The Relation Between Anger Coping Strategies,Anger Mood and Somatic Complaints in Children and Adolescents

Attempts to explain the experience of somatic complaints among children and adolescents suggest that they may in part result from the influence of particular strategies for coping with anger on the longevity of negative emotions. To explore these relationships British (n = 393) and Dutch (n = 299) children completed a modified version of the Behavioral Anger Response Questionnaire (BARQ), and two additional questionnaires assessing anger mood and somatic complaints. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that for both the UK and Dutch samples two coping styles, Social support-seeking and Rumination, made a significant contribution to somatic complaints, over and above the variance explained by anger mood. A tendency to repeatedly think or talk about an angering event as a way of coping seems to underlie the observed negative health effects. In addition, tentative support is given for a broader range of strategies to cope with anger than just the traditionally studied anger-out and anger-in styles.     

Standards der sozialmedizinischen Leistungsbegutachtung in der Psychosomatischen Medizin und Psychotherapie

Sociomedical problems are playing an increasingly important role in both psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy and in psychiatry. The present article examines the standards relating to content and method in sociomedical assessments, primarily in the discipline of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy. The focus is on the assessment of performance, highlighting the fact that performance and performance deficits cannot primarily be derived from the medical diagnosis; instead, psychosocial variables that influence the processes of dealing with disease in particular affect the actual performance status. The article pays particular attention to aspects that aggravate or dissimulate performance competence. Finally, the principles of integrating the various findings and results that are incorporated into the assessment report are outlined.     

Psychometric properties of the Beck Depression Inventory for Youth in a sample of girls

A new measure has been developed to assess depressive symptoms, the Beck Depression Inventory for Youth (BDI-Y; J. S. Beck, A. T. Beck, & J. B. Jolly, 2001). This research extends previous validation research of BDI-Y total scores by examining internal consistency and convergent and predictive validity within a school-based sample (n=859) of girls 9-13 years old by age level and for selected races or ethnic groups. Scores had high internal consistency, and there was support for using the BDI-Y to assess depressive symptoms. Reliability was slightly lower for 9-year-olds, but reliability and validity estimates did not differ by race or ethnic group. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis results provide some support for unidimensionality of scores but also point toward possible refinements.     

Asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) interval estimation of coefficient alpha

The point estimate of sample coefficient alpha may provide a misleading impression of the reliability of the test score. Because sample coefficient alpha is consistently biased downward, it is more likely to yield a misleading impression of poor reliability. The magnitude of the bias is greatest precisely when the variability of sample alpha is greatest (small population reliability and small sample size). Taking into account the variability of sample alpha with an interval estimator may lead to retaining reliable tests that would be otherwise rejected. Here, the authors performed simulation studies to investigate the behavior of asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) versus normal-theory interval estimators of coefficient alpha under varied conditions. Normal-theory intervals were found to be less accurate when item skewness >1 or excess kurtosis >1. For sample sizes over 100 observations, ADF intervals are preferable, regardless of item skewness and kurtosis. A formula for computing ADF confidence intervals for coefficient alpha for tests of any size is provided, along with its implementation as an SAS macro.     

Two modes of sensorimotor integration in intention-based and stimulus-based actions

Human actions may be driven endogenously (to produce desired environmental effects) or exogenously (to accommodate to environmental demands). There is a large body of evidence indicating that these two kinds of action are controlled by different neural substrates. However, only little is known about what happens—in functional terms—on these different “routes to action”. Ideomotor approaches claim that actions are selected with respect to their perceptual consequences. We report experiments that support the validity of the ideomotor principle and that, at the same time, show that it is subject to a far-reaching constraint: It holds for endogenously driven actions only! Our results suggest that the activity of the two “routes to action” is based on different types of learning: The activity of the system guiding stimulus-based actions is accompanied by stimulus-response (sensorimotor) learning, whereas the activity of the system controlling intention-based actions results in action-effect (ideomotor) learning.     

Instrument specificity in experienced musicians

Previous studies have shown that experienced pianists have acquired integrated action-effect (A-E) associations. In the present study, we were interested in how specific these associations are for the own instrument by investigating pianists and guitarists. A-E associations were examined by testing whether the perception of a “potential” action-effect has an influence on actions. Participants played chords on their instrument in response to visual stimuli, while they were presented task-irrelevant auditory distractors (congruent or incongruent) in varying instrument timbre. In Experiment 1, pianists exhibited an interference effect with timbres of their own instrument category (keyboard instruments: piano and organ). In Experiment 2 guitarists showed an interference effect only with guitar timbre. Thus, integrated A-E associations primarily seem to consist of a specific component on a sensory-motor level involving the own instrument. Additionally, categorical knowledge about how an instrument is played seems to be involved.     

Recognition and evaluation of emotional prosody in individuals with generalized social phobia: a pilot study

Studies using facial emotional expressions as stimuli partially support the assumption of biased processing of social signals in social phobia. This pilot study explored for the first time whether individuals with social phobia display a processing bias towards emotional prosody. Fifteen individuals with generalized social phobia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) matched for gender, age, and education completed a recognition test consisting of meaningless utterances spoken in a neutral, angry, sad, fearful, disgusted or happy tone of voice. Participants also evaluated the stimuli with regard to valence and arousal. While these ratings did not differ significantly between groups, analysis of the recognition test revealed enhanced identification of sad and fearful voices and decreased identification of happy voices in individuals with social phobia compared with HC. The two groups did not differ in their processing of neutral, disgust, and anger prosody.     

Improving postswitch performance in the dimensional change card-sorting task: the importance of the switch and of pretraining by redescribing the test cards

The dimensional change card-sorting task (DCCS) is used to assess the executive abilities of young children. Typically, 3-year-olds have difficulty in performing this task. However, the exact nature of this difficulty is still being debated. In the standard DCCS, children need to sort, for example, test cards with a blue flower or a red car into two boxes marked with the target cards. The 3-year-olds commonly have pronounced difficulty in switching from one sorting criterion (e.g., color) to another (e.g., shape). Here two experiments with 3-year-olds showed that making the transition between the sorting criteria more distinct improved performance significantly. This was achieved by taking away the target cards for a brief time period, asking a question irrelevant to the task, and pretraining the children by redescribing the test cards.     

And deplete us not into temptation: Automatic attitudes, dietary restraint, and self-regulatory resources as determinants of eating behavior

Linking contemporary models of self-regulation to recent research on automatic attitudes, the present study investigated the impact of automatic candy attitudes, dietary restraint standards, and self-regulation resources on eating behavior. Participants were assigned to either an emotion suppression task (low self-regulation resources) or an emotion flow task (high self-regulation resources), and were then given an opportunity to taste candies. When self-regulation resources were high, candy consumption was uniquely related to dietary restraint standards (but not automatic candy attitudes). In contrast, when self-regulation resources were low, candy consumption was primarily predicted by automatic candy attitudes, with dietary restraint standards showing a tendency for counterintentional effects. These results indicate that the behavioral impact of automatic attitudes and personal standards depends on available control resources. Implications for research on automatic attitudes and self-regulation are discussed.