Examination of emotional Stroop interference in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Previous research has produced conflicting findings on whether or not patients with subclinical or manifest obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) share an attentional bias for anxiety-related material. In the present study, 35 OCD patients were compared with 20 healthy controls on their performance in an emotional Stroop paradigm. Nine different stimulus conditions were compiled, including sets for depression-related and anxiety-related words as well as stimuli from two constructs with a potential relevance for the pathogenesis and maintenance of OCD symptomatology: responsibility and conscientiousness. Patients did not show enhanced interference for any of the conditions. Syndrome subtype and severity, avoidance and speed of information processing did not moderate results. The present study concurs with most prior research that OCD patients display no interference effect for general threat words. It deserves further consideration, that emotional interference effects in OCD as seen in other anxiety disorders occur when using idiosyncratic word material with a direct relation to the individual's primary concerns.     

Studies of the vicarious traumatization of college students by the September 11th attacks: effects of proximity, exposure and connectedness

From mid-October 2001 through the end of November 2001, we collected fairly large sets of questionnaires from undergraduates at three public universities (Albany, NY, n = 507, Augusta, GA, n = 336, Fargo, ND, n = 526 ) to assess rate of acute stress disorder (ASD) and level of ASD symptoms following the September 11th attacks, rate of current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and level of PTSD symptoms, and current level of depressive symptoms resulting from the September 11th attacks. We also gathered information on exposure to media coverage of the attacks, connectedness to the World Trade Center (WTC) and personnel there, and degree of engagement in reparative acts such as giving blood, attending vigils. We found higher levels of ASD, ASD symptoms, PTSD and PTSD symptoms as a function of geographical proximity to New York City (and within the Albany site, proximity of students' homes) and gender. Exposure (hours of TV watched) was a predictor in some instances as was connectedness to WTC victims. ASD symptoms were the strongest predictor of subsequent PTSD symptoms. Path models accounted for over 60% of the variance in PTSD symptoms.     

Developing new treatments: on the interplay between theories, experimental science and clinical innovation

It is often argued that behaviour therapy and cognitive-behaviour therapy have a sound theoretical and experimental basis. In the early days of behaviour therapy, the learning theory accounts that were the basis of treatment made clear suggestions about the procedures that were likely to be effective in treatment. In contrast, more recent cognitive-behavioural models tend to specify targets for therapy, but not the procedures that might be optimal for changing the targets. As a consequence, a considerable amount of work has to be done in order to create an effective cognitive-behavioural treatment from a promising cognitive-behavioural model. The process by which cognitive-behavioural treatments are developed is rarely discussed in the literature. For this reason, the way in which one group has used a mixture of phenomenological, experimental and treatment development studies to create effective cognitive therapy programmes for anxiety disorders is described.     

The Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire: Psychometric properties of a Lithuanian translation in an adolescent sample

The present study provides a preliminary validation of the Lithuanian version of the Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire (SAQ, Nurmi, et al., 1995), a self-reported measure of social and cognitive behavioral strategies. An attempt to validate SAQ subscales was made by correlating them with the Youth Self-Report (Achenbach, 1991) and school grades. This was done with a sample of 14- to 17-year-old adolescents (N= 734). The results showed that although internal consistency reliabilities were good, they were lower when compared with the original version of SAQ. The SAQ subscales were moderately associated with various validity criteria, such as anxiety/depression, withdrawal, social problems and somatic complaints and school grades. Results also showed moderate correlations between similar strategic components across achievement and affiliative situations. The results provide preliminary evidence for concurrent validity of the Lithuanian version of SAQ.     

The Mediation Effect of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms on the Relationship of Intimate Partner Violence and IFN-γ Levels

Background: Women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) report greater stress and negative health consequences than nonabused women. Although an association between psychological stress and altered immune function has been shown, IPV studies have not investigated this relationship. Objective: This study explored the association of IPV with mental health symptoms and an immune marker to determine if posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms mediate the effect of IPV on pro-inflammatory (IFN-γ) cytokine levels. Methods: A cross-sectional, comparative design was used to compare 62 women with IPV and 39 nonabused women. Results: Mean IFN-γ values were higher in abused women and in women with current PTSD symptoms. There were no significant relationships with potential confounding variables that could provide an alternative explanation for the increase in production of proinflammatory cytokines. Conclusions: PTSD symptoms mediate the association between IPV and IFN-γ levels and may partially explain the association of mental health symptoms with physical health sequelae in IPV.     

Semantic and syntactic aspects of the mass/count distinction: a case study of semantic dementia

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of metonymic nouns. While the patient did not show impaired performance on the grammaticality judgment task, he manifested difficulties in making mass/count distinctions in the sentence-picture matching task. It is thus argued that while distributionally the mass/count distinction may be established on a purely syntactic basis, cognitive processing of mass/count information requires both intact syntactic and semantic knowledge.     

Which Executive Functioning Deficits Are Associated With AD/HD,ODD/CD and Comorbid AD/HD+ODD/CD?

This study investigated (1) whether attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) is associated with executive functioning (EF) deficits while controlling for oppositional defiant disorder/conduct disorder (ODD/CD), (2) whether ODD/CD is associated with EF deficits while controlling for AD/HD, and (3)~whether a combination of AD/HD and ODD/CD is associated with EF deficits (and the possibility that there is no association between EF deficits and AD/HD or ODD/CD in isolation). Subjects were 99~children ages 6–12 years. Three putative domains of EF were investigated using well-validated tests: verbal fluency, working memory, and planning. Independent of ODD/CD, AD/HD was associated with deficits in planning and working memory, but not in verbal fluency. Only teacher rated AD/HD, but not parent rated AD/HD, significantly contributed to the prediction of EF task performance. No EF deficits were associated with ODD/CD. The presence of comorbid AD/HD accounts for the EF deficits in children with comorbid AD/HD+ODD/CD. These results suggest that EF deficits are unique to AD/HD and support the model proposed by R. A. Barkley (1997).     

Severity of Emotional and Behavioral Problems Among Poor and Typical Readers

The purpose of this study was to examine the severity of behavioral and emotional problems among adolescents with poor and typical single word reading ability (N = 188) recruited from public schools and followed for a median of 2.4 years. Youth and parents were repeatedly assessed to obtain information regarding the severity and course of symptoms (depression, anxiety, somatic complaints, aggression, delinquent behaviors, inattention), controlling for demographic variables and diagnosis of ADHD. After adjustment for demographic variables and ADHD, poor readers reported higher levels of depression, trait anxiety, and somatic complaints than typical readers, but there were no differences in reported self-reported delinquent or aggressive behaviors. Parent reports indicated no differences in depression, anxiety or aggression between the two groups but indicated more inattention, somatic complaints, and delinquent behaviors for the poor readers. School and health professionals should carefully assess youth with poor reading for behavioral and emotional symptoms and provide services when indicated.     

Combining speed and accuracy to assess error-free cognitive processes

Both the speed and accuracy of responding are important measures of performance. A well-known interpretive difficulty is that participants may differ in their strategy, trading speed for accuracy, with no change in underlying competence. Another difficulty arises when participants respond slowly and inaccurately (rather than quickly but inaccurately), e.g., due to a lapse of attention. We introduce an approach that combines response time and accuracy information and addresses both situations. The modeling framework assumes two latent competing processes. The first, the error-free process, always produces correct responses. The second, the guessing process, results in all observed errors and some of the correct responses (but does so via non-specific processes, e.g., guessing in compliance with instructions to respond on each trial). Inferential summaries of the speed of the error-free process provide a principled assessment of cognitive performance reducing the influences of both fast and slow guesses. Likelihood analysis is discussed for the basic model and extensions. The approach is applied to a data set on response times in a working memory test. The authors wish to thank Roger Ratcliff, Christopher Chabris, and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and Aureliu Lavric for providing the data analyzed in this paper.