Regional brain activity change predicts responsiveness to treatment for stuttering in adults

Developmental stuttering is known to be associated with aberrant brain activity, but there is no evidence that this knowledge has benefited stuttering treatment. This study investigated whether brain activity could predict progress during stuttering treatment for 21 dextral adults who stutter (AWS). They received one of two treatment programs that included periodic H₂¹⁵O PET scanning (during oral reading, monologue, and eyes-closed rest conditions). All participants successfully completed an initial treatment phase and then entered a phase designed to transfer treatment gains; 9/21 failed to complete this latter phase. The 12 pass and 9 fail participants were similar on speech and neural system variables before treatment, and similar in speech performance after the initial phase of their treatment. At the end of the initial treatment phase, however, decreased activation within a single region, L. putamen, in all 3 scanning conditions was highly predictive of successful treatment progress.     

Extended problem solving treatment for depression

Introduction: Effective brief psychological approaches for depression that can be delivered by a variety of health professionals with minimal training increase access to treatment by patients. Problem Solving Treatment (PST) was developed for primary care and was modified for this study (EPST) to better meet the needs of mental health patients. Method: A total of 92 therapists from different professional backgrounds completed EPST workshops and treated 92 patients with major depression with interval clinical and treatment process assessments. Results: EPST achieved a significant reduction in depressive symptom scores, life problem scores, and there were few treatment non‐completers. Treatment outcome was predicted by process and therapist variables. Discussion: EPST is an effective and easy to teach treatment that can be delivered by a variety of practitioners and suitable for busy primary mental health care settings.     

Test anxiety and comprehension efficiency: The role of prior knowledge and working memory deficits

The hypotheses that test anxiety is associated with a deficit in prior knowledge and/or working memory capacity, that anxiety impairs comprehension efficiency, and that deficits in knowledge and capacity underlie the efficiency impairment, were tested. In Study 1, high-anxiety students were characterized by lower scores in several vocabulary measures, compared with low-anxiety students. In Study 2, high-anxiety individuals showed inferior working memory capacity to low-anxiety individuals under evaluative stress conditions, but not under non-stress conditions. In Study 3 high-anxiety subjects exhibited lower efficiency scores than low-anxiety subjects in expository texts without a summary: The former employed a greater amount of reading time than the latter to acquire an equivalent amount of information. In addition, the disadvantage in efficiency associated with anxiety was removed when differences in vocabulary knowledge were partialled out statistically. Instead, that disadvantage was only reduced, but not eliminated, when differences in transitory working memory capacity were partialled out. Therefore, the prior knowledge deficit hypothesis accounts for the impairment in reading efficiency associated with high anxiety better than the transitory working memory reduction hypothesis.     

Book Review

Repetition priming is one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology, but participants vary substantially on the amount of priming that they produce. The current experiments assessed the reliability of repetition priming within individuals. The results suggest that observed differences in the size of the repetition priming effect across participants are largely reliable and result primarily from systematic processes. We conclude that the unreliability of semantic priming observed by Stolz, Besner, and Carr (2005) is specific to uncoordinated processes in semantic memory, and that this unreliability does not generalize to other processes in visual word recognition. We consider the implications of these results for theories of automatic and controlled processes that contribute to priming. Finally, we emphasize the importance of reliability for researchers who use similar paradigms to study individual and group differences in cognition.     

A job characteristics approach to explain workplace bullying

This article analyses job characteristics as antecedents of workplace bullying, in line with the early Scandinavian research tradition. Research thus far suggests a large variety of possible job related antecedents. Recent review findings and methodological criticism, however, suggests that these findings need to be treated with caution. Warr's Vitamin model is used to summarize relevant job-related antecedents of workplace bullying. All relationships are tested simultaneously in a hierarchical regression analysis, controlling for covariates. A large and heterogeneous sample of Belgian workers is used to test the hypotheses (n = 6175). The results show that task autonomy is not significantly related to bullying. In line with earlier research, role conflicts and role ambiguity are the most important antecedents. Also (lack of) participation in decision making, (lack of) skill utilization, workload, cognitive demands, changes in the job, job insecurity, and (lack of) task-related feedback are found to be directly related to workplace bullying. These findings are discussed in the light of the literature and some suggestions for practice are formulated.     

Assessing knowledge-intensive work environment: General versus situation-specific instruments

The aim of the present study is to examine to what extent general and situation-specific work environment instruments capture the salient work characteristics in a knowledge-intensive context. We conducted qualitative open-ended interviews with 30 employees (24 men and six women) from a Norwegian university department. The information from the interviews was content-analysed and coded on the scales of five work environment instruments; two general instruments (the General Nordic Questionnaire for Psychological and Social Factors at Work [QPSNordic] and the Job Diagnostic Survey [JDS]) and three situation-specific instruments (Assessing the climate for creativity [KEYS], Situational Outlook Questionnaire [SOQ], and the Organizational Climate Measure [OCM]). The results showed that situation-specific work environment instruments covered significantly more statements about the work environment than the general instruments. More statements could be categorized on the organization and individual levels, compared to group and leadership levels. The situation-specific instruments covered more statements than general instruments at the organization level. These statements were mainly related to the organizational context, social and relational characteristics, and encouragement of creativity and organizational impediments to creativity. The findings support the value of situation-specific instruments for assessing the work environment in knowledge-intensive organizations.     

Visual experience is not necessary for efficient survey spatial cognition: Evidence from blindness

This study investigated whether the lack of visual experience affects the ability to create spatial inferential representations of the survey type. We compared the performance of persons with congenital blindness and that of blindfolded sighted persons on four survey representation-based tasks (Experiment 1). Results showed that persons with blindness performed better than blindfolded sighted controls. We repeated the same tests introducing a third group of persons with late blindness (Experiment 2). This last group performed better than blindfolded sighted participants, whereas differences between participants with late and congenital blindness were nonsignificant. The present findings are compatible with results of other studies, which found that when visual perception is lacking, skill in gathering environmental spatial information provided by nonvisual modalities may contribute to a proper spatial encoding. It is concluded that, although it cannot be asserted that total lack of visual experience incurs no cost, our findings are further evidence that visual experience is not a necessary condition for the development of spatial inferential complex representations.     

Phonotactic regularities in the segmentation of spoken Italian

Five word-spotting experiments explored the role of consonantal and vocalic phonotactic cues in the segmentation of spoken Italian. The first set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic constraints cueing syllable boundaries. Participants were slower in spotting words in nonsense strings when target onsets were misaligned (e.g., lago in ri.blago) than when they were aligned (e.g., lago in rin.lago) with phonotactically determined syllabic boundaries. This effect held also for sequences that occur only word-medially (e.g., /tl/ in ri.tlago), and competition effects could not account for the disadvantage in the misaligned condition. Similarly, target detections were slower when their offsets were misaligned (e.g., cittá in cittáu.ba) than when they were aligned (e.g., cittá in cittá.oba) with a phonotactic syllabic boundary. The second set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic cues, which specifically signal lexical (and not just syllable) boundaries. Results corroborate the role of syllabic information in speech segmentation and suggest that Italian listeners make little use of additional phonotactic information that specifically cues word boundaries.     

Learning To Read Words

The ease with which we process the written word belies its complexities and makes it easy to forget that it is a highly skilled behaviour and one that takes time to master. In this paper, I argue that our ability to read words has its roots in our capacity for language. Good progress has been made towards understanding how children discover the systematic relationship between speech sounds and the letters used to represents those sounds, very early in reading development. However, we understand much less about how beginning readers become skilled readers. To understand this, I argue that it is important to view the visual word recognition system within the context of a broader language system, one that incorporates a rich network of semantic and episodic knowledge.     

Masked priming effect reflects evidence accumulated by the prime

In the same–different match task, masked priming is observed with the same responses but not different responses. Norris and Kinoshita's (2008) Bayesian reader account of masked priming explains this pattern based on the same principle as that explaining the absence of priming for nonwords in the lexical decision task. The pattern of priming follows from the way the model makes optimal decisions in the two tasks; priming does not depend on first activating the prime and then the target. An alternative explanation is in terms of a bias towards responding “same” that exactly counters the facilitatory effect of lexical access. The present study tested these two views by varying both the degree to which the prime predicts the response and the visibility of the prime. Unmasked primes produced effects expected from the view that priming is influenced by the degree to which the prime predicts the response. In contrast, with masked primes, the size of priming for the same response was completely unaffected by predictability. These results rule out response bias as an explanation of the absence of masked priming for different responses and, in turn, indicate that masked priming is not a consequence of automatic lexical access of the prime.