Création de l’Échelle de Distorsions Cognitives pour adultes (EDC-A) : étude des propriétés psychométriques en population générale et association avec l’anxiété et la dépression

IntroductionCognitive distortions contribute to the maintenance of inappropriate cognitive schemas and play a role in the emergence of pathologies such as anxiety and depression. We developed the Cognitive Distortion Scale for Adults in order to identify distortions in individuals’ reasoning. The main objectives of this study were: (1) to study the psychometric properties of the Cognitive Distortion Scale for Adults, (2) to identify cognitive distortions associated with anxiety and depression in the general population.MethodThe study involved 916 participants (151 men and 765 women) aged 18 to 85-years. The participants completed the Cognitive Distortion Scale for Adults. The tool presents 42 mini scenarios with a daily life situation and a proposition concerning a cognitive distortion. Participants must give their degree of agreement (0 to 10) with this one. Seven cognitive distortions are operationalized (dichotomous reasoning, disqualification of one of the poles, arbitrary focusing, omission of the neutral, requalification in the other pole, maximization and minimization). They also completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Both scales were available online on the Internet. The total duration of the test was approximately 10 minutes. A group of 35 participants completed the two scale 15 days apart.ResultsThe sub-dimensions of EDC-A obtain Cronbach alphas higher than .65 and EDC-A has a coherent factor structure. The scale has good temporal stability. Anxiety is predicted by dichotomous reasoning, disqualification of one of the poles, arbitrary focusing and maximization. Depression is predicted by dichotomous reasoning, arbitrary focusing, omission of the neutral and requalification in the other pole. Anxiety and depression are associated with negative cognitive distortions in reasoning. However, depression is also associated with positive cognitive distortions. Subjects with depression produce more varied cognitive distortions than subjects with anxiety.DiscussionThe Cognitive Distortion Scale for Adults shows promising psychometric properties. Further studies will need to be conducted to confirm these results. Anxiety would be related to biased information treatment of negative information, whereas depression would be related to more comprehensive biased information treatment, both negative and positive information. Anxiety would be related to suboptimal functioning of reasoning abilities; depression would be more characterized by a structural deficit of reasoning abilities.     

Intentional response distortion during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has abruptly and unexpectedly transformed nearly every aspect of work, including but not limited to increased unemployment rates and uncertainty regarding future job prospects. Response distortion has always been a concern given that many organizations rely on information that is self-reported by applicants regarding their potential employability (e.g., responses to self-reported personality instruments, resumes, interview responses). Drawing from the Valence-Instrumentality-Expectancy (VIE) theory of motivation, we propose that the uncertainty surrounding jobs may lead to amplified distorted responses on these measures in areas where COVID-19 was most salient. In a sample of 213 working adults [~50% female, age M = 38.48], the present study shows that increases in response distortion on a measure of conscientiousness were more pronounced as a function of (a) local COVID positivity rates and (b) job type, such that frontline workers distorted their responses the most. Findings are discussed in the context of VIE theory, personality measurement, and challenges with maintaining effective selection procedures.     

Are curmudgeon personality scales resistant to response distortion?

Curmudgeon personality, which is assessed by having participants evaluate a heterogeneous set of attitude objects, provides an applied value beyond that of more established personality traits. Recent research, for instance, suggests that curmudgeon personality is distinct from the Five Factor Model personality traits and that it predicts unique variance in important criteria, such as job attitudes and well-being. In the current paper we contribute to this literature by testing an explanation of how curmudgeon personality is distinct from other traits—their potential resistance to response distortion. We estimated response distortion for scales of curmudgeon personality and FFM traits across two quasi-experimental studies. As expected, the score shifts between nonapplicant and applicant conditions were smaller for scales of curmudgeon personality compared to scales of emotional stability and conscientiousness. We argue that curmudgeon personality scales may be more resistant to response distortion than are measures of other traits because curmudgeon personality items are semi-implicit and lack an obvious desirable response. The resistance to response distortion should serve as a call to future researchers to test the criterion validity of curmudgeon personality in regard to performance criteria.     

Subclmical depression and role fulfillment in domestic settings: Spurious relationships,imagined problems,or real effects?

Considerable evidence has accumulated in support of the hypothesis that subclinical depression may inhibit role performance in important ways. However, interpersonal stress and marital discord often precede the development of depressive symptomatology and may independently predict deficits in family role functioning. In addition, cognitive theories suggest that persons with subclinical depression may report poor role functioning even in the absence of any real performance deficits. The current research examines the possibility (1) that the effect of depression on the fulfillment of important family roles is attributable to previously unmeasured contextual variables of ongoing interpersonal stress and/or relationship dissatisfaction or, alternatively, (2) that this relationship is the result of depressive distortion associated with self-report of symptoms and performance. Multiple regression analyses of interview data collected from 495 community-dwelling adults found, however, that depression is related to role functioning beyond any spurious effects attributable to interpersonal stress, spousal stress, or marital satisfaction. In addition, the effect of depression persists when collateral reports of role functioning utilized. Accordingly, it appears that subclinical depression is related to decrements in role performance, and this effect is not entirely due to contextual elements or shared method variance between self-report measures.The authors acknowledge research support from Research Grants R01-AA-07250 and R01-AA-07218 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Research Grant R01-DA-07417 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institutes of Mental Health Grant A-41487-07.     

Eyewitness testimony and memory distortion

Abstract: Do memories change as we acquire new information? Recent research on memory distortion using implicit tests along with research using confidence is reviewed and new studies are presented. Two new studies asked misinformed subjects to provide reasons for their answers. In each study 15% to 27% of subjects said they remembered seeing items they had only read about. In another study subjects were asked to identify the source of misleading items they had seen in slides or read in misleading questions. Subjects were more likely to say they had seen in slides something they read about in the questions than they were to confuse information from two nearly identical sets of slides. Recent work shows that, not only is it possible to distort memory for events, it is possible to implant an entire memory for something that never happened. The evidence is now clear that we can become mentally tricked into making large as well as small changes in the way we recall the past.     

A robust steganography method for HEVC based on secret sharing

This paper presents a robust steganography method for HEVC based on secret sharing. To prevent intra-frame distortion drift, three Classes of intra-frame prediction are defined. To improve the robustness of the secret message, the embedded message has been encoded into n sub-secrets by using (t, n)-threshold secret sharing. Then the encoded message is embedded into the multi-coefficients of the selected 4 × 4 luminance DST blocks which meet the Classes mentioned above. When the test video faced with different loss-rates, the survival rate of the proposed steganography method has increased by around 24.27%, 27.38%, 61.91% and 32.26% compared with Swati, Hayat, and Shahid (2014), respectively; the survival rate of the proposed steganography method has increased by around 28.74%, 34.60%, 56.05% and 41.40% compared with Liu, Liu, and Zhao (2017), respectively; when the loss-rate is less than 15%, the proposed steganography method can get 100% survival rate. And the experiments prove that the proposed method can achieve high performance than previously video steganography methods based on HEVC, especially for visual quality and robustness performance.     

Changing beliefs about past public events with believable and unbelievable doctored photographs

Doctored photographs can shape what people believe and remember about prominent public events, perhaps due to their apparent credibility. In three studies, subjects completed surveys about the 2012 London Olympic torch relay (Experiment 1) or the 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (Experiments 2–3). Some were shown a genuine photo of the event; others saw a doctored photo that depicted protesters and unrest. A third group of subjects saw a doctored photo whose inauthenticity had been made explicit, either by adding a written disclaimer (Experiment 1) or by making the digital manipulation deliberately poor (Experiments 2–3). In all three studies, doctored photos had small effects on a subset of subjects’ beliefs about the events. Of central interest though, comparable effects also emerged when the photos were overtly inauthentic. These findings suggest that cognitive mechanisms other than credibility – such as familiarity misattribution and mental imagery – can rapidly influence beliefs about past events even when the low credibility of a source is overt.     

Event-related fMRI of category learning: differences in classification and feedback networks

Eighteen healthy young adults underwent event-related (ER) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while performing a visual category learning task. The specific category learning task required subjects to extract the rules that guide classification of quasi-random patterns of dots into categories. Following each classification choice, visual feedback was presented. The average hemodynamic response was calculated across the eighteen subjects to identify the separate networks associated with both classification and feedback. Random-effects analyses identified the different networks implicated during the classification and feedback phases of each trial. The regions included prefrontal cortex, frontal eye fields, supplementary motor and eye fields, thalamus, caudate, superior and inferior parietal lobules, and areas within visual cortex. The differences between classification and feedback were identified as (i) overall higher volumes and signal intensities during classification as compared to feedback, (ii) involvement of the thalamus and superior parietal regions during the classification phase of each trial, and (iii) differential involvement of the caudate head during feedback. The effects of learning were then evaluated for both classification and feedback. Early in learning, subjects showed increased activation in the hippocampal regions during classification and activation in the heads of the caudate nuclei during the corresponding feedback phases. The findings suggest that early stages of prototype-distortion learning are characterized by networks previously associated with strategies of explicit memory and hypothesis testing. However as learning progresses the networks change. This finding suggests that the cognitive strategies also change during prototype-distortion learning.     

Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks?

ABSTRACT

Decades of research show that people are susceptible to developing false memories. But if they do so in one task, are they likely to do so in a different one? The answer: “No”. In the current research, a large number of participants took part in three well-established false memory paradigms (a misinformation task, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM] list learning paradigm, and an imagination inflation exercise) as well as completed several individual difference measures. Results indicate that many correlations between false memory variables in all three inter-paradigm comparisons are null, though some small, positive, significant correlations emerged. Moreover, very few individual difference variables significantly correlated with false memories, and any significant correlations were rather small. It seems likely, therefore, that there is no false memory “trait”. In other words, no one type of person seems especially prone, or especially resilient, to the ubiquity of memory distortion.     

Misconstruing methods and meaning in the General Factor of Personality

Research has suggested that a General Factor of Personality (GFP) might represent a real and meaningful higher‐order factor in the personality hierarchy. However, there are psychometric shortcomings in many of the studies used to support this argument, as well as convincing empirical evidence for alternative explanations of the GFP as methodological rather than meaningful. The current article re‐examines the research supporting a substantive GFP by considering and evaluating the evidence presented in a recent volume (Just, 2011). It is concluded that covariation among first‐order personality factors is more likely a statistical or methodological artefact than a theoretically meaningful higher‐order construct.