Psychological

Background-From an affective neuroscience perspective, our understanding of psychiatric illness may be advanced by neuropsychological test paradigms probing emotional processes. Reversal learning is one such process, whereby subjects must first acquire stimulus/reward and stimulus/punishment associations through trial and error and then reverse them. We sought to determine the specificity of previously demonstrated reversal learning impairments in youths with bipolar disorder (BD) by now comparing BD youths to those with severe mood dysregulation (SMD), major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety (ANX), and healthy controls.

www.mind-eye.in / www.methf.in Hi, Students! We are here to have some ideas of  Self Esteem and  Body Image and the  Relationship with each other and also  Why it is important to know or to have a concept Self-esteem First let us have knowledge of Self-esteem: Estimation of self by self only. WE LIVE IN TWO WORLDS 1) The objective world (the world outside, everything outside of us) For example, the places, people and events around us that we can't change (where we live, the College we go to, parents, friends and others). 2) The subjective (internal) world (our internal world, what's inside our minds) for example, our thoughts, beliefs, wishes, feelings and dreams (how we perceive what we do and what happens to us). The Objective World we perceive from the 1. behavior of the person towards me 2. the reflection of the eyes of the person I meet or talk 3. people staring when I walk on the road 4. etc. The Subjective World is our internal world: 1. how I think, the error in thinking 2. the concept of mine when I speak, the intelligence and clarity of thought 3. the values and tradition built in me when I groomed in my family

The effects of the presence of challenging behavior problems, parental conflict and violence in the community were determined by the probability of occurrence of bullying behaviors in elementary students. 664 students participated in the study, of whom 80 (12.04%) were identified as aggressors. 80 students with no reports of attacks were later selected randomly for comparison. Using logistic regression, it was found that the variables studied manifest significant differences between the student groups with and without aggressive behavior toward peers (R2 = .39). Challenging behavior (OR = 7.83), parental conflict (OR = 3.77) and Community Violence (OR = 5.36) increase the probability of belonging to the group of aggressors. We conclude that it is necessary to analyze the bullying from an ecological framework that considers variables located in the contexts in which individuals interact.

1998) did not incorporate mechanisms proposed to explain set size effects in J. D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J. L. . The authors report a new simulation that incorporates these mechanisms and more accurately simulates S. M. Kanne et al.'s empirical data. The authors then point to other factors that could be explored in a more complete test of their model. The use of feed-forward rather than recurrent inhibition is discussed as a potentially important limitation of their original model, and recent work addressing this issue is described. The authors also discuss possible differences between word reading and color naming in the Stroop task. Although such differences may exist, the authors retain their earlier view that such differences do not reflect a dichotomy between automatic and controlled processing.

We examined the mechanisms that mediate the transfer of information from visual input to storage in memory. Observers performed two concurrent tasks, one of which required input into memory. We discovered that the processes involved in the transfer of information from sensory input into memory cause slowing in concurrent cognitive tasks (dual-task slowing). We used the dual-task slowing eect to demonstrate that memory encoding requires more time when more information is to be encoded and to show that dual-task slowing occurs long after the initial perceptual encoding of visual information (Exp. 1). These results suggest a late and central locus of interaction between the two tasks. Experiment 2 also used two concurrent tasks. However, we reversed the direction of interaction between them and produced a memory de®cit from the execution of a concurrent task. Together the results suggest that the mechanisms that encode information into memory belong to a family of mechanisms that are involved in dual-task slowing phenomena and that have been studied under the rubric of the PRP eect (psychological refractory period). We were able to locate the most probable locus of the dual-task interactions to a process that appears necessary for memory encoding. We call this process short-term consolidation.

Depression after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) is very common, yet there is a lack of evidence-based treatment options for people who experience depression after a TBI. Traditionally, a history of TBI has been considered an exclusion criterion for transcranial magnetic stimulation trials because of the increased risk of seizure after a TBI. We present what we believe to be the first case of a patient with depression after a TBI treated with transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Background. Identify a group of adults with 'undiagnosed' attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and compare their personal and family medical histories, psychosocial profiles, functional impairment and quality of life with non-ADHD controls. Additionally, compare adults with undiagnosed and diagnosed ADHD to investigate possible reasons why the undiagnosed avoid clinical detection.

When serial neurocognitive assessments are performed, 2 main factors are of importance: test-retest reliability and practice effects. With children, however, there is a third, developmental factor, which occurs as a result of maturation. Child tests recognize this factor through the provision of age-corrected scaled scores. Thus, a ready-made method for estimating the relative contribution of developmental versus practice effects is the comparison of raw (developmental and practice) and scaled (practice only) scores. Data from a pool of 507 Portuguese children enrolled in a study of dental amalgams (T. A. DeRouen, B. G. Leroux, et al., 2002; T. A. DeRouen, M. D. Martin, et al., 2006) showed that practice effects over a 5-year period varied on 8 neurocognitive tests. Simple regression equations are provided for calculating individual retest scores from initial test scores.

The developmental trend from overall similarity to dimensional identity classifications is explained by a quantitative model. I begin with the assumption that objects are represented in terms of constit uent dimensions and that the representation of objects changes little with development. Given this assumption, the model has three major parts. First, the similarity between objects is a function of the combination of the constituent dimensional differences. 1 propose developmental change in the likelihood that dimensions are differentially weighted in the calculation of similarity. Second, the perceived similarities between objects are valued for the purpose of constructing classifications. I propose that similarities are valued more dichotomously with age, such that identity becomes in creasingly special. Third, the valued similarities are used to choose the best classification of those possible. The model provides good qualitative fits to the extant data. Three experiments examining classifications in 2 to 8 year olds and in adults support specific new claims of the model. The data and the model provide new insights about development, classification, and similarity.

Lim and Leek (2012) presented a formalization of information along object contours, which they argued was an alternative to the approach taken in our article (Feldman & Singh, 2005). Here, we summarize the 2 approaches, showing that--notwithstanding Lim and Leek's (2012) critical rhetoric--their approach is substantially identical to ours, except for the technical details of the formalism. Following the logic of our article point by point, Lim and Leek (a) defined probabilistic expectations about the geometry of smooth contours (which they based on differential contour geometry, while we used a discrete approximation--the only essential difference in their approach), (b) assumed that information along the contour was proportional to the negative logarithm of probability, following standard information theory, and then (c) extended this formulation to closed contours. We analyze what they described as errors in our approach, all of which rest on mathematical misunderstandings or ...

A brief review of the literature on structural analysis of interpersonal be-havior is followed by a proposal which draws heavily from prior models, especially those of Schaefer and of Leary. The proposed model goes be-yond previous ones in that it has a highly explicit ...

Bernoulli's framework of expected utility serves as a model for various psychological processes, including motivation, moral sense, attitudes, and decision making. To account for evidence at variance with expected utility, the authors generalize the framework of fast and frugal heuristics from inferences to preferences. The priority heuristic predicts (a) the Allais paradox, (b) risk aversion for gains if probabilities are high, (c) risk seeking for gains if probabilities are low (e.g., lottery tickets), (d) risk aversion for losses if probabilities are low (e.g., buying insurance), (e) risk seeking for losses if probabilities are high, (f) the certainty effect, (g) the possibility effect, and (h) intransitivities. The authors test how accurately the heuristic predicts people's choices, compared with previously proposed heuristics and 3 modifications of expected utility theory: security-potential/aspiration theory, transfer-of-attentionexchange model, and cumulative prospect theory.

Scale discriminability is the ability of a measure to discriminate among individuals ordered along some continuum, such as depressive severity. We used a nonparametric item-response model to examine scale discriminability in the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Center for Epidemiclogic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) in both college and depressed outpatient samples. In the college sample, the CES-D was more discriminating than the BDI, but a standard CES-D cutoff score of 16 overestimated the likely prevalence of depression (45%). The CES-D may be more effective than the BDI in detecting differences in depressive severity in college students but may be less specific. In the depressed outpatient sample, the CES-D was again more discriminating than the BDI. The superior scale discriminability of the CES-D offers one explanation for its poorer specificity in college samples. Endorsing many items that discriminate at low levels of depressive severity can result in scores that exceed a cutoff criterion. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Shaw, Rush, & Emery, 1979) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D; Radloff, 1977) are among the most frequently used and well-validated self-report measures of depression (for reviews, see Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988; Orme, Reis, & Herz, 1986). Although both measures treat depression as a continuous variable, the BDI and the CES-D were initially designed to assess depression in different populations. The BDI was initially intended as a measure of depressive severity for individuals already diagnosed as clinically depressed (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961), whereas the CES-D was originally constructed as a measure of depressive severity for adults in the community (Radloff, 1977). Despite this difference, the BDI and CES-D have been used extensively in both clinical and nonclinical populations, and both have been used to estimate the prevalence of cases of depression in various populations. Traditional approaches to psychometric analyses of inventories, such as the BDI and CES-D, use omnibus statistics, such as item-total correlations or reliability coefficients, that average

Psychophysical studies of short-term memory for attributes or dimensions of the visual stimulus known to be important in early visual processing ± spatial frequency, orientation, contrast, motion ± identify an early perceptual memory system. The proposed system, which may be part of the Schacter-Tulving perceptual representation system (PRS), is located early in the visual processing stream, prior to the structural description system responsible for shape priming but beyond primary visual cortex (V1), and consists of a series of parallel special-purpose perceptual mechanisms with independent but limited processing resources, where each mechanism is devoted to the analysis of a single stimulus dimension and is coupled to a memory store. The experimental evidence for this hypothesis is reviewed.

Many studies demonstrate that musicians exhibit superior timing abilities compared to nonmusicians. Here, we investigated how specific musical expertise can mediate the relationship between movement and timing perception. In the present study, a group of highly trained percussionists (n = 33) and a group of non-percussionists (n = 33) were tested on their ability to detect temporal deviations of a tone presented after an isochronous sequence. Participants either tapped along with the sequence using a drumstick (movement condition) or listened without tapping (no-movement condition). Although both groups performed significantly better when moving than when listening alone, percussionists gained a greater benefit from tapping when detecting the smallest probe tone delays compared to non-percussionists. This complements both the musical expertise and timing perception literature by demonstrating that percussionists with high levels of training may further capitalize on the benefits of ...

Evidence suggests that religious systems have specific effects on attentional and action control processes. The present study investigated whether religions also modulate choices that involve higher-order knowledge and the delay of gratification in particular. We tested Dutch Calvinists, Italian Catholics, and Atheists from both countries/cultures using an intertemporal choice task where participants could choose between a small immediate and a larger delayed monetary reward. Based on the Calvinist theory of predestination and the Catholic concept of a cycle of sin-confession-expiation, we predicted a reduced delay tolerance, i.e., higher discount rate, for Italian Catholics than for Dutch Calvinists, and intermediate rates for the two atheist groups. Analyses of discount rates support our hypotheses. We also found a magnitude effect on temporal discounting and faster responses for large than for small rewards across religions and countries/cultures. We conclude that temporal discounting is specifically modulated by religious upbringing rather than by generic cultural differences.

Behavioral sleep medicine is a subspecialty both of sleep medicine and clinical and health psychology that addresses the explanation of cognitive-behavioral focuses that are relevant to identify contributing psychological factors in the development and/or maintenance of sleep disorders. Apart from being a specialty in the design of empirically validated cognitive-behavioral assessment and non pharmacologic intervention techniques for the whole spectrum of sleep disorders, behavioral sleep medicine develops strategies to identify aspects related to life quality in terms of health and sleep disorders, as well as the relationship between stress and sleep. Plenty of researches have been carried out using this approach and many disciplines have contributed to its action field configuration, of interest both for psychologists and health practitioners in general.

A review of the field of lightness perception from Helmholtz to the present shows the most adequate theories of lightness perception to be the intrinsic image models. Nevertheless, these models fail on 2 important counts: They contain no anchoring rule, and they fail to account for the pattern of errors in surface lightness. Recent work on both the anchoring problem and the problem of errors has produced a new model of lightness perception, one that is qualitatively different from the intrinsic image models. The new model, which is based on a combination of local and global anchoring of lightness values, appears to provide an unprecedented account of a wide range of empirical results, both classical and recent, especially the pattern of errors. It provides a unified account of both illumination-dependent failures of constancy and background-dependent failures of constancy, resolving a number of longstanding puzzles. We present a new theory of how the visual system assigns lightness values-or perceived black, white, or gray values-to various regions of the retinal image. The theory grew out of two problems facing what are probably the most advanced models of lightness perception: the intrinsic image models.

The aim of the present study is to explore the linkages between personality and organization citizenship behavior (OCB) using a field sample. Big-Five personality model was used to explore the relationship between personality and OCB. The participants in the study were 187 doctors working in medical college in north India.  Four of the big five factors except Neuroticism were positively correlated with OCB. Hierarchical regression analysis on data after controlling for demographic variables indicated that, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism were valid predictors for OCB. However, Openness to experience showed no significant relationship with overall measure of OCB. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed. Keywords: Personality, OCB, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, India

We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.

Few studies have investigated how physical and social facial cues are integrated in the formation of face preferences. Here we show that expression differentially qualifies the strength of attractiveness preferences for faces with direct and averted gaze. For judgments of faces with direct gaze, attractiveness preferences were stronger for smiling faces than for faces with neutral expressions. By contrast, for judgments of faces with averted gaze, attractiveness preferences were stronger for faces with neutral expressions than for smiling faces. Because expressions can differ in meaning depending on whether they are directed toward or away from oneself, it is only by integrating gaze direction, facial expression, and physical attractiveness that one can unambiguously identify the most attractive individuals who are likely to reciprocate one's own social interest.

OBJECTIVES It is well recognised that medical training can be extremely stressful and that high stress is a risk factor for a wide range of psychological and health-related consequences. The primary aims of this study were to introduce the Medical Student Stress Profile (MSSP) and to demonstrate its psychometric quality as a specific device for auditing medical student stress. Secondary aims were to establish the reliability, construct and criterion validity of this instrument and to explore the relationships between stress, coping, personality, motivation and emotional intelligence in medical students.

This article describes cross-cultural research on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among populations living in the same area and engaged in similar activities. This has novel implications for ...

This article critically examines the view that the signal detection theory (SDT) interpretation of the remember-know (RK) paradigm has been ruled out by the evidence. The author evaluates 5 empirical arguments against a database of 72 studies reporting RK data under 400 different conditions. These arguments concern (a) the functional independence of remember and know rates, (b) the invariance of estimates of sensitivity, (c) the relationship between remember rates and overall hit and false alarm rates, (d) the relationship between RK responses and confidence judgments, and (e) dissociations between remember and overall hit rates. Each of these arguments is shown to be flawed, and despite being open to refutation, the SDT interpretation is consistent with existing data from both the RK and rememberknow-guess paradigms and offers a basis for further theoretical development.

The stop-signal task has been used to study normal cognitive control and clinical dysfunction. Its utility is derived from a race model that accounts for performance and provides an estimate of the time it takes to stop a movement. This model posits a race between go and stop processes with stochastically independent finish times. However, neurophysiological studies demonstrate that the neural correlates of the go and stop processes produce movements through a network of interacting neurons. The juxtaposition of the computational model with the neural data exposes a paradox-how can a network of interacting units produce behavior that appears to be the outcome of an independent race? The authors report how a simple, competitive network can solve this paradox and provide an account of what is measured by stop-signal reaction time.

The ability to play chess is generally assumed to depend on two types of processes: slow processes such as search, and fast processes such as pattern recognition. It has been argued that an increase in time pressure during a game selectively hinders the ability to engage in slow processes. Here we study the eVect of time pressure on expert chess performance in order to test the hypothesis that compared to weak players, strong players depend relatively heavily on fast processes. In the Wrst study we examine the performance of players of various strengths at an online chess server, for games played under diVerent time controls. In a second study we examine the eVect of time controls on performance in world championship matches. Both studies consistently show that skill diVerences between players become less predictive of the game outcome as the time controls are tightened. This result indicates that slow processes are at least as important for strong players as they are for weak players. Our Wndings pose a challenge for current theorizing in the Weld of expertise and chess.

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, _______ is the correct answer") and provided neutral (uninformative) feedback for the remaining confabulated responses (e.g., "O.K. _______"). One week later, participants developed false memories for the events they had earlier confabulated knowingly. However, confirmatory feedback increased false memory for forcibly confabulated events, increased confidence in those false memories, and increased the likelihood that participants would freely report the confabulated events 1 to 2 months later. The results illustrate the powerful role of social-motivational factors in promoting the development of false memories.

In this study, 2440 adolescents and young people of different localities in the Northwestern Spanish coast participated. The Communities that Care Youth Survey (CTCYS) (Arthur, Hawkins, Pollard, Catalano y Baglioni, 2002; Glaser, Van Horn, Arthur, Hawkins y Catalano, 2005) was used to identify drug use and antisocial behavior, and their risk and protective factors in the family, the school, the community and the individual/peers. The objective of the research was to identify the predictive role of age and sex in the drug use and the antisocial behaviour, as well as the identification of common predictive risk and protective factors. Data show that age predicts drug use but not the antisocial behaviour. The common predictive risk factors are school failure, gang involvement, attitudes favourable to and early start of antisocial behaviour. The common protective factors are social skills and moral order beliefs. Results show the relevance of considering risk and protection, confirm the...

Comments on the article by E. Brandstätter, G. Gigerenzer, and R. Hertwig. The authors discuss the priority heuristic, a recent model for decisions under risk. They reanalyze the experimental validity of this approach and discuss how these results compare with cumulative prospect theory, the currently most established model in behavioral economics. They also discuss how general models for decisions under risk based on a heuristic approach can be understood mathematically to gain some insight in their limitations. They finally consider whether the priority heuristic model can lead to some understanding of the decision process of individuals or whether it is better seen as an as-if model.

Background. Although much research has focused on mechanisms of traumatization and factors related to post-trauma psychological functioning in survivors of trauma, there have been few studies of survivors of torture despite the widespread practice of torture in the world. The aim of this study was to examine the role of `psychological preparedness' for trauma in post-traumatic stress responses in survivors of torture.
Method. Thirty-four torture survivors who had no history of political activity, commitment to a political cause or group, or expectations of arrest and torture were compared with 55 tortured political activists, using structured interviews and measures of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Results. Compared with tortured political activists, tortured non-activists were subject to relatively less severe torture but showed higher levels of psychopathology. Less psychological preparedness related to greater perceived distress during torture and more severe psychological problems, explaining 4% of the variance in general psychopathology and 9% of the variance in posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Conclusions. The study findings lend support to the role of prior immunization to traumatic stress and to unpredictability and uncontrollability of stressors in the effects of traumatization. Further research aimed at identifying the behavioural and cognitive components of psychological preparedness that play a role in traumatization may provide useful insights into effective treatment strategies for survivors of torture.

People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying either neutral or angry expressions and later attempted to identify previously seen faces. Recognition accuracy for neutral faces showed the outgroup homogeneity bias, but this bias was entirely eliminated for angry Black faces. Indeed, when participants' cognitive processing capacity was constrained, recognition accuracy was greater for angry Black faces than for angry White faces, demonstrating an out-group heterogeneity bias.

A behavior-based theory identified 2 characteristics of voluntary acts. The first, extensively explored in operant-conditioning experiments, is that voluntary responses produce the reinforcers that control them. This bidirectional relationship-in which reinforcer depends on response and response on reinforcerdemonstrates the functional nature of the voluntary act. The present article focuses on the second characteristic: a similar bidirectional relationship between reinforcement and the predictability/ unpredictability of voluntary acts. Support for the theory comes from 2 areas of research. The first shows that levels of behavioral variability-from highly predictable to randomlike-are directly influenced by reinforcers. Put another way, variability is an operant dimension, analogous to response rate and force. The second source of support comes from psychophysical experiments in which human participants judged the degree to which "choices" by virtual actors on a computer screen appeared to be voluntary. The choices were intermittently reinforced according to concurrently operating schedules. The actors' behaviors appeared to most closely approximate voluntary human choices when response distributions matched reinforcer distributions (an indication of functionality) and when levels of variability, from repetitive to random, changed with reinforcement contingencies. Thus, voluntary acts are characterized by reinforcement-controlled functionality and unpredictability.

A stochastic optimized-submovement model is proposed for Pitts' law, the classic logarithmic tradeoff between the duration and spatial precision of rapid aimed movements. According to the model, an aimed movement toward a specified target region involves a primary submovement and an optional secondary corrective submovement. The submovements are assumed to be programmed such that they minimize average total movement time while maintaining a high frequency of target hits. The programming process achieves this minimization by optimally adjusting the average magnitudes and durations of noisy neuromotor force pulses used to generate the submovements. Numerous results from the literature on human motor performance may be explained in these terms. Two new experiments on rapid wrist rotations yield additional support for the stochastic optimizedsubmovement model. Experiment 1 revealed that the mean durations of primary submovements and of secondary submovements, not just average total movement times, conform to a square-root approximation of Pitts' law derived from the model. Also, the spatial endpoints of primary submovements have standard deviations that increase linearly with average primary-submovement velocity, and the average primary-submovement velocity influences the relative frequencies of secondary submovements, as predicted by the model. During Experiment 2, these results were replicated and extended under conditions in which subjects made movements without concurrent visual feedback. This replication suggests that submovement optimization may be a pervasive property of movement production. The present conceptual framework provides insights into principles of motor performance, and it links the study of physical action to research on sensation, perception, and cognition, where psychologists have been concerned for some time about the degree to which mental processes incorporate rational and normative rules.