The paradoxical effects of suppressing anxious thoughts during imminent threat

In line with the ironic processing theory of Wegner (Psychol. Rev. 101 (1994) 34), it is often argued that the suppression of anxiety-related thoughts results in a paradoxical increase of anxiety and thought intrusions, both after and during the thought suppression. In a sample of undergraduate students (14 men, 18 women), we investigated the effects of suppressing anxious thoughts about an imminent painful electrocutaneous stimulus. During thought suppression, self-reported anxiety and frequency of anxious thoughts did not increase, and duration of anxious thoughts decreased. After thought suppression, participants experienced an increase in self-reported anxiety and the frequency of anxious thoughts. There was no effect upon thought duration. The results support the idea that suppression of anxiety-related thoughts may result in a paradoxical increase in anxiety, and may cause and/or maintain anxiety problems.     

Pain anxiety among chronic pain patients: specific phobia or manifestation of anxiety sensitivity?

Rather than viewing anxiety among chronic pain patients as simply a component of negative affectivity, investigators have developed a model of "pain anxiety" in which patients develop fear and avoidance of activity linked to pain. We examined whether pain anxiety can be conceptualized as a specific phobia, or whether evidence supported the notion that pain anxiety is better understood as a manifestation of anxiety sensitivity in the context of chronic pain. Chronic musculoskeletal pain patients (N=70) underwent cold pressor and mental arithmetic tasks while cardiovascular, self-report, and behavior indexes were recorded. They completed measures of pain anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, fear of negative evaluation, depression and trait anxiety. Correlation analyses showed pain anxiety was related to pain-relevant responses during cold pressor, but it was also related to evaluation-relevant responses during cold pressor, and to pain- and evaluation-relevant responses (including subtraction accuracy) during mental arithmetic. Regression analyses showed that almost all effects of pain anxiety on task responses were accounted for by anxiety sensitivity. Fear of negative evaluation, in contrast, correlated only with evaluation-relevant responses, and mostly during mental arithmetic. These effects remained significant when depression, trait anxiety, or anxiety sensitivity were statistically controlled. Pain anxiety may be an expression of anxiety sensitivity rather than a circumscribed phobia; a distinction that could profitably guide treatment strategies.     

Rigidity in children's drawings and its relation with representational change

Four studies tested the application of to the drawing domain. In particular, we tested her claim that young children are inhibited in their attempts at changing their graphic representations (representational change) due to being constrained by the order in which the elements of the representation are drawn (procedural rigidity). The first study required 60 children (4- to 6-year-olds and an older comparison group of 8-year-olds) to make three drawings of a familiar and novel topic. From these drawings each child was measured for procedural rigidity. In a further drawing the child was asked to modify their usual representation of each topic. Regression analyses revealed procedural rigidity levels were not predictive of manipulation performance. A second study, testing 75 4- to 6-year-olds and a third study, testing 30 3- to 4-year-olds, revealed that when young children were specifically asked to manipulate rigid sub-procedures on a familiar topic they were indeed able to do so. Finally, a fourth study (testing 40 5-year-olds and 40 8-year-olds) removed the notational trace in drawing (a possible aid for procedural interruption) but this still produced no evidence of a relation between procedural rigidity and representational change. We suggest how the concept of procedural rigidity might be re-interpreted for the drawing domain so that the RR model can remain as a domain-general theory of cognitive development. We also suggest the development of information processing may be crucial for flexibility in drawing.     

General self-efficacy,dental anxiety and multiple fears among 20-year-olds in Norway

This paper examines the extent to which low general self-efficacy and painful dental and medical experiences are related to dental anxiety, multiple fears and to avoidance of dental care. A total of 754 20-year-olds completed a series of questionnaires, including the General Self-efficacy Scale (GSE), Geer Fear Scale (GFS) and Dental Fear Survey (DFS). Females had lower self-efficacy, higher dental anxiety and higher scores on the GFS than males. Multivariate analyses (linear stepwise regression) indicated that painful dental experiences, a high score on the GFS and negative opinions about own dental health explained 37% of the variance in DFS scores. Self-efficacy had no predictive power for dental anxiety, and only dental anxiety had predictive power for dental avoidance behavior. Thirty-eight percent of the total variance in GFS scores was explained by the following variables: being a female, high dental anxiety (DFS), low general self-efficacy (GSE) and low educational level of the mother.     

Global and local covert visual attention: Evidence from a bayesian hidden markov model

Psychological, psychophysical and physiological research indicates that people switch between two covert attention states, local and global attention, while visually exploring complex scenes. The focus in the local attention state is on specific aspects and details of the scene, and on examining its content with greater visual detail. The focus in the global attention state is on exploring the informative and perceptually salient areas of the scene, and possibly on integrating the information contained therein. The existence of these two visual attention states, their relative prevalence and sequence in time has remained empirically untested to date. To fill this gap, we develop a psychometric model of visual covert attention that extends recent work on hidden Markov models, and we test it using eye-movement data. The model aims to describe the observed time series of saccades typically collected in eye-movement research by assuming a latent Markov process, indicative of the brain switching between global and local covert attention. We allow subjects to be in either state while exploring a stimulus visually, and to switch between them an arbitrary number of times. We relax the no-memory-property of the Markov chain. The model that we develop is estimated with MCMC methodology and calibrated on eye-movement data collected in a study of consumers' attention to print advertisements in magazines.We thank Dominique Claessens of Verify International for making the data available to us.     

Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: the politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology

Peace accords and international interventions have contributed to the suspension of armed conflict and the censuring of repressive regimes in many parts of the world. Some governments and their opposition parties have agreed to the establishment of commissions or other bodies designed to create historical records of the violations of human rights and foster conditions that facilitate reparatory and reconciliatory processes. This paper explores selected roles that community psychologists have played in this process of remembering the past and constructing new identities towards creating a more just future. With reference to two community groups (in Guatemala and South Africa) we show how efforts to speak out about one's own experiences of political and military repression involve complex representational politics that go beyond the simple binary opposition of silencing versus giving voice. The Guatemalan group consisted of Mayan Ixil women who, together with the first author, used participatory action research and the PhotoVoice technique to produce a book about their past and present struggles. The South African group, working within the ambit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in collaboration with the third author and others, explored ways of speaking about their roles in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Although both these initiatives can be seen as moments in on-going struggles to overcome externally-imposed repressive practices that censor the voices of marginalized communities, they also serve to dispel overly romanticized notions of univocal communities now liberated to express themselves in an unmediated and unequivocal fashion. The paper discusses how each group of women instead entered into subtly nuanced relationships with community psychologists involving a continual interplay between the authenticity of their self-representational accounts and the requirements of the discursive technologies into which they were being inducted and the material conditions within their sites of struggle. In both cases the group's agenda also evolved over time, so that what emerged was not so much a particular account of themselves, or even the development of a particular voice for speaking about themselves, but an unfolding process—for the groups and for the community psychologists who accompanied them—of becoming active players in the postmodern, mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.     

From I: A/M to “Who am I?”—Aggregation/Massification and Trauma-Based Affects and Object Relations in Groups: A Response to Earl Hopper

Hopper's portrayal of the fourth basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification has two components: (1) a revision of Turquet's theory of BA Oneness to incorporate the polarity of aggregation and massification stemming from annihilation anxiety; and (2) a conception of the difficult patient as having an encapsulated psychosis. Hopper's theory of the encapsulated psychosis offers an important but incomplete perspective in explaining borderline and narcissistic pathology, as well as psychological trauma. In this response to Hopper, I suggest that the fourth assumption is in fact a still more primitive state of boundary opening and closing. I also see a need to differentiate trauma as such from borderline pathology, and further hold that the relationship between Hopper's British Independent theory and trauma theories based on dissociation needs to be clarified.     

Examining the effectiveness of a community-based self-help program to increase women's readiness for smoking cessation

This study investigated the effectiveness of two components of a smoking cessation intervention: a reading manual and a series of televised programs. Female smokers in the Chicago metropolitan area with a high school education or less were interviewed at 4 different times: baseline, immediate postintervention, and 6 and 12 months. We examined the effects of several baseline measures (race, age, number of cigarettes smoked, and stage of readiness to change) and exposure to the intervention components on subsequent stage of change. Race, baseline smoking rate, baseline stage, and exposure to both intervention components had direct effects on stage at immediate postintervention, with both intervention components increasing readiness to quit. Furthermore, exposure to the manual interacted with baseline stage, such that the manual benefited women at earlier stages more than women at later stages. Effects of both components were sustained at 6 months, and the effects of the manual were sustained at 12 months.     

Resistance to change of operant variation and repetition

A multiple chained schedule was used to compare the relative resistance to change of variable and fixed four-peck response sequences in pigeons. In one terminal link, a response sequence produced food only if it occurred infrequently relative to 15 other response sequences (vary). In the other terminal link, a single response sequence produced food (repeat). Identical variable-interval schedules operated in the initial links. During baseline, lower response rates generally occurred in the vary initial link, and similar response and reinforcement rates occurred in each terminal link. Resistance of responding to prefeeding and three rates of response-independent food delivered during the intercomponent intervals then was compared between components. During each disruption condition, initial- and terminal-link response rates generally were more resistant in the vary component than in the repeat component. During the response-independent food conditions, terminal-link response rates were more resistant than initial-link response rates in each component, but this did not occur during prefeeding. Variation (in vary) and repetition (in repeat) both decreased during the response-independent food conditions in the respective components, but with relatively greater disruption in repeat. These results extend earlier findings demonstrating that operant variation is more resistant to disruption than is operant repetition and suggest that theories of response strength, such as behavioral momentum theory, must consider factors other than reinforcement rate. The implications of the results for understanding operant response classes are discussed.     

Field Independence and Change Agent Correlation in Emerging Communities of Irian Jaya,Indonesia

Communities that are limited by oral traditions find theological truths communicated by missions a challenge to understand. Currently, linguists work in many of these minority language groups in order to create vital written languages and produce various literature titles that include the Scriptures. Development of a writing system requires indigenous language assistants who are adept in drawing meaning from unfamiliar cultural paradigms and accurately articulating them. Empirical studies in cognitive style conducted among the minority language groups of Irian Jaya, Indonesia show a correlation between field independence (a dimension of cognitive style) and the ability to grasp abstract linguistic concepts. The Brantley/Larsen Test was developed to identify language assistants, also known as change agents, in a culturally appropriate manner for Irian Jaya. Furthermore, this study suggests that the church would benefit from community lay counselors who manifest field independence, which indicates comprehension of abstract and complex linguistic notions found in Scriptures.Indonesia as Organizational Consultant;