Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention decreases the prevalence of depression and enhances benefit finding among women under treatment for early-stage breast cancer.

The authors tested effects of a 10-week group cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention among 100 women newly treated for Stage 0-II breast cancer. The intervention reduced prevalence of moderate depression (which remained relatively stable in the control condition) but did not affect other measures of emotional distress. The intervention also increased participants' reports that having breast cancer had made positive contributions to their lives, and it increased generalized optimism. Both remained significantly elevated at a 3-month follow-up of the intervention. Further analysis revealed that the intervention had its greatest impact on these 2 variables among women who were lowest in optimism at baseline. Discussion centers on the importance of examining positive responses to traumatic events--growth, appreciation of life, shift in priorities, and positive affect-as well as negative responses.     

Who uses community mental health centres? A study of one health district

A caseload analysis was undertaken to investigate those clients seen by five community mental health centre teams within one healthcare district. The 985 clients are described in terms of demographic and clinical features and questions relating to service provision are discussed.     

Recognition and recall of invisible objects

Three experiments examined recognition and recall of items that people imagined as being invisible. When one item hid another, the hidden item suffered in recognition, but so did the one that remained visible; the demand to imagine items invisibly made both items less recognizable than in control conditions. Cued recall did not depend on whether the visible item or the invisible item was the cue, but it did depend on whether the initial task required relational processing of the items. When both items were invisible in a dark imaginary scene, there was a general loss in all measures of memory, including memory for the scene. None of the results requires recourse to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle that memory depends on the visual characteristics of images. The results attest, instead, to the importance of the informational characteristics of memorial records.     

Salkovskis on obsessional-compulsive neurosis: a rejoinder

Salkovskis (Behav Res. Ther. 27, 677–682, 1989) presents a development of his 1985 account, together with empirical findings. A number of criticisms of this work are presented.     

Physical exercise, social background, and the well-being of older adult women

28 older women participating in an exercise program were compared to 30 older women not participating in an exercise program on two behavioral measures. There were no significant main effects for participation-nonparticipation in an exercise program. Significant main effects were found, however, for each of three social variables.     

Do letter features migrate? A note of caution

Summary The feature-integration model of visual information processing (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) predicts perceptual errors based on the incorrect grouping of stimulus features in multi-element displays. Experiment 1 examined the frequency of such errors with a tachistoscopic bar probe task using letters and novel patterns with a production response. A substantial proportion of the errors did involve figures that were not present in the display but contained combinations of features which had been present. Such errors were especially prominent with novel patterns. The results with letters suggested that such responses were due to guessing, not feature migration, and this was confirmed by Experiment 2. In the second study, responses were collected for single character displays but were scored as if they had been responses to the multielement displays in Experiment 1. The results showed the same high proportion of illusory conjunction errors as the previous results and it was concluded that both results were due to guessing. Spatial confusions in the bar probe task with letters appear to involve whole characters, not character features.This research was supported by grant A-9581 from the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada to the senior author. This research was reported as a paper to the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Toronto, 1981. Ian Morrison is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University.