The effectiveness of university counselling for improving academic outcomes and well-being

The work discusses the effectiveness of the counselling treatment to enhance student academic success. The participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (66 students who had completed counselling treatment) or a wait-list comparison group (44 students). The Adult Self Report (ASR) by Achenbach and Rescorla [2003. Manual for the ASEBA adult forms & profiles. Burlington, VT: Research Center for Children, Youth, & Families, University of Vermont] and the Outcome Questionnaire 45 (OQ-45) by Lambert and Hill [1994. Assessing psychotherapy outcomes and processes. In A. E. Bergin & S. L. Garfield (Eds.), Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (pp. 72–113). New York: John Wiley] were applied before and after the counselling sessions. Data show statistically significant decrease in the ASR clinical scales for both internalising and externalising problems after counselling as well as in the OQ-45 scores for distress symptoms and relationship difficulties. Compared with the control group, the students who received counselling exhibited a significant recovery regarding their progress with their studies.     

Are we certain about which measure of intolerance of uncertainty to use yet?

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) has been understood as a dispositional tendency to view the presence of negative events as unacceptable and threatening, regardless of the likelihood of those events occurring. The preference over the 12-item vs. 27-item of the IUS has been central to debate. The goals of the present study were to evaluate two competing models of measuring IU with model-fitting analyses and explore model invariance of gender (e.g. men vs. women). A sample of 980 individuals completed an online IUS survey. Results indicated that the two-factor short-form model provided better fit to the data compared to the full-length two-factor model proposed by. Results also indicated that the short-form IUS is gender invariant, suggesting acceptable use among men and women. These findings provide further support of a two-factor structure and suggest that the IUS is appropriate for men and women.     

Infant Emotion Regulation Strategy Moderates Relations between Self‐Reported Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Infant HPA Activity

Children of mothers with depressive symptoms often have high cortisol levels. Research shows that various child characteristics (e.g., attachment pattern, internalizing behaviours, and temperament) moderate this association. We suggest that these characteristics share common variance with emotion regulation strategy. Therefore, we examine infant emotion regulation strategy as a moderator of the association between maternal depressive symptoms and infant hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) function. We hypothesize that infants who utilize more independent emotion regulation strategies and have mothers who report higher depressive symptoms will exhibit elevated cortisol levels. Participants were 193 mothers and infants (15 months old) recruited from the community. Self‐reported maternal depressive symptoms were assessed. Infant independent regulatory behaviours (withdrawal, wandering away, distraction, scanning, orienting to another object) were coded in the context of a Toy Frustration Task. Infant cortisol was collected via saliva samples at baseline, +20, and +40 minutes. Results indicate that infant emotion regulation strategy moderates the relation between mothers' self‐reported depressive symptoms and infant total cortisol output (AUC_G) and cortisol reactivity (AUC_I). Infants who employed more independent regulatory behaviours and have mothers with higher depressive symptoms experience greater cortisol secretion. We discuss the findings in relation to parent‐infant interactions and the adaptive nature of emotion regulation strategies, as they relate to HPA regulatory capacities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender differences in reaction to psychological pressure: evidence from tennis players

Using data on about 35,000 professional tennis matches, we test whether men and women react differently to psychological pressure arising from the outcomes of sequential stages in a competition. We show that, with respect to men, women losing the first set are much more likely to play poorly the second set. This suggests that women are more discouraged when facing the pressure of falling behind and receiving negative feedback. The gender differential is stronger in high-stake matches. On the other hand, when players are tied in the third set we do not find any gender difference in players’ reactions suggesting that women are as able as men to handle pressure if they do not lag behind. These results are robust controlling for measures of abilities and fitness of players, such as players’ rankings, players’ ex-ante winning probability, players’ rest, monetary prizes, players’ and tournaments’ fixed effects.     

A Temporal Semantics for Basic Logic

In the context of truth-functional propositional many-valued logics, Hájek’s Basic Fuzzy Logic BL [14] plays a major rôle. The completeness theorem proved in [7] shows that BL is the logic of all continuous t-norms and their residua. This result, however, does not directly yield any meaningful interpretation of the truth values in BL per se. In an attempt to address this issue, in this paper we introduce a complete temporal semantics for BL. Specifically, we show that BL formulas can be interpreted as modal formulas over a flow of time, where the logic of each instant is ?ukasiewicz, with a finite or infinite number of truth values. As a main result, we obtain validity with respect to all flows of times that are non-branching to the future, and completeness with respect to all finite linear flows of time, or to an appropriate single infinite linear flow of time. It may be argued that this reduces the problem of establishing a meaningful interpretation of the truth values in BL logic to the analogous problem for ?ukasiewicz logic.     

Die Erfahrung des Anderen. Phänomenologie,Behaviorismus und Spiegelneuronen

The recent discovery of a mirror neuron system sets a challenge for a philosophy of experience such as phenomenology, because in humans and monkeys the mirror system seems to transform seen actions into an inner representation of these actions. This paper tries to outline the guidelines of a transcendental-phenomenological analysis of alterity, different from empirical research. The transcendental research must provide a criterion for interpreting the results of empirical science. On this basis the paper compares the phenomenological analysis of alterity with some results of neuroscientific research. It is argued that Edmund Husserl presents an analysis that enables us to avoid misinterpretations of the role and function of the mirror neuron system.

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Anandamide and memory in CD1 mice: effects of immobilization stress and of prior experience

Five sets of experiments were carried out with CD1 mice tested in a one-trial inhibitory avoidance task. In a first set, immediately posttraining administrations of the endogenous ligand for the cannabinoid CB1 receptor anandamide (arachidonylethanolamide) (3 or 6 mg/kg) dose-dependently impaired memory consolidation in mice. A lower dose (1.5 mg/kg) was ineffective. In a second set of experiments, which was carried out at the same time of the first set, preexposure of the animals to the testing apparatus decreased the effect of the drug, as compared with non-preexposed mice. In a third set of experiments, administration of anandamide (3 or 6 mg/kg) prior to the retention test did not affect the retention performance of mice given posttraining injections of either saline or anandamide. These findings indicate that the memory-impairing effects of posttraining administration of anandamide are not state-dependent. In the fourth and fifth series of experiments, carried out with non-preexposed mice, an otherwise ineffective immobilization stress (15 min) enhanced the memory-impairing effect of anandamide, and an otherwise ineffective dose of naltrexone (0.1 mg/kg) completely antagonized the effect. The results are discussed in terms of attenuation of emotionality, resulting in impaired retention, following anandamide administration, and of involvement of opioid system in the effect of this drug.     

Effects of MK-801 and ethanol combinations on memory consolidation in CD1 mice: involvement of GABAergic mechanisms

In the present research the effect of the noncompetitive N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor antagonist MK-801 and ethanol combinations on memory consolidation and the involvement of GABAergic mechanisms in this effect were investigated in CD1 mice injected intraperitoneally with the drugs immediately or 120 min after training in a one-trial inhibitory avoidance apparatus and tested for retention 24 h later. The results showed that (a) the retention performances of mice were impaired in a dose-dependent manner by immediate posttraining MK-801 (0.2 and 0.3, but not 0.1 mg/kg) and ethanol (1 and 2, but not 0.5 g/kg) administrations; (b) an otherwise ineffective dose of MK-801 (0.1 mg/kg) enhanced the deleterious effect exerted by ethanol (1 and 2 g/kg); (c) an otherwise ineffective dose of muscimol (0.5 mg/kg) enhanced, while otherwise ineffective doses of picrotoxin (0.25 mg/kg) or bicuculline (0.1 mg/kg) antagonized, this effect; and (d) no effect was observed when the treatments were carried out 120 min after training, suggesting that the effects observed following immediate posttraining administrations were due to the influence on the consolidation of memory. From these experiments it is evident that (a) MK-801 enhances ethanol's effects on memory consolidation and (b) GABAergic mechanisms are involved in this effect.     

Book Review: Ecological rationality and its heuristics

In this study both adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls were presented with conditional reasoning problems using familiar content. In this task both valid and fallacious conditional inferences that would otherwise be drawn can be suppressed if counterexample cases are brought to mind. Such suppression occurs when additional premises are presented, whose effect is to suggest such counterexample cases. In this study we predicted and observed that this suppression effect was substantially and significantly weaker for autistic participants. We take this as evidence that autistics are less contextualised in their reasoning, a finding that can be linked to research on autism on a variety of other cognitive tasks.