Transdiagnostic Internet treatment for anxiety disorders: A randomized controlled trial

Clinician-guided Internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (iCBT) programs are clinically effective at treating specific anxiety disorders. The present study examined the efficacy of a transdiagnostic Internet-based cognitive behavioural treatment (iCBT) program to treat more than one anxiety disorder within the same program (the Anxiety Program). Eighty six individuals meeting diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, and/or social phobia were randomly assigned to a treatment group, or to a waitlist control group. Treatment consisted of CBT based online educational lessons and homework assignments, weekly email or telephone contact from a clinical psychologist, access to a moderated online discussion forum, and automated emails. An intention-to-treat model using the baseline-observation-carried-forward principle was employed for data analyses. Seventy-five percent of treatment group participants completed all 6 lessons within the 8 week program. Post-treatment data was collected from 38/40 treatment group and 38/38 control group participants, and 3-month follow-up data was collected from 32/40 treatment group participants. Relative to controls, treatment group participants reported significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety as measured by the Generalized Anxiety Disorder - 7 Item, Social Phobia Screening Questionnaire, and the Panic Disorder Severity Rating Scale - Self Report Scale, but not on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, with corresponding between-groups effect sizes (Cohen’s d) at post-treatment of 0.78, 0.43, 0.43, and 0.20, respectively. The clinician spent a total mean time of 46 min per person over the program, participants rated the procedure as moderately acceptable, and gains were sustained at follow-up. Modifications to the Anxiety program, based on post-treatment feedback from treatment group participants, were associated with improved outcomes in the control group. These results indicate that transdiagnostic programs for anxiety disorders may be successfully administered via the Internet.     

Personality Processes in Anger and Reactive Aggression: An Introduction

ABSTRACT The situational factors precipitating anger and reactive (i.e., emotional) aggression have been well documented in the social psychology literature. However, there are pronounced individual differences in reactivity to hostile cues that are equally important in understanding such outcomes. Indeed, in predicting tendencies toward anger and reactive aggression, it appears critical to simultaneously consider both individual difference and situational factors. This case is first made. Subsequently, the utility of this individual difference realm in understanding wider personality processes related to social cognition, reactivity, and self-regulation is highlighted. Individual difference frameworks of this type are scattered across multiple literatures. For this reason, the present special section of the Journal of Personality invited contributions from experts in developmental, social, cognitive, trait, and biological subdisciplines of psychology. The final section introduces the invited papers and makes a brief case for broader process-related conclusions that are generally apparent.     

Field and observer modes of remembering

Abstract

Nigro and Neisser (1983) contrasted two ways of remembering personal experiences: the rememberer may ‘see’ the event from his or her perspective as in normal perception, or ‘see’ the self engaged in the event as an observer would. Several factors contribute to the determination of perspective, but Nigro and Neisser also reported that many subjects claimed they could change to another perspective at will. We sampled personal memories from several life periods and assessed ability to change the initially reported perspective. Changing was easier for recent or vividly recalled events, harder for older and less vividly recalled events. Memory perspectives may differ in other aspects than their imagery. A second study was conducted to determine whether affective experience is altered when perspectives are changed. The affect experienced decreased when shifting from a field to an observer perspective, but did not change with the converse shift. These studies provide further evidence that remembering is more than retrieval. The information that enters awareness is determined by the information sources in memory and the organisational scheme adopted for recollection.     

On misunderstanding science

Abstract

The paper examines the differences between Kuhn's account, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, of the sciences as necessarily communal activities with internally set standards of procedure and achievement, and that view of the sciences which calls itself ‘Scientific Realism’ and regards them as striving toward, and perhaps asymptotically approaching, some external and objective reality that bestows truth or falsity on scientific theories.

The main argument turns on Poincaré's demonstration that Newton's Second Law (f = ma) is not a testable, provable proposition with a truth value, but something that is simply adopted. It is adopted in the light of experience, certainly, but there is no logical necessity in the adoption. My suggestion is that it is a ‘way of looking’ and ‘a method of analysis’ and that the necessity of its adoption by any individual lies in its being a necessary condition of entry into the scientific community. That community itself adopts ways of looking or methods of analysis for their fruitfulness in dealing with old problems and defining new ones.

Incoherences in the ‘approach’ account of scientific progress are looked at, and the individualistic assumptions that motivate it. These require the sciences to be presented as the source and basis of agreement and community amongst separated individuals. This picture and its requirement inverts reality as well as Kuhn's account, which makes community and agreement the starting point. The notion of reality as a transcendental convergence point becomes redundant.

The old problem of the incommensurability of paradigms is discussed by relating them to the notions of ways of looking and methods of analysis. These may be incompatible in that one cannot look at things in two different ways at once, but at the same time they cannot be measured on any common scale.     

The power of print: Children’s trust in unexpected printed suggestions

How do children evaluate the veracity of printed text? We examined children’s handling of unexpected suggestions conveyed via print versus orally. In Experiment 1 (N = 131), 3- to 6-year-olds witnessed a speaker either read aloud an unexpected but not completely implausible printed label (e.g., fish for a bird-like animal with some fish features) or speak the label without accompanying text. Pre-readers accepted labels in both conditions. Early readers often rejected spoken labels yet accepted them in the print condition, and in Experiment 2 (N = 55) 3- to 6-year-olds continued to apply them even after the print was obscured. Early readers accept printed testimony that they reject if only spoken, and the influence of text endures even when it is no longer visible.     

The Interactive Effects of Self‐Perceptions and Job Requirements on Creative Problem Solving

Over the years, researchers have focused on ways to facilitate creativity in the workplace by looking at individual factors and organizational factors that affect employee creativity (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993 ). In many cases, the factors that affect creativity are examined independently. In other words, it is uncommon for researchers to look at the interaction among individual and organizational factors. In this study, it is argued that to get a true understanding of how to maximize creativity in the workplace, organizational researchers must look at the interaction between organizational factors and individual factors that affect employee creativity. More specifically, the current study looked at an individual's perceptions about his or her ability to be creative (i.e., individual factor) and perceptions of requirements for creativity in the workplace (i.e., an organizational factor). The results indicated that individuals who have a high belief about their ability to be creative (an individual factor) were most creative when they also perceived requirements for creativity in the workplace (an organizational factor). Furthermore, individuals who had low perceptions of creative ability were still able to perform creatively when they had high perceptions of requirements for creativity. This suggests that, to maximize creativity, organizations should focus on both individual and organizational factors that affect employee creativity.     

Why a Big Mac Is a Good Mac: Associations between Affect and Size

Evaluation is a core topic of interest in both social psychology and linguistic theory, but there are relatively few social-cognitive studies examining the “online” consequences of affective metaphor. The experiments presented here sought to investigate such online consequences in relation to an understudied class of metaphors linking evaluation to size (i.e., “bigger is better”). Consistent with such metaphors, we found that positive (vs. negative) words were evaluated more quickly (Experiment 1) and accurately (Experiment 2) when presented in a larger (vs. smaller) font size. Parallel and opposite effects were found for negative words. A third experiment demonstrated that words presented in a larger font size were evaluated more favorably, thus extending size effects to evaluative judgments. Together, the studies converge on the importance of size metaphors for understanding evaluation from a social-cognitive perspective.     

Clear heads are cool heads: Emotional clarity and the down-regulation of antisocial affect

Emotional clarity results in reduced anger, but it is important to better understand why this is true. Drawing upon existing cybernetic models of affect regulation, the authors propose that affect down-regulation operations are crucial to understanding the clarity/anger relationship. A two study, multi-method investigation provided support for these hypotheses. Study 1 used dispositional measures of emotional clarity, anger control, and trait anger, and found that anger control mediated the relationship between clarity and reduced anger. Study 2 found that individuals high in emotional clarity were successful in correcting for the influence of aggressive primes on subsequent evaluations. Importantly, though, disrupting these affect regulation operations through the imposition of cognitive load left emotionally clear individuals as susceptible to antisocial affect priming as emotionally unclear individuals. In total, the studies suggest that emotional clarity is closely associated with the effortful down-regulation of antisocial affect.     

Cognitive-emotional dysfunction among noisy minds: Predictions from individual differences in reaction time variability

Mental noise can be defined as less reliable information processing. Individuals with high levels of mental noise are thought to be disadvantaged in cognitive, emotional, and behavioural realms. The present five studies (total N=298) investigated such potential disadvantages among normally functioning college undergraduates. Mental noise was operationalised in terms of the reaction time coefficient of variation (RTCV), a measure of RT variability that corrects for average levels of mental speed. Individuals with higher RTCV exhibited less effective cognitive control (Studies 1 and 5), less controlled behaviour (Study 2), and were more prone to negative emotional experiences (Study 3) and depressive symptoms (Study 4). Study 5 extended these results and found that individuals higher (versus lower) in RTCV were more adversely affected by their attentional lapses in daily life. Results converge on the idea that mental noise is an important individual difference dimension with multiple adverse correlates and consequences.