Do obsessional beliefs discriminate OCD without tic patients from OCD with tic and Tourette's syndrome patients?

There is considerable overlap in symptomatology between Tourette's syndrome (TS) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Increased rates of tics are found in OCD and up to 60% obsessive-compulsive symptoms in TS. However, in OCD obsessive-compulsive symptoms are more often anxiety-related and, as a consequence, aimed at anxiety-reduction, whereas in TS these symptoms are more stimulus-bound. Therefore, it is of clinical interest to study whether these phenomenological differences are reflected in differences between dysfunctional cognitions accompanying OC symptoms in OCD with or without tics and TS. Current cognitive theory of OCD ascertains that specific dysfunctional beliefs are important in the etiology and maintenance of OCD. To assess these beliefs, the obsessive-compulsive beliefs questionnaire-87 (OBQ-87) has been developed. In the present study, OBQ-87 scores of OCD patients without tics, OCD with tics, and TS (without OCD) patients were compared to those of normal controls. Results: OCD without tic patients exhibited higher OBQ-87 scores than TS patients. No differences were found between OCD with or without tic patients on any of the OBQ-87 subscales. These results suggest that: (1) dysfunctional beliefs have no discriminative power with respect to OCD with or without tic patients; (2) the direct relationship between types of OC symptoms and specific dysfunctional beliefs is questionable. Therefore, one can doubt the specificity of cognitive theory of OCD to explain specific OC behavior.     

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

A number of studies using the dot-probe task now report the existence of an attentional bias to angry faces in participants who rate highly on scales of anxiety; however, no equivalent bias has been observed in non-anxious populations, despite evidence to the contrary from studies using other tasks. One reason for this discrepancy may be that researchers using the dot-probe task have rarely investigated any effects which might emerge earlier than 500 ms following presentation of the threat-related faces. Accordingly, in the current study we presented pairs of face stimuli with emotional and neutral expressions and probed the allocation of attention to these stimuli for presentation times of 100 and 500 ms. Results showed that at 100 ms there was an attentional bias towards the location of the relatively threatening stimulus (the angry face in angry/neutral pairs and the neutral face in neutral/happy pairs) and this pattern reversed by 500 ms. Comparisons of reaction time (RT) scores with an appropriate baseline suggested that the early bias toward threatening faces may actually arise through inhibition of the relatively least threatening member of a face pair rather than through facilitation of, or vigilance towards, the more threatening stimulus. However the mechanisms governing the observed biases are interpreted, these data provide evidence that probing for the location of spatial attention at 500 ms is not necessarily indicative of the initial allocation of attention between competing emotional facial stimuli.     

Threat interpretation in anxious children and their mothers: comparison with nonclinical children and the effects of treatment

Interpretation biases towards threat play a prominent role in cognitive theories of anxiety, and have been identified amongst highly anxious adults and children. Little is known, however, about the development of these cognitive biases although family processes have been implicated. The current study investigated the nature of threat interpretation of anxious children and their mothers through (i) comparison of a clinic and non-clinic population, (ii) analysis of individual differences; and (iii) pre- and post-treatment comparisons. Participants were 27 children with a primary anxiety disorder and 33 children from a non-clinic population and their mothers. Children and mothers completed self-report measures of anxiety and indicated their most likely interpretation of ambiguous scenarios. Clinic and non-clinical groups differed significantly on measures of threat interpretation. Furthermore, mothers' and children's threat interpretation correlated significantly. Following treatment for child anxiety, both children and their mothers reported a reduction in threat interpretation.     

A prospective study of pressures from parents, peers, and the media on extreme weight change behaviors among adolescent boys and girls

The current study was designed to evaluate the role of sociocultural influences over a 16 month period on strategies to lose weight, extreme weight loss strategies, and strategies to increase muscles among adolescent boys (n=344) and girls (n=246). All participants completed measures of body dissatisfaction, body image importance, strategies to lose weight, extreme weight loss strategies, and strategies to increase muscles. Measures of perceived pressure to lose weight or increase muscles from mother, father, best male friend, best female friend and the media were also evaluated. Data were gathered on three occasions, 8 months apart. The results demonstrated that boys showed a decrease in strategies to lose weight and increase muscles over time, whereas girls showed an increase. Both boys and girls showed an increase in extreme weight loss strategies with girls demonstrating a greater increase than boys. The sociocultural influences generally were perceived by girls to relate to messages to lose weight, whereas for boys they were perceived to relate to increasing muscles. Messages from parents, particularly fathers, were strong predictors of both strategies to lose weight and increase muscles among boys, with the media and best male friend playing a limited role. For girls, the strongest influences were mothers and best female friends, with few influences from fathers or the media. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the importance of the various sociocultural influences in shaping body change strategies among young adolescent boys and girls, and the implications of these findings for intervention programs for adolescents.     

Spiritual Disposition and Understanding Illness

Although Dull and Skokan (1995) proposed a cognitive model of the effect of religion on health, they neglected to clearly identify the multi-dimensional nature of religion as a cognitive schema. The present paper identifies various aspects of spiritual disposition (defined as personality and beliefs) that can play a role in an individual’s adaptation to illness. Specifically, this paper reviews the factors of religious doctrine and affiliation, spiritual beliefs, religious orientation, God locus of control, faith and hope as aspects of a spiritual disposition and explores how they can function as resources and/or negative factors in the process of adjustment to illness. Implications for clinical health care (e.g., pastoral counsellors) are drawn from this review.     

Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-based Approach

The present study is a corpus-based investigation of syntactic priming, i.e. the tendency to reuse syntactic constructions. On the basis of data from the ICE-GB corpus, I analyze two different pairs of syntactic patterns, the so-called dative alternation and particle placement of transitive phrasal verbs. Although it has sometimes been argued that only experimental data can contribute to studies of priming, the analysis shows that (a) the corpus-based results for datives are very similar to the experimental ones; (b) priming is also obtained for the verb-particle construction, a construction hitherto not explored in the priming literature and (c), most importantly, in line with much previous psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic work, priming effects turn out to be strongly verb-specific such that some verbs are much more resistant or responsive to priming than others. I conclude with a discussion of how corpus data relate to experimental data and how the corpus-based findings can contribute to psycholinguistic model building.This paper is dedicated to Günter Rohdenburg on the occasion of his 65th birthday I thank (in alphabetical order) Doris Schönefeld (Ruhr University of Bochum), Anja Steinlen (University of Southern Denmark) and Stefanie Wulff (University of Bremen) for comments on a previous draft of this paper. In addition, I have benefited a lot from discussion with Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (University of Freiburg) and from the very detailed and useful comments of one anonymous reviewer, which made it possible to improve the paper considerably. Naturally, all remaining inadequacies are my own.     

Depression,Confidence, and Decision: Evidence Against Depressive Realism

This research examined how retrospective self-assessments of performance are affected by major depression. To test the validity of the depressive realism versus the selective processing hypotheses, aggregate posttest performance estimates (PTPEs) were obtained from clinically depressed patients and an age-matched comparison group across 4 decision tasks (object recognition, general knowledge, social judgment, and line-length judgment). As expected on the basis of previous findings, both groups were underconfident in their PTPEs, consistently underestimating the percentage of questions they had answered correctly. Contrary to depressive realism, and in partial support of the selective processing account, this underconfidence effect was not reduced but modestly exacerbated in the depressed patients. Further, whereas the PTPEs of the comparison group exceeded that expected on the basis of chance alone those of the depressed individuals did not. The results provide no support for the depressive realism account and suggest that negative biases contribute to metacognitive information processing in major depression.The results reported in this paper are based on an extension of the MSc dissertation of Tiffany Fu, conducted in partial fulfillment of the degree of MSc in Research Methods in Psychology, University of Reading, 2003     

Bring It On: Proactive Coping with Discrimination

We investigated proactive coping with discrimination among heavy women in both a high impact lab study (101 women) and a daily diary study (62 women). Heavy women assessed greater harm and fewer coping resources for discriminatory, as compared to non-discriminatory, hassles (Study 2). Primary appraisals of harm were important determinants of proactive coping, including primary control (attempts to change the environment) and secondary control (attempts to change the self to fit the environment) directed at discriminatory stressors (Studies 1 and 2). When heavy women used primary control coping efforts, they experienced positive interpersonal outcomes (Study 1) and less negative intrapersonal outcomes (Study 2). We discuss the benefits and limitations of engaging in proactive coping and suggest avenues for future research.

Predictors of Young Adolescents’ Math Grades and Course Enrollment Intentions: Gender Similarities and Differences

Gender differences and similarities in the relations of key constructs in Eccles and colleagues (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) model of achievement were examined as predictors of math grades and enrollment intentions for Grade 9 boys (n = 263) and girls (n = 277). A number of gender similarities were found, particularly in the prediction of math grades. There were, however, two gender-specific paths: for girls, a direct path from competence beliefs to enrollment intentions, and for boys, a direct path from prior math grades to enrollment intentions. In addition, for boys, the path from utility value to enrollment intentions was stronger than it was for girls. These differential predictive patterns were found even though girls and boys reported similar levels of math utility and girls had lower math competence beliefs. For girls, competence beliefs were a significant predictor of both intentions and current math grades, which indicates the central role of competence beliefs.     

On Irrational Guilt

A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is not allowed, and even if he has rejected this taboo years ago, he still feels guilty when attending theater. These kinds of cases may not be rare, but they are strange. Indeed, one may wonder how they are even possible. This is why an explanation is needed, and in my paper I aim to give such an explanation. In particular, I will first provide a brief review of the explanations of irrational guilt that are compatible with the cognitive theories of emotions, that is, theories that presuppose that there is a causal or a constitutional connection between emotions and cognitive factors, such as judgments, beliefs or thoughts. Following many other reviewers, I found most of the explanations of irrational guilt unsatisfactory, although my reasons for critical conclusions will partly differ from the usual ones. After the review, I will defend a solution according to which it is possible to believe that an act does not have any moral costs and at the same time to have an impression that is has, which explains the guilty feelings.