Safety Behaviour Enhances the Acceptability of Exposure

Compulsive washing and contamination fears are among the most common symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Research suggests that exposure and response prevention (ERP) is effective for OCD. However, ERP is prone to dropouts and refusals, and a substantial proportion of clients therefore do not receive the care they need. A proposed solution involves the judicious use of safety behaviour to enhance the acceptability of exposure-based interventions. The current study aimed to test this proposed solution. Participants were 70 undergraduate students who completed two exposure exercises for contamination fear, one with safety behaviour and one without. Participants then rated the acceptability of the two exercises. Exposure with safety behaviour (ESB) was rated as significantly more acceptable than ERP. Furthermore, subjective fear ratings were lower and behavioural approach to a series of contaminants was greater in the ESB condition. Results demonstrated the acceptability-enhancing potential of safety behaviour in exposure, and are discussed in terms of both theoretical and practical aspects of safety behaviour, exposure, and evidence-based interventions for anxiety disorders.     

Perception of threat and safety at work among employees in the Norwegian ministries after the 2011 Oslo bombing

Background and objectives: Terrorism can heighten fears and undermine the feeling of safety. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence threat and safety perception after terrorism. The aim of the present study was to explore how proximity to terror and posttraumatic stress reactions are associated with perceived threat and safety after a workplace terrorist attack. Design and methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was administered to employees in 14 of 17 Norwegian ministries 9–10 months after the 2011 bombing of the government headquarters in Oslo (n = 3520). Results: About 198 of 1881 employees completing the survey were at work when the bomb exploded. Regression analysis showed that this high-exposed group had elevated perceived threat (β = 0.36; 95% CI = 0.19 to 0.53) and reduced perceived safety (β = ?0.42; 95% CI = ?0.62 to ?0.23) compared to a reference group of employees not at work. After adjusting for posttraumatic stress reactions, however, proximity to the explosion no longer mattered, whereas posttraumatic stress was associated with both high perceived threat (β = 0.55; 95% CI = 0.48 to 0.63) and low perceived safety (β = ?0.71; 95% CI, ?0.80 to ?0.63). Conclusion: Terror-exposed employees feel more threatened and less safe after a workplace terrorist attack, and this is closely linked to elevated levels of posttraumatic stress reactions.     

Temporal cue–target overlap is not essential for backward inhibition in task switching

Lag 2 repetition costs are a performance cost observed when participants return to a task after just one intervening trial of a different task, compared to returning after a longer interval (AB A vs. CB A sequences, where A, B, C are tasks). This effect is known as backward inhibition (BI) and is thought to reflect the need to overcome inhibition applied specifically to Task “A” during disengagement at trial n – 1. Druey and Hübner (2007) Druey, M. and Hübner, R. 2007. The role of temporal cue–target overlap in backward inhibition under task switching. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14: 749–754. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] have suggested that employment of such a specific inhibitory mechanism relies upon the cue and the target of the task overlapping temporally. We provide evidence across three experiments (including a direct replication attempt) that this is not the case, and that the presence of task-specific BI relies to some extent on the need to translate the cue–target relationship into working memory. Additionally, we provide evidence that faster responses in no overlap conditions are driven by low-level perceptual differences between target displays across overlap conditions. We conclude that BI is an effective sequential control mechanism, employed equally in cases of temporally overlapping and temporally separated cues and targets.     

Mediated conditioning versus retrospective revaluation in humans: The influence of physical and functional similarity of cues

Two experiments assessed whether similarity between the two elements of a compound would influence the degree of mediated extinction versus recovery from overshadowing in human causal judgements. In both Experiments 1 and 2, we assessed the influence of extinguishing one element of a two-element compound on judgements about the other element. In Experiment 1 we manipulated the physical similarity of the two elements of the compound; in Experiment 2, we used equivalence and distinctiveness pretraining in order to vary their functional similarity. We found that these procedures influenced mediated extinction and recovery from overshadowing as a function of both physical and acquired similarity and distinctiveness, respectively. The implications of these results for previously reported differences between humans and nonprimate animals are discussed.     

The 36th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: An associative analysis of spatial learning

The ability of animals to find important goals in their environment has been said to require a form of learning that is qualitatively different from that normally studied in the conditioning laboratory. Such spatial learning has been said to depend upon the construction of a global representation of the environment, and the acquisition of knowledge about the position of goals with reference to this representation is said to be unaffected by the presence of other cues or landmarks. To evaluate the first of these claims, experiments are described that investigated the extent to which the effects of training in one environment transfer to another. To evaluate the second claim, experiments are described that investigated whether cue competition effects normally found in conditioning studies can be found in spatial tasks. Overall, the results indicate that most of the phenomena of spatial learning can be explained by the principles of associative learning. The implications of the reported results for an understanding of the neural mechanisms of spatial learning are considered.     

Age differences in contingency judgement linked to perceptual segregation

We demonstrate large differences in judging positive and null contingencies between younger and older adults with a task commonly used to explore cue competition in both contingency and causality judgements. The one-phase blocking task uses two cues, with separate contingencies with the same outcome. The age differences persisted even when participants knew in advance which of the two contingencies to judge. The age differences disappeared, however, when the stimulus display contained markers aiding perceptual segregation. We suggest that the age differences elicited in the one-phase blocking task are linked to decrements in perceptual segregation.     

Control processes in voluntary and explicitly cued task switching

Explicitly cued task switching slows performance relative to performing the same task on consecutive trials. This effect appears to be due partly to more efficient encoding of the task cue when the same cue is used on consecutive trials and partly to an additional task-switching process. These components were examined by comparing explicitly cued and voluntary task switching groups, with external cues presented to both groups. Cue-switch effects varied in predictable ways to dissociate explicitly cued and voluntary task switching, whereas task-switch effects had similar characteristics for both instructional groups. The data were well fitted by a mathematical model of task switching that included a cue-encoding mechanism (whereby cue repetition improves performance) and an additional process that was invoked on task-switch trials. Analyses of response-time distributions suggest that this additional process involves task-set reconfiguration that may or may not be engaged before the target stimulus is presented.     

Name Letter Preferences Are Not Merely Mere Exposure: Implicit Egotism as Self-Regulation

People prefer the letters in their own names to letters that are not in their own names. Furthermore, people prefer the numbers in their own birthdays to numbers not in their own birthdays. In this article we argue that these examples of implicit egotism are best conceptualized as the product of unconscious self-regulation processes rather than a result of mere exposure. In support of this hypothesis, a study of name-letter preferences showed that people preferred their own name letters even when these letters were relatively rare. Furthermore, the name-letter and birthday-number preferences of high and low self-esteem participants diverged in response to an experimentally manipulated self-concept threat. We conclude that implicit egotism, specifically name-letter and birthday-number preferences, represent a form of unconscious self-regulation. Implications of these results for the mere exposure explanation of name-letter preferences and for theory and research in implicit egotism are discussed.     

Adolescent reading skill and engagement with digital and traditional literacies as predictors of reading comprehension

This study investigates the concurrent predictors of adolescent reading comprehension (literal, inferential) for fiction and non‐fiction texts. Predictors were examined from the cognitive (word identification, reading fluency), psychological (gender), and ecological (print exposure) domains. Print exposure to traditional and digital texts was surveyed using a diary method of reading habits. A cross‐sectional sample of 312 students in early (11–13 years) or middle adolescence (14–15 years) participated from a range of SES backgrounds. Word identification emerged as a strong predictor of reading comprehension across adolescence and text genres. Gender effects favouring female students were evident for reading frequency but not for reading skill itself. Reading habits also differed, and comprehension advantages were observed among females for fiction and males for non‐fiction. Age effects emerged for reading frequency, which was lower in middle adolescence. Although more time was spent on digital than on traditional texts, traditional extended text reading was the only reading habit to predict inference‐making in comprehension and to distinguish skilled from less skilled comprehenders. The theoretical and educational implications of these results are discussed.