Functions of Clinical Psychological Service in California Juvenile and Adult Courts

Subjects provided free responses to six concepts representing varying degrees of involvement. Responses were obtained from each subject under normal and negative affect conditions. Group data were used. Under negative affect conditions, significant correlations were found between concept involvement and type/token ratio (TTR), tokens per type, response variation index (RVI), and total types. Correlations were in the direction of increased redundancy as involvement decreased and, conversely, increased response variation as involvement increased. These relationships held only under negative affect conditions. Implications were discussed for the problems of communication under negative affect conditions and the assessment of individuals’ internal states from verbal behavior. Finally, a sociolinguistic view of the “language community” concept was offered.     

Psychological Researches in Schizophrenic Language and Thought

Seventy-two five- to seven-year-old boys were exposed to televised adult models and were then administered tests of resistance to deviation (moral behavior), moral choice, and moral judgment level. Boys exposed to a model who said he would resist deviating from a prohibition and who supported his statement with a morally realistic justification were subsequently more likely to use that model's statements to guide their own moral behavior and moral choice than were boys exposed to a model advocating resistance to deviation with a morally autonomous justification. Realistic models expressing a deviating moral choice led to more deviating moral choices in observers than did autonomous deviating models. The moral judgment levels of the boys were not significantly affected by the models. The boys' moral behavior was predictive of their moral choice while moral judgment level was not significantly related to the other two indices of morality.     

A Natural Approach in Mental Health Practice: Occupational Adaptation Revealed

A single case study of the stories told by one occupational therapist about her clients in mental health settings is presented in this article. Qualitative analysis revealed key concepts of the role of the occupational therapist as defined by occupational adaptation theory, along with unique perspectives of occupational therapy in mental health settings. The outcome of this study is a demonstration of the unique insight occupational therapy brings to addressing client recovery in mental health settings, specifically from an occupational adaptation perspective. This insight should enlighten others as to the necessity of skilled occupational therapy in mental health settings.     

A validation of a computerised task of risk-taking and moral decision-making and its association with sensation-seeking,impulsivity and sociomoral reasoning

The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the computer based application of the Secret Agent (SA) task of risk-taking and moral decision-making. The participants were 100 male patients in a maximum security hospital (50 with severe mental illness and 50 with personality disorder) and 50 community based healthy controls. All participants completed the SA task, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), and measures of IQ, antisocial personality traits, sensation-seeking, impulsivity and sociomoral reasoning. The SA risk-taking and moral decision-making scales had satisfactory levels of reliability (Cronbach’s alpha). Risk-taking correlated significantly with sensation-seeking across all three participant groups. In contrast, risk-taking only correlated with impulsivity among the severe mental illness group. Moral decision-making correlated with sociomoral reasoning among the personality disorder group. No correlation was found between the SA scores and the IGT score and the IGT did not correlate with sensation-seeking or impulsivity. IQ and antisocial personality traits did not correlate with the SA or IGT scales. The study highlights the importance of context, the nature of the risk-taking task, and ‘problem framing’ of the instructions in their relationship with individual differences.     

Does it help to feel your body? Evidence is inconclusive that interoceptive accuracy and sensibility help cope with negative experiences

ABSTRACT

In four studies (total N?=?534), we examined the moderating impact of Interoceptive Accuracy (i.e. IAcc, as measured with the heartbeat counting task) and Interoceptive Sensibility (IS, assessed via questionnaire) on negative affect, following social exclusion or after receiving negative feedback. Results from an integrative data analysis combining the four studies confirmed that the manipulations were successful at inducing negative affect. However, no significant interaction between mood induction (control versus negative affect induction) and interoception on mood measures was observed, and this was true both for objective (i.e. IAcc) and subjective (i.e. IS) measures of interoception. Hence, previous conclusions on the moderating impact of interoception in the relationship between mood induction and self-reported mood were neither replicated nor generalised to this larger sample. We discuss these findings in light of theories of emotion regulation as well as recent concerns raised about the validity of the heartbeat counting task.     

Seeing through the eyes of anxious individuals: An investigation of anxiety-related interpretations of emotional expressions

The interpretation of emotional states is necessary for successful social communication. Often individuals interpret emotional expressions intuitively and without full cognitive awareness. The aim of the present study was to test whether anxiety would influence affect interpretation in the manner suggested by interpretation bias—the tendency to interpret ambiguous cues in a threatening way. Interpretation of social cues was assessed with the similarity rating task (simtask) in two studies (n₁ = 116, n₂ = 76). The similarity ratings were analysed with a multidimensional scaling (MDS) approach, and the effects of anxiety on the interpretation of emotional expressions were analysed with multilevel modelling. The results of both studies showed evidence for an anxiety-related interpretation bias. High-anxious individuals tended to interpret milder threats as more negative than low-anxious individuals did. The consequences for anxiety research are discussed.     

Lack of habituation to shocking words: The attentional bias to their spatial origin is context free

Following a suggestion made by Aquino and Arnell (2007), we assumed that the processing of emotional words is influenced by their context of presentation. Supporting this idea, previous studies using the emotional Stroop task in its visual or auditory variant revealed different results depending on the mixed versus blocked presentation of the stimuli (Bertels, Kolinsky, Pietrons, & Morais, 2011; Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992). In the present study, we investigated the impact of these presentation designs on the occurrence of spatial attentional biases in a modified version of the beep-probe task (Bertels, Kolinsky, & Morais, 2010). Attentional vigilance to taboo words as well as non-spatial slowing effects of these words were observed whatever the mixed or blocked design, whereas attentional vigilance to positive words was only observed in the mixed design. Together with the results from our previous study (Bertels et al., 2010), the present data support the reliability of the effects of shocking stimuli, while vigilance to positive words would only be observed in a threatening context.     

Interference Effects in a Numerical Stroop Paradigm in 9- to 12-year-old Children with ADHD-C

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by deficient self-regulation, poor attentional control, and poor response inhibition. To date, however, the extent to which these deficits affect basic interference control remains a matter of controversy. Secondly, ADHD has been reported to be associated with arithmetic deficits. It remains unclear whether such deficits are a secondary consequence of the above-mentioned characteristics of ADHD or whether basic numerical magnitude representations are also affected. In the present study we attempted to investigate these issues using a basic numerical interference paradigm.

Nine- to twelve-year-old children with ADHD-C (attention-deficit hyperactivity-disorder combined type) and control children without ADHD (each n = 16) were presented with two digits of possibly different physical sizes (e.g., 3 7). This numerical Stroop task requires subjects to make a magnitude classification concerning either the physical or the numerical stimulus dimension. The irrelevant dimension can be congruent (same response), incongruent (different response), or neutral (no response association).

Children with ADHD-C performed worse than control children in most analyses. The most important finding was a significant interaction of congruity effects with group in the numerical comparison task. Children with ADHD-C tended to show larger congruity and interference effects than controls, and these were not attributable to a speed-accuracy trade-off.

The results might reflect differential processing speeds, or a different degree of automatic activation of physical and numerical magnitudes in children with and without ADHD-C. Alternative explanations, such as insufficient inhibition of selective (domain-specific) attention are also discussed.     

Modeling Interactions Between Latent Variables in Research on Type D Personality: A Monte Carlo Simulation and Clinical Study of Depression and Anxiety

Several approaches exist to model interactions between latent variables. However, it is unclear how these perform when item scores are skewed and ordinal. Research on Type D personality serves as a good case study for that matter. In Study 1, we fitted a multivariate interaction model to predict depression and anxiety with Type D personality, operationalized as an interaction between its two subcomponents negative affectivity (NA) and social inhibition (SI). We constructed this interaction according to four approaches: (1) sum score product; (2) single product indicator; (3) matched product indicators; and (4) latent moderated structural equations (LMS). In Study 2, we compared these interaction models in a simulation study by assessing for each method the bias and precision of the estimated interaction effect under varying conditions. In Study 1, all methods showed a significant Type D effect on both depression and anxiety, although this effect diminished after including the NA and SI quadratic effects. Study 2 showed that the LMS approach performed best with respect to minimizing bias and maximizing power, even when item scores were ordinal and skewed. However, when latent traits were skewed LMS resulted in more false-positive conclusions, while the Matched PI approach adequately controlled the false-positive rate.     

Dynamic Simulation and Static Matching for Action Prediction: Evidence From Body Part Priming

Accurately predicting other people's actions may involve two processes: internal real‐time simulation (dynamic updating) and matching recently perceived action images (static matching). Using a priming of body parts, this study aimed to differentiate the two processes. Specifically, participants played a motion‐controlled video game with either their arms or legs. They then observed arm movements of a point‐light actor, which were briefly occluded from view, followed by a static test pose. Participants judged whether this test pose depicted a coherent continuation of the previously seen action (i.e., “action prediction task”). Evidence of dynamic updating was obtained after compatible effector priming (i.e., arms), whereas incompatible effector priming (i.e., legs) indicated static matching. Together, the results support action prediction as engaging two distinct processes, dynamic simulation and static matching, and indicate that their relative contributions depend on contextual factors like compatibility of body parts involved in performed and observed action.