Marital counselling: Teaching an eclectic approach

Limited opportunities for training combined with misperceptions about the nature of marital counselling lead to many professionals conducting consultations with couples without training. Where training exists, generally a specific ‘pure’ approach, or a definite brand of eclecticism is taught. The Sheffield Marital and Sexual Difficulties Clinic training course currently aims to give trainees the building blocks for evolving their own brand of eclecticism, or the opportunity to follow a particular approach. Psychodynamic, behavioural and systems theories are highlighted, and the various ways to which these (and other theories) can be used together are examined.     

The importance of knowledge in vivid text memory: An individual-differences investigation of recollection and familiarity

The goal of this study was to examine how individual variation in readers’ skills and, in particular, their background knowledge about a text are related to text memory. Recollection and familiarity estimates were obtained from remember and know judgments to text ideas. Recollection estimates to old items were predicted by readers’ background knowledge, but not by other comprehension-related factors, such as word-decoding skill and working memory capacity. False alarms involving recollection of new items (inferences) were diminished as a function of verbal ability, working memory capacity, and reasoning but increased as a function of background knowledge. The results suggest that recollection indexes the reader’s ability to construct a text representation in which text ideas are integrated with relevant domain knowledge. Moreover, these results highlight the importance of background knowledge in explaining individual variation in comprehension and memory for text.     

The effects of COVID-19 stressors and family life on anxiety and depression one-year into the COVID-19 pandemic

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Coronavirus (COVID-19)-related stressors and family health on adult anxiety and depressive symptoms 1 year into the pandemic. The sample consisted of 442 adults living in the United States who were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Data were analyzed using multiple logistic regression. Results indicated that compared to a sample 1 month into the pandemic, participants in the current sample reported worse family health and increases in both positive and negative perceptions of the pandemic on family life and routines. COVID-19 stressors and perceived negative effects of the pandemic on family life increased the odds for moderate-to-severe depression and anxiety while having more family health resources decreased the odds for depression and anxiety symptoms. Participants reported lower odds for worse depression and anxiety since the beginning of the pandemic when they reported more positive family meaning due to the pandemic. The results suggest a need to consider the impact of family life on mental health in pandemics and other disasters.     

Working memory and stroop interference: an individual differences investigation

We investigated the claim that individual differences in working-memory capacity reflect limitations on the ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information and/or to maintain activation in the face of distracting or interfering events. Specifically, we investigated whether high- and low-capacity individuals differed in their susceptibility to interference on the Stroop task and whether high-capacity individuals employed a strategy for minimizing Stroop interference. In Experiment 1, we found that high-capacity participants showed substantial interference when conflict trials were infrequent, but almost no interference when conflict trials were frequent. In contrast, low-capacity participants showed substantial interference irrespective of the proportion of conflict trials. In Experiment 2, we found that high-capacity participants experienced substantial negative priming, slow responses when the to-be-named color was the irrelevant word on the previous trial. We discuss these results and their implications for high-capacity individuals' ability to reduce Stroop interference in light of both inhibitory and noninhibitory accounts of negative priming.     

The representation of discourse in the two hemispheres: an individual differences investigation

Two experiments were conducted to investigate discourse representation in the two cerebral hemispheres as a function of reading skill. We used a lateralized visual-field procedure to compare left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) sensitivity to different discourse relations in readers with varying skill levels. In Experiment 1, we investigated two levels of discourse representation in memory: (a) the propositional representation and (b) the discourse model. We found that all readers were sensitive to propositional relations in the LH. In contrast, sensitivity to propositional relations in the RH increased as a function of reading skill. In addition, reading skill was positively related to topic relations in the LH, whereas it was negatively in the RH. In Experiment 2, we investigated propositional relations of different distances and again found that all readers were sensitive to propositional relations in the LH, whereas sensitivity to propositional relations in the RH was negatively related to reading skill. In general, reading skill appears to be associated with left-lateralized discourse representations.     

Individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing

This study used fMRI to examine individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing. Participants with varying language skill levels, as indexed by scores on the vocabulary portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, read four types of two-sentence passages in which causal relatedness (moderate and distant) and presence or absence of explicit clause connectives were orthogonally varied to manipulate coherence and cohesion during inference generation. Skilled readers showed better neural efficiency (less activation) during all context sentences and during all inference conditions. Increased activation in less-skilled readers was most extensively distributed in the right hemisphere (RH) homologues of left hemisphere (LH) language areas, especially in the most difficult passage types. Skilled readers also showed greater sensitivity to coherence (greater activation and synchronization in moderately related than distantly related passages) whereas less-skilled readers showed sensitivity to cohesion (greater activation and synchronization when clause connectives were present than when they were not). These finding support the hypothesis that skilled reading comprehension requires recruitment of the RH on an “as needed” basis. We describe the dynamic spillover hypothesis, a new theoretical framework that outlines the conditions under which RH language contributions are most likely evoked.     

Assessing text representations with recognition: The interaction of domain knowledge and text coherence

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know judgments to text ideas. Knowledge and coherence interacted to influence remember judgments differently than know judgments. In Experiment 2, the authors used the process-dissociation procedure to obtain recollection and familiarity estimates. Knowledge and coherence interacted to influence recollection estimates but not familiarity estimates. The authors claim that recollection and familiarity can be used as markers of the different processes involved in constructing a textbase and a situation model.     

The propositional structure of discourse in the two cerebral hemispheres

Readers construct at least two interrelated representations when they comprehend a text: (a) a representation of the explicit ideas in a text and the relations among them (i.e., a propositional representation) and (b) a representation of the context or situation to which a text refers (i.e., a discourse model). In a recent study, found evidence that readers' representations were structured according to propositional relations, but only in the left hemisphere. Both hemispheres, however, appeared to represent contextually relevant semantic information. The goal in the current study was to examine further the organization of explicit text concepts in the two hemispheres. We used an item-priming-in-recognition paradigm in combination with a lateralized visual-field manipulation. We found evidence for a propositionally structured representation in the left hemisphere, that is, priming effects that reflected the linear distance between primes and targets in the propositional structure of passages. We also found that the right hemisphere represented explicit text concepts, but we found no evidence that these concepts were organized structurally. In a second experiment, we found our item priming effects reflected the representation of text information in memory and did not reflect lexical-semantic priming at test.     

An fMRI investigation of analogical mapping in metaphor comprehension: the influence of context and individual cognitive capacities on processing demands

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of analogical mapping during metaphor comprehension, with a focus on dynamic configuration of neural networks with changing processing demands and individual abilities. Participants with varying vocabulary sizes and working memory capacities read 3-sentence passages ending in nominal critical utterances of the form "X is a Y." Processing demands were manipulated by varying preceding contexts. Three figurative conditions manipulated difficulty by varying the extent to which preceding contexts mentioned relevant semantic features for relating the vehicle and topic of the critical utterance to one another. In the easy condition, supporting information was mentioned. In the neutral condition, no relevant information was mentioned. In the most difficult condition, opposite features were mentioned, resulting in an ironic interpretation of the critical utterance. A fourth, literal condition included context that supported a literal interpretation of the critical utterance. Activation in lateral and medial frontal regions increased with increasing contextual difficulty. Lower vocabulary readers also had greater activation across conditions in the right inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, volumetric analyses showed increased right temporo-parietal junction and superior medial frontal activation for all figurative conditions over the literal condition. The results from this experiment imply that the cortical regions are dynamically recruited in language comprehension as a function of the processing demands of a task. Individual differences in cognitive capacities were also associated with differences in recruitment and modulation of working memory and executive function regions, highlighting the overlapping computations in metaphor comprehension and general thinking and reasoning.     

Individual differences in syntactic ambiguity resolution: Readers vary in their use of plausibility information

Two experiments investigated the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity and differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing. In one experiment, readers comprehended sentences containing main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities that all resolved to the reduced-relative interpretation. High-span (but not low-span) readers processed sentences more slowly when the sentences were biased to the preferred, main-verb interpretation than when they were biased to the reduced-relative interpretation. Moreover, high-span (but not low-span) readers used information about the plausibility of the different interpretations even though low-span readers appeared to possess the requisite knowledge. In Experiment 2, readers received intensive exposure to sentences with main-verb/reduced-relative ambiguities. Exposure enhanced low-span readers' use of plausibility information. Moreover, the effect of exposure generalized to sentences that were not included in the training materials.