In the absence of rose-colored glasses: Ratings of self-attributes and their differential certainty and importance across multiple dimensions in social phobia

Sixty-seven individuals with social phobia (social anxiety disorder) and 60 healthy controls rated their perceived standing relative to others on 13 self-attribute dimensions, their level of certainty concerning those standings, and the importance of each dimension. As expected, individuals with social phobia provided self-ratings that were significantly more negative than controls across all dimensions. In addition, positive self-views were equated with higher levels of certainty and importance for controls, but not for individuals with social phobia. Thus, whereas reports of control participants reflected a healthy, positive framing of self-views, the ratings of clinical participants demonstrated an orientation toward self-framing that was neither positive nor negative. Together, these novel findings shed light on the nature of self-appraisals in social anxiety. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of contemporary cognitive-behavioral models of social phobia.     

Change in emotional processing during a dialectical behavior therapy-based skills group for major depressive disorder

Across studies, paying attention to and analyzing one's emotions has been found to be both positively and negatively correlated with depression symptoms. One way of reconciling these seemingly contradictory findings is the possibility that attending to emotions in a skillful manner may help to reduce depression whereas attending to emotions with limited skill may be counterproductive. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a clinical intervention designed to foster adaptive awareness, expression, regulation, tolerance, and acceptance of emotions. Results of the present report come from a pilot study of a 16-week DBT-based skills training group for treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) as an adjunctive treatment to pharmacotherapy. Patients were randomized to treatment or a waitlist control group. A significant interaction revealed that increases in emotional processing were associated with decreases in depression symptoms in the DBT-based skills group; however, increases in emotional processing in the waitlist condition were associated with increases in depression. Results offer preliminary support for the idea that participating in DBT-based skills training may help individuals with treatment-resistant MDD to develop skills that facilitate processing emotions in a way that helps to reduce rather than exacerbate depression symptoms.     

Development of perceptual expertise in emotion recognition

How do children’s early social experiences influence their perception of emotion-specific information communicated by the face? To examine this question, we tested a group of abused children who had been exposed to extremely high levels of parental anger expression and physical threat. Children were presented with arrays of stimuli that depicted the unfolding of facial expressions, from neutrality to peak emotions. The abused children accurately recognized anger early in the formation of the facial expression, when few physiological cues were available. The speed of children’s recognition was associated with the degree of anger/hostility reported by the child’s parent. These data highlight the ways in which perceptual learning can shape the timing of emotion perception.     

Beyond quantity: Individual differences in working memory and the ordinal understanding of numerical symbols

In two different contexts, we examined the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are related to the tendency to infer complex, ordinal relationships between numerical symbols. In Experiment 1, we assessed whether this tendency arises in a learning context that involves mapping novel symbols to quantities by training adult participants to associate dot-quantities with novel symbols, the overall relative order of which had to be inferred. Performance was best for participants who were higher in WM capacity (HWMs). HWMs also learned ordinal information about the symbols that lower WM individuals (LWMs) did not. In Experiment 2, we examined whether WM relates to performance when participants are explicitly instructed to make numerical order judgments about highly enculturated numerical symbols by having participants indicate whether sets of three Arabic numerals were in increasing order. All participants responded faster when sequential sets (3-4-5) were in order than when they were not. However, only HWMs responded faster when non-sequential, patterned sets (1-3-5) were in order, suggesting they were accessing ordinal associations that LWMs were not. Taken together, these experiments indicate that WM capacity plays a key role in extending symbolic number representations beyond their quantity referents to include symbol-symbol ordinal associations, both in a learning context and in terms of explicitly accessing ordinal relationships in highly enculturated stimuli.     

Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features

Whereas previous work has shown that male sexual orientation can be accurately and rapidly perceived from the human face and its individual features, no study has examined the judgment of female sexual orientation. To fill this gap, the current work examined the accuracy, speed, and automaticity of judgments of female sexual orientation from the face and from facial features. Study 1 showed that female sexual orientation could be accurately judged from the face and from just eyes without brows and limited to the outer canthi. Study 2 then examined the speed and efficiency of these judgments, showing that judgments of the faces following very brief, near subliminal (40 ms) exposures were significantly better than chance guessing. Finally, Study 3 tested the automaticity of judgments of female sexual orientation by examining the effects of deliberation on accuracy. Participants who made snap judgments of female sexual orientation were significantly more accurate than participants who made thoughtful and deliberated judgments. These data therefore evidence a robust, reliable, and automatic capacity for extracting information about female sexual orientation from nonverbal cues in the face.     

Do amnesic patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome use feedback when making decisions under risky conditions? An experimental investigation with the Game of Dice Task with and without feedback

We investigated the role of feedback processing in decision making under risk conditions in 50 patients with amnesia in the course of alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome (KS). Half of the patients were administered the Game of Dice Task (GDT) and the remaining 25 patients were examined with a modified version of the GDT in which no feedback was provided. Patients' results in the GDT and in the modified version were compared with that of 50 healthy subjects of whom 25 subjects performed the original GDT and 25 performed the modified version. While performance on the original GDT was superior to performance on the modified GDT in healthy subjects, KS patients performed similarly on both the GDT with and GDT without feedback. Performance on both task versions was correlated with categorization and set-shifting. The findings indicate that amnesic patients do not profit from receiving feedback for their decisions in explicit risk conditions.     

An emotional processing writing intervention and heart rate variability: the role of emotional approach

Expressing and understanding one's own emotional responses to negative events, particularly those that challenge the attainment of important life goals, is thought to confer physiological benefit. Individual preferences and/or abilities in approaching emotions might condition the efficacy of interventions designed to encourage written emotional processing (EP). This study examines the physiological impact (as indexed by heart rate variability (HRV)) of an emotional processing writing (EPW) task as well as the moderating influence of a dispositional preference for coping through emotional approach (EP and emotional expression (EE)), in response to a laboratory stress task designed to challenge an important life goal. Participants (n?=?98) were randomly assigned to either EPW or fact control writing (FCW) following the stress task. Regression analyses revealed a significant dispositional EP by condition interaction, such that high EP participants in the EPW condition demonstrated higher HRV after writing compared to low EP participants. No significant main effects of condition or EE coping were observed. These findings suggest that EPW interventions may be best suited for those with preference or ability to process emotions related to a stressor or might require adaptation for those who less often cope through emotional approach.     

Phase-based Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy for Adults With Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD) presents unique challenges to treatment beyond that of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The expert consensus best practice for treatment of complex PTSD is a phase-based or sequenced approach that has typically been offered in individual or group therapy modalities. Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFCT) shows promise as a couple-based treatment for PTSD, but the standard protocol may inadequately incorporate best practice guidelines of phase-based treatment for complex PTSD. Integration of phase-based treatment of complex PTSD within an EFCT format is proposed, giving direction to EFCT providers on incorporating best practice guidelines into their work with survivors.     

Visual search at different spatial scales

Treisman and Gelade's (1980) feature-integration model claims that the search for separate ("primitive") stimulus features is parallel, but that the conjunctions of those features require serial scan. Recently, evidence has accumulated that parallel processing is not limited to these "primitive" stimulus features, but that combinations of features can also produce parallel search. In the experiments reported here, the processing of feature conjunctions was studied when the stimulus features of a combination were at different spatial scales. The patterns in the search array were composed of three cross-shaped or T-shaped (local) elements, which formed an oblique bar (the global pattern) 45 deg or 135 deg in orientation. When the target and distractors differed from each other at one spatial scale only (either in the bar orientation or in the shape of the local elements), target detection was independent of the number of distractors, i.e., the search was parallel. In the conjunction task, in which the target and distractors were defined as the combinations of the bar orientation and the element shape, i.e., both spatial scales were relevant, the detection of the target required slow serial scrutiny of the search array. It is possible that the conjunction search could not be performed in parallel because switches between the two scales (or spatial frequency channels) are linked to attention and the task required the use of both scales in order to find the target.     

Strategies or similarities—what determines mastery of figurative language?

Six experiments examined different determinants of metaphor performance. Special focus was placed on tenor-vehicle similarities and on visual-verbal strategy operations. The results showed that use of specified strategy operations tended to favour verbal operations, whereas previous research demonstrated that unspecified visual strategies improve metaphor comprehension. The deviating observations were interpreted as due to differences in levels of strategy specification. In the new experiments metaphors were shown to be less easily transformed under visual than under verbal processing conditions. The number of detected similarities between tenor and vehicle terms are shown to be only modestly related to metaphor performance. Findings suggested that similarities are more easily found with visually encoded metaphors, whereas an alternative tenor term is easier to find with the metaphor verbally encoded.