Integrity of Literature on Expressed Emotion and Relapse in Patients with Schizophrenia Verified by a p‐Curve Analysis

There is growing concern that much published research may have questionable validity due to phenomena such as publication bias and p‐hacking. Within the psychiatric literature, the construct of expressed emotion (EE) is widely assumed to be a reliable predictor of relapse across a range of mental illnesses. EE is an index of the family climate, measuring how critical, hostile, and overinvolved a family member is toward a mentally ill patient. No study to date has examined the evidential value of this body of research as a whole. That is to say, although many studies have shown a link between EE and symptom relapse, the integrity of the literature from which this claim is derived has not been tested. In an effort to confirm the integrity of the literature of EE predicting psychiatric relapse in patients with schizophrenia, we conducted a p‐curve analysis on all known studies examining EE (using the Camberwell Family Interview) to predict psychiatric relapse over a 9‐ to 12‐month follow‐up period. Results suggest that the body of literature on EE is unbiased and has integrity, as there was a significant right skew of p‐values, a nonsignificant left skew of p‐values, and a nonsignificant test of flatness. We conclude that EE is a robust and valuable predictor of symptom relapse in schizophrenia.     

Caregiver Expressed Emotion and Psychiatric Symptoms in African‐Americans with Schizophrenia: An Attempt to Understand the Paradoxical Relationship

Expressed emotion (EE) is a family environmental construct that assesses how much criticism, hostility, and/or emotional over‐involvement a family member expresses about a patient (Hooley, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 2007, 3, 329). Having high levels of EE within the family environment has generally been associated with poorer patient outcomes for schizophrenia and a range of other disorders. Paradoxically, for African‐American patients, high‐EE may be associated with a better symptom course (Rosenfarb, Bellack, & Aziz, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2006, 115, 112). However, this finding is in need of additional support and, if confirmed, clarification. In line with previous research, using a sample of 30 patients with schizophrenia and their primary caregivers, we hypothesized that having a caregiver classified as low‐EE would be associated with greater patient symptom severity. We also aimed to better understand why this pattern may exist by examining the content of interviews taken from the Five‐Minute Speech Sample. Results supported study hypotheses. In line with Rosenfarb et al. (2006), having a low‐EE caregiver was associated with greater symptom severity in African‐American patients. A content analysis uncovered some interesting patterns that may help elucidate this finding. Results of this study suggest that attempts to lower high‐EE in African Americans may, in fact, be counterproductive.     

Social Media and Language Processing: How Facebook and Twitter Provide the Best Frequency Estimates for Studying Word Recognition

Corpus‐based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora (such as movie subtitles) are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency‐based estimators of lexical decision reaction times (up to 3.6% increase in explained variance). The results are robust (observed for Twitter‐ and Facebook‐based frequencies on American English and British English datasets) and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.     

How are recent changes to primary care mental health provision within the NHS affecting psychodynamic counsellors’ construction and management of their professional identities? A Foucauldian perspective

The research used Foucauldian techniques to explore how counsellors currently working for the NHS construct and manage their professional identities in the face of changes imposed on them by the institution. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with four counsellors and one doctoral student, all with substantial experience working for the NHS. A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis revealed four main subjectivities that were made available; feeling like part of a process at times; the NHS imposes limitations on their practice; feeling able to retain their professional standards despite the limitations and lack of influence; feeling proud of, and satisfied with the work they do. Places in which the participants explored ways of constructing a professional identity were also explored.     

就业危机形势下——大学生就业心理问题分析及对策研究

在当前就业危机的严峻形势下,大学生就业是一个社会热点和难点问题。大学生的就业压力越来越大,由此导致大学生出现了自卑、不平衡、自负等一系列的就业心理问题。本文就大学生就业心理问题的表现、产生就业心理问题的原因以及应采取的措施作以分析。     

Influence of suggestion in the DRM paradigm: what state of consciousness is associated with false memory?

We assessed the effect of suggestion on the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm and associated it with the Remember–Know–Guess paradigm. Undergraduate students were given either lists of semantically related words or texts containing these words. After the recall task, if participants did not produce the critical lure, the experimenter suggested that the word had been present, using either a question (moderate suggestion) or an assertion (strong suggestion); these conditions were compared to a condition without suggestion. Afterwards, participants took a recognition test. The results showed that strong suggestions lead to more false recognitions than other conditions and the state of consciousness associated with false recognitions tends to be a feeling of knowing rather than remembering, regardless of the verbal version (list or text). Therefore moderate suggestions did not lead to more false recognitions compare to no suggestion. We discuss the impact of suggestion on consciousness associated with false memories.     

Withdrawal Aversion and the Equivalence Test

If a doctor is trying to decide whether or not to provide a medical treatment, does it matter ethically whether that treatment has already been started? Health professionals sometimes find it harder to stop a treatment (withdraw) than to refrain from starting the treatment (withhold). But does that feeling correspond to an ethical difference? In this article, we defend equivalence—the view that withholding and withdrawal of treatment are ethically equivalent when all other factors are equal. We argue that preference for withholding over withdrawal could represent a form of cognitive bias—withdrawal aversion. Nevertheless, we consider whether there could be circumstances in which there is a moral difference. We identify four examples of conditional nonequivalence. Finally, we reflect on the moral significance of diverging intuitions and the implications for policy. We propose a set of practical strategies for helping to reduce bias in end-of-life decision making, including the equivalence test.     

Multidimensional Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdCRQA) – A Method for Quantifying Correlation between Multivariate Time-Series

In this paper, Multidimensional Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdCRQA) is introduced. It is an extension of Multidimensional Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdRQA), which allows to quantify the (auto-)recurrence properties of a single multidimensional time-series. MdCRQA extends MdRQA to bi-variate cases to allow for the quantification of the co-evolution of two multidimensional time-series. Moreover, it is shown how a Diagonal Cross-Recurrence Profile (DCRP) can be computed from the MdCRQA output that allows to capture time-lagged coupling between two multidimensional time-series. The core concepts of these analyses are described, as well as practical aspects of their application. In the supplementary materials to this paper, implementations of MdCRQA and the DCRP as MatLab- and R-functions are provided.     

Trends in Women's Participation at the Meetings of the Association for Behavior Analysis: 1975-2005

We examined women's participation, relative to men's, at the annual meetings of the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA) between 1975 and 2005. Among our findings are upward trends in female presenters across formats (e.g., posters), types of authorship (e.g., first authors), and specialty areas (e.g., autism). Where women have attained parity, however, they are still often underrepresented, given their percentage of membership. Women also participate less than men as sole and invited authors and discussants and in the domains of basic research and conceptual analysis, but participate more than men in the applied domain. Data from the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis show parallel but delayed trends toward parity in basic and applied research, whereas data from The Behavior Analyst show only modest gains in the conceptual domain. We discuss the gender disparities in ABA's more prestigious categories of participation (e.g., invited addresses) and across its content domains, as well as in science in general, and the role of social and cultural factors in producing the disparities and how behavior analysts might aid in correcting them.