THE CUMULATIVE QUALITY OF CULTURE EXPLAINS HUMAN UNIQUENESS

What explains the unique features of human culture? Culture is not uniquely human, but human culture is uniquely cumulative. Cumulative culture is a product of our collective intelligence and is supported by cognitive processes and learning strategies that enable people to acquire, transform, and transmit information and technologies within and across generations. Technological and social innovations are currently driving unprecedented changes in cultural complexity and diversity. Innovation is a cognitively and socially complex, multistep process that typically requires (cumulative) cultural learning to achieve. I argue that the technological solutions that characterize twenty-first-century innovation can only be explained by understanding both the capacity to learn from and build upon the insights of others and the transmission systems that store the knowledge and technologies of previous generations. Human uniqueness is a product of cumulative cultural learning, transmission, and innovation.     

Psychobiological Treatment Response to a Two-Week Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Integrated Treatment Program: A Case Report

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) demonstrate high prevalence and comorbidity among post-9/11 veterans. Veterans with this comorbidity often present with multiple co-occurring healthcare needs and increased clinical complexity. The current case report describes the clinical presentation of a veteran with mild TBI and PTSD, both before, during, and after treatment within a multidisciplinary 2-week intensive outpatient program involving prolonged exposure, evidence-based PTSD treatment, and Cognitive Symptom Management and Rehabilitation Therapy, evidence-based treatment for postconcussive symptoms. Mr. A was a 25-year-old White, transgender male who presented with a complex mental health history. At intake, presenting complaints included anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares, and depression secondary to military sexual trauma, as well as reported cognitive difficulties secondary to a concussion. He met current criteria for PTSD as well as panic disorder with agoraphobia. Head injury history consisted of a motor vehicle collision with less than 30 seconds loss of consciousness, brief posttraumatic amnesia, and alterations of consciousness. Mr. A demonstrated habituation during individual exposure sessions as assessed via skin conductance during imaginal exposures and decreased subjective ratings during in vivo exposures, as well as a decrease in trauma-potentiated startle response to trauma cues. Posttreatment data indicates significant reduction in neurobehavioral, posttraumatic stress, and depression symptoms and significant improvement in subjective cognitive functioning. The current findings support the feasibility and efficacy of short-term integrated treatment for complex clinical presentations and the need for larger scale research investigating combined PTSD and TBI intervention.     

Intensive Cognitive Processing Therapy Associated With Reduced PTSD Treatment Dropout in a Case-Controlled Study of Treatment-Seeking Veterans

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an empirically supported psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The complex issue of treatment attrition is a frequently cited concern regarding CPT and other evidence-based psychotherapies for PTSD. The current study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of “intensive” CPT, a treatment-consistent modification of CPT in which sessions are conducted more frequently than standard protocol. Fifty-four military veterans (20% female; M_age = 46; 80% Caucasian) seeking outpatient treatment for PTSD were included in this study. Patients who elected to receive intensive CPT (n = 27) were matched with archival records of individuals who received standard CPT (n = 27). Patients across treatment conditions were matched based on baseline symptom severity as measured by the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5; M_PCL-5 = 52.61). Treatment outcomes were compared and longitudinal multilevel modeling was used to compare rate of symptom change over time. Patients who elected to engage in intensive CPT were twice as likely to complete treatment (88.9%) as those who received standard CPT (44.4%), X²(1, N = 54) = 12.00, p = .001. On average, intensive CPT patients completed treatment in about 25% of the time as standard CPT patients (33.8 days vs. 125.7 days). Patients in intensive CPT also demonstrated greater benefit: 81.4% reported a clinically significant improvement in PCL-5 scores compared to 51.8% of those in standard CPT, X²(1, N = 54) = 5.33, p = .020, φ = −0.314. Intensive and standard CPT performed comparably in regard to final PCL-5 score, change over time, and screening cutoff. In addition, there were no differences in treatment outcomes based on licensure status of the provider nor whether treatment was delivered in person or virtually. Intensive CPT represents a novel, treatment-consistent adaptation that was utilized to treat a group of veterans with PTSD with minimal treatment dropout. Patients who elected to engage in more frequent treatment were more likely to complete treatment, did so in one quarter of the time, and reported similar to better treatment outcomes. Providers may consider encouraging their patients to participate in treatment as frequently as they are able. However, preliminary findings are based on a nonrandom sample and design limitations temper conclusions.     

Ask me why,don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking

Identifying abstract relations is essential for commonsense reasoning. Research suggests that even young children can infer relations such as “same” and “different,” but often fail to apply these concepts. Might the process of explaining facilitate the recognition and application of relational concepts? Based on prior work suggesting that explanation can be a powerful tool to promote abstract reasoning, we predicted that children would be more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone. Five- and 6-year-olds were given a modified Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) task, with repeated demonstrations of relational (same) matches by an adult. Half of the children were prompted to explain these matches; the other half reported the match they observed. Children who were prompted to explain showed immediate, stable success, while those only asked to report the outcome of the pedagogical demonstration did not. Findings provide evidence that explanation facilitates early abstraction over and above demonstration alone.     

Psychotherapists’ psychological well-being: The role of epistemic orientation and emotion regulation

Psychotherapists’ mental health has been traditionally associated with the harmful consequences of clinical practice. In contrast to this dominant model, a growing body of research in positive psychology has sparked an interest in therapists’ positive well-being. The main objective of this study was to examine the relations between therapists’ epistemic orientation modes, emotion regulation strategies and psychological well-being (PWB). This was a cross-sectional study in which participants were 674 therapists (78.5% women), with a mean age of 42.02 years (SD = 13.06). Therapists completed an online questionnaire containing self-report measures of all study variables. Structural equation modelling using latent variables was performed to test the study hypotheses. Results revealed no significant direct effects of epistemic orientation on PWB. Up- and downregulation strategies had the most substantial direct effects on total PWB. Furthermore, emotion regulation mediated the association between therapists’ epistemic orientation modes and PWB, accounting for 57% of the variance in the outcome variable. Implications for training, practice and therapist self-care are discussed.     

Associations between risk factors,developmental outcomes,and executive function in neonatal intensive care unit graduates at 2 years: A retrospective study

This study explores the extent to which medical and sociodemographic variables and cognitive and language skills are associated with executive function (EF) skills in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) graduates at 24 months of adjusted age. We explored cognitive, language, and EF skills in 42 NICU graduates who participated in a NICU follow-up programme clinic. The association between risk factors and EF and the completion of the EF assessment were explored. Correlational analyses revealed that child gender was associated with EF scores. Analyses revealed cognitive skills, language skills, and multiple gestational births were associated with EF assessment completion. Our findings are among the first to examine EF skills in NICU graduates as young as 24 months of age using a multidimensional, child completed measure. Implications for NICU follow up programmes, the consideration of early interventions aimed to positively affect EF skills, and considerations for future studies are discussed.     

Who is a thinker? With age,higher SES American children increasingly associate social status with divisions in labour

This exploratory report investigates how children, aged 6- to 12-years, reason about divisions in labour. It focuses on understanding when in development children might associate higher status groups with intellectual as opposed to physical labour. It explores this question by introducing a sample of mostly mid/high-SES American children to a novel factory setting and then asking them who is likely to have one of two jobs: a ‘builder’ (physical labour), or ‘thinker’ (intellectual labour) job. Older children were more likely than younger children to associate an individual's higher social status with intellectual labour work as opposed to physical labour work. Children also explained their reasoning, and with age their explanations focused more on social factors like the role of access to ‘choices’ or opportunities in shaping the nature of others' work.     

A vignette study of novices' interviewing skills of asylum seekers

The aim of the current research was to replicate Van Veldhuizen, Horselenberg, Landstrom, et al.’s (2017) vignette study among novice Estonian police cadets to map their interviewing skills. Sixty-one police cadets from the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences were asked to respond to one of four vignettes that contained fictitious asylum narratives. Two of the vignettes contained no evidence for the origin of the asylum seeker, and the other two contained no evidence for the claim of persecution. The cadets were asked to formulate five questions that would help them to assess the credibility of the applicant's claim. We coded the style, type, and content of the questions. Our analyses showed that, in line with best practice, the cadets mainly formulated open questions in an information-gathering style. A thematic analysis revealed that when a claim about origin was assessed, cadets typically formulated questions about life in the country of origin, identity documents, and the flight to Europe. When assessing a persecution claim, in contrast, they mostly formulated case-specific questions.