressed individuals in response to daily positive events. This so-called mood-brightening (MB) effect represents a theoretical and empirical oddity. The current study is a secondary analysis investigating whether the MB effect is moderated by spontaneous use of emotion regulation strategies, which have been implicated in the maintenance and modulation of NA in prior work. Participants (N?=?95) representing a large spectrum of depressive symptom severity reported their experiences of NA and the occurrence of positive events in daily life over the course of seven days using the experience sampling method. Our findings replicate and build upon those of prior studies relating to the MB effect in the following ways: (1) we observed the MB effect for specific negative emotions of sadness, anger, anxiety; and (2) we found evidence that the MB effect is moderated by spontaneous use of rumination, distraction, and expressive suppression, which have been shown to enhance or dampen NA. The role of emotion regulation strategies in daily emotional reactivity to pleasant events is discussed.     

State of the States: A survey of statutory law,regulations and court rules pertaining to guilty pleas across the United States

A psycholegal research agenda on guilty pleas is in its nascent stage. Multijurisdictional surveys of related law and policy may advance this research agenda by focusing investigators on the specifics of existing policies and motivating cross‐jurisdictional comparisons of diverse policies. We thus conducted a systematic, national survey of statutes, regulations and court rules across the United States pertaining to nine aspects of the guilty plea process, including sentencing differentials, collateral consequences and waiver of rights, which have been identified in existing legal and psycholegal research and commentary. Following a discussion of these issues, including legal concerns and existing research findings, we present the results of our systematic survey. We supplement this review with a non‐systematic sampling of appellate case law. Broadly, there was notable diversity in whether and how jurisdictions approached these issues. We discuss general and specific implications of our findings for future research, emphasizing the importance of data on actual policies and procedures to the design of studies that may contribute to evidence‐based criminal justice policy.     

The gesture ‘Touch’: Does meaning-making develop in chimpanzees’ use of a very flexible gesture?

Animal Cognition - In this bottom-up study of gesture, we focused on the details of a single gesture, Touch. We compared characteristics of use by three young chimpanzees with those of 11 adults,...     

Power and perceived influence: I caused your behavior,but I'm not responsible for it

There are numerous examples of powerful people denying responsibility for others' (mis)conduct in which they played—and acknowledge playing—a causal role. The current article seeks to explain this conundrum by examining the difference between, and powerful people's beliefs about, causality and responsibility. Research has shown power to have numerous psychological consequences. Some of these consequences, such as overconfidence, are likely to increase an individual's belief that he or she caused another person's behavior. However, others, such as decreased perspective‐taking, are likely to decrease an individual's belief that he or she was responsible for another person's behavior. In combination, these psychological consequences of power may lead powerful people to believe that they instigated another's behavior while simultaneously believing that the other person could have chosen to do otherwise. The dissociation between these two attributions may help to explain why people in positions of power often deny responsibility for others' behavior—unethical or otherwise—that they undeniably caused.     

Testing the generality of the zoom-lens model: Evidence for visual-pathway specific effects of attended-region size on perception

There are volumes of information available to process in visual scenes. Visual spatial attention is a critically important selection mechanism that prevents these volumes from overwhelming our visual system’s limited-capacity processing resources. We were interested in understanding the effect of the size of the attended area on visual perception. The prevailing model of attended-region size across cognition, perception, and neuroscience is the zoom-lens model. This model stipulates that the magnitude of perceptual processing enhancement is inversely related to the size of the attended region, such that a narrow attended-region facilitates greater perceptual enhancement than a wider region. Yet visual processing is subserved by two major visual pathways (magnocellular and parvocellular) that operate with a degree of independence in early visual processing and encode contrasting visual information. Historically, testing of the zoom-lens has used measures of spatial acuity ideally suited to parvocellular processing. This, therefore, raises questions about the generality of the zoom-lens model to different aspects of visual perception. We found that while a narrow attended-region facilitated spatial acuity and the perception of high spatial frequency targets, it had no impact on either temporal acuity or the perception of low spatial frequency targets. This pattern also held up when targets were not presented centrally. This supports the notion that visual attended-region size has dissociable effects on magnocellular versus parvocellular mediated visual processing.     

Emotion Regulation Mediates Effects of Alexithymia and Emotion Differentiation on Impulsive Aggressive Behavior

Alexithymia and low emotion differentiation restrict access to emotional information and increase propensity toward dysregulated and deviant behaviors, such as impulsive aggression. However, mechanisms underlying such effects are largely unknown. This study examined the mediating role of emotion regulation in the relationship between restricted access to emotional information and impulsive aggression. Alexithymic features and emotion differentiation explained 43% of the variance in impulsive aggression; these relationships were fully mediated by emotion-regulation difficulty. Contrary to previously held assumptions, alexithymic features and emotion differentiation were uncorrelated with one another, each limiting the translation of unique emotion information necessary for adaptive emotion and behavior regulation.