Treating Speech Anxiety in Youth: A Randomized Controlled Microtrial Testing the Efficacy of Exposure Only Versus Exposure Combined With Anxiety Management Strategies

CBT for anxious youth usually combines anxiety management strategies (AMS) with exposure, with exposure assumed to be critical for treatment success. To limit therapy time while retaining effectiveness, one might optimize CBT by restricting treatment to necessary components. This study tested whether devoting all sessions to exposure is more effective in reducing speech anxiety in youth than devoting half to AMS including cognitive or relaxation strategies and half to exposure. After a 6-week waitlist period, adolescents with speech anxiety (N = 65; age 12–15; 42 girls) were randomized to a 5-session in-school group-based CBT training consisting of either (1) exposure-only (EXP+EXP) or (2) cognitive strategies followed by exposure (COG+EXP) or (3) relaxation strategies followed by exposure (REL+EXP). Clinical interviews, speech tests, and self-report measures were assessed at pretest, posttest, and follow-up. For all conditions (a) the intervention period resulted in a stronger decline of speech anxiety than waitlist period; (b) there was a large sized reduction of speech anxiety that was maintained at six-week follow-up; (c) there was no meaningful difference in the efficacy of EXP+EXP versus COG+EXP or REL+EXP. These findings suggest that devoting all sessions to exposure is not more effective than combining exposure with AMS. AMS appeared neither necessary for CBT to be effective, nor necessary for youth to tolerate exposure. This indicates that CBT can be optimized by restricting treatment to exposure.     

Prophetic performatives: the New Age’s pending efficacy through self-prophecy

This paper broadens the limited area of scholarship on New Age spiritualism by providing and explanation for the suasive force of one of its main themes, the ‘Law of Attraction’. Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, is utilised as emblematic of the doctrine, where the individual is seen to engage in a dynamic similar to that of classical predictive prophecy, with the role of prophet being internalised. Three elements discussed are the positioning of the prophet, prophecy’s temporal ambiguity, and its linguistic tense. This paper suggests that the Law of Attraction re-imagines and employs the predictive prophetic structure and suggests that such a belief can act as a fetish.     

Articles of Faith: Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression within contemporary multicultural liberal democracies. These two fundamental human rights have increasingly been seen, in public and political discourse, in terms of tension if not outright opposition, a view reinforced by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015. And yet in every human rights charter they are proximate to one another. This essay argues that this adjacency is not coincidental, that it has a history and that, in illuminating this history, it is possible to explore how the contemporary framing of these two rights as being in opposition has come about. Looking back to the framing of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the essay offers an historical perspective that, in turn, facilitates a reappraisal and re-evaluation of these two liberties that is the necessary, albeit insufficient, predicate to the task of addressing the problematic of multicultural ‘crisis' in the contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, in which the presence of certain religious communities (Muslims, in particular) and the role of religion in public and political life more generally (and, conversely, of secularism) has assumed a central importance.     

Ethnic Speech and Ethnic Action as Ethnic Behavior: Part 1. Construction of the Brunel Ethnic Behavior Inventory

This article reports the construction of a new survey—specifically, the Brunel Ethnic Behavior Inventory (BEBI)—designed to measure ethnic speech and ethnic action as separate, yet related, aspects of individuals’ ethnic behavior. Using Tajfel’s social identity theory as a conceptual frame of reference, this study sought an answer to the research question of how many factors actually are measured by the BEBI, and tested the hypothesis that a two-factor model (i.e., Ethnic Speech and Ethnic Action as two correlated factors) would provide significantly better goodness of fit to the correlational data than would a one-factor model (i.e., Ethnic Behavior as one undifferentiated factor). Across one pilot sample (n = 101) and two main samples (n = 120 for Sample 1, n = 148 for Sample 2), the study found that not only did the BEBI measure two factors at most (i.e., Ethnic Speech and Ethnic Action) but, consistent with the hypothesis, the two-factor model yielded better goodness of fit than did the one-factor model. Implications for the conceptualization and measurement of Verkuyten’s “ways of ethnicity” are discussed.     

Inner speech sustains predictable task switching: direct evidence in adults

It has been proposed that inner speech supports task selection in task-switching studies, especially when the need for endogenous control is increased. This has been established through the suppression of inner speech in cognitive-flexibility tasks that leads to poorer performance. The aim of this study is to quantify the role of inner speech in a flexibility task by using surface laryngeal electromyography, which, contrary to previous studies, enables participants to freely verbalise the tasks. We manipulated endogenous and exogenous flexibility in a mathematical switching task paradigm. Experiment 1 shows that inner speech acts as a support for switching and is recruited more often when the tasks are of an endogenous type. The main result of Experiment 2 that language is recruited more for the mixing cost than for the switch cost (regardless of the endogenous factor) extends past findings obtained through articulatory suppression.     

The final chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech: A reader's guide

The seventh and last chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934) is generally considered as his final word in psychology. It is a long chapter with a complex argumentative structure in which Vygotsky gives his view on the relationship between thinking and speech. Vygotsky's biographers have stated that the chapter was dictated in the final months of Vygotsky's life when his health was rapidly deteriorating. Although the chapter is famous, its structure has never been analyzed in any detail. In the present article we reveal its rhetorical structure and show how Vygotsky drew on many hitherto unrevealed sources to convince the reader of his viewpoint.     

Pure word deafness and the bilateral processing of the speech code

The analysis of pure word deafness (PWD) suggests that speech perception, construed as the integration of acoustic information to yield representations that enter into the linguistic computational system, (i) is separable in a modular sense from other aspects of auditory cognition and (ii) is mediated by the posterior superior temporal cortex in both hemispheres. PWD data are consistent with neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence in a manner that suggests that the speech code is analyzed bilaterally. The typical lateralization associated with language processing is a property of the computational system that acts beyond the analysis of the input signal. The hypothesis of the bilateral mediation of the speech code does not imply that both sides execute the same computation. It is proposed that the speech signal is asymmetrically analyzed in the time domain, with left‐hemisphere mechanisms preferentially extracting information over shorter (25–50 ms) temporal integration windows and right mechanisms over longer (150–250 ms) windows.     

工作记忆中的语音回路对汉语阅读理解的影响

语音回路是工作记忆中一个重要的组成部分,主要负责加工和存储语音信息。采用混合实验设计,以正确数和反应时 为指标,汉语语篇为阅读材料,探讨工作记忆中的语音回路对汉语阅读理解的影响。本研究包括两个实验,实验一采用发音抑制的范式,结合错误干扰考察了语音回路中的发音复述装置对汉语阅读理解的影响;实验二采用无关言语的范式,结合错误干扰考察了语音回路中的语音存储装置对汉语阅读理解的影响。结果表明：(1)通过发音抑制和无关言语的方法证明,语音回路中的发音复述装置和语音存储装置在汉语阅读理解中起着重要作用。(2) 字音和字形都影响汉语的阅读理解,但字形比字音起着更大的作用,而且它们的作用机制也不相同,字音直接进入语音存储装置,而字形要经过字音的转换进入语音存储装置。(3) 词频与语音回路有密切关系,语音回路中的发音复述装置的作用在高频词上有明显的表现。(4) 词频与字形、字音也有密切关系,在低频词的条件下,字形的作用大于字音的作用