Impacts of trait anxiety on visual working memory, as a function of task demand and situational stress.

Higher trait anxiety can impair cognitive functioning via attention, but relatively little is known about the impacts on visual working memory. These were investigated using previously validated visual feature binding tasks. In Study 1, participants' memory for visual features (shapes) and feature bindings (coloured shapes) was assessed. Stimulus presentation was simultaneous or sequential, varying attentional demand, and participants were grouped according to trait cognitive anxiety (low, moderate, high). No reliable effect of trait anxiety, either cognitive or somatic, was found on memory accuracy, but moderate trait cognitive anxiety was associated with faster correct response times (i.e. increased efficiency) when stimuli were sequentially presented. In Study 2, the role of situational stress was explored during a simultaneously presented task. Higher trait cognitive and somatic anxiety were both associated with poorer efficiency during both shape and binding memory tasks. Trait somatic anxiety also predicted poorer binding effectiveness (i.e. accuracy), in those reporting higher state cognitive anxiety. Situational stress predicted binding effectiveness, but never interacted with trait anxiety, and was therefore not necessary to observe these trait anxiety-visual working memory relationships. Trait cognitive and somatic anxiety, and situational stress, therefore each influence visual working memory performance.

Cognitive Appraisals Mediate Affective Reactivity in Affiliative Extraversion.

Extraversion is comprised of two main components of affiliation and agency. Affiliative and agentic extraversion have been found to predict positive activation in response to appetitive stimuli, and affiliative extraversion also predicts warmth-affection in response to affiliative stimuli. The aim of this study was to test whether cognitive appraisals could account for these personality-emotion relationships. In an online experiment, 192 participants completed affiliative and appetitive imagery tasks, and reported their affect before and after each task. Participants also reported on how they appraised the imagined events. Affiliative extraversion was positively associated with warmth-affection following the affiliative imagery, and this relationship was mediated by appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness and compatibility with internal standards. Affiliative extraversion also predicted positive activation following the affiliative imagery, and this relationship was mediated by appraisals of importance. Neither agentic nor affiliative extraversion predicted any other form of affect following either the affiliative or appetitive imagery tasks. These results suggest that cognitive appraisals may be one mechanism that mediate affective reactivity in affiliative extraversion, although future confirmatory studies are required to further test this hypothesis.

The effects of improving sleep on mental health (OASIS): a randomised controlled trial with mediation analysis.

BACKGROUND: Sleep difficulties might be a contributory causal factor in the occurrence of mental health problems. If this is true, improving sleep should benefit psychological health. We aimed to determine whether treating insomnia leads to a reduction in paranoia and hallucinations. METHODS: We did this single-blind, randomised controlled trial (OASIS) at 26 UK universities. University students with insomnia were randomly assigned (1:1) with simple randomisation to receive digital cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for insomnia or usual care, and the research team were masked to the treatment. Online assessments took place at weeks 0, 3, 10 (end of therapy), and 22. The primary outcome measures were for insomnia, paranoia, and hallucinatory experiences. We did intention-to-treat analyses. The trial is registered with the ISRCTN registry, number ISRCTN61272251. FINDINGS: Between March 5, 2015, and Feb 17, 2016, we randomly assigned 3755 participants to receive digital CBT for insomnia (n=1891) or usual practice (n=1864). Compared with usual practice, the sleep intervention at 10 weeks reduced insomnia (adjusted difference 4·78, 95% CI 4·29 to 5·26, Cohen's d=1·11; p<0·0001), paranoia (-2·22, -2·98 to -1·45, Cohen's d=0·19; p<0·0001), and hallucinations (-1·58, -1·98 to -1·18, Cohen's d=0·24; p<0·0001). Insomnia was a mediator of change in paranoia and hallucinations. No adverse events were reported. INTERPRETATION: To our knowledge, this is the largest randomised controlled trial of a psychological intervention for a mental health problem. It provides strong evidence that insomnia is a causal factor in the occurrence of psychotic experiences and other mental health problems. Whether the results generalise beyond a student population requires testing. The treatment of disrupted sleep might require a higher priority in mental health provision. FUNDING: Wellcome Trust.

Beliefs and emotions have different roles in generating attitudes toward providing personal help and state-sponsored help for people with a mental illness.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of emotions like pity and anger in mediating the relationship between beliefs about the controllability of a mental illness, and the willingness to help someone with a mental illness. In particular, we tested the hypothesis that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to provide personal help are mediated by the emotions of pity and anger, but that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to condone state-organised help were more direct, and not mediated by emotions. A between-groups design was employed to investigate the effects of manipulating controllability attributions via 3 hypothetical vignettes. ANOVA analysis of responses to a revised version of the AQ-27 from 371 participants demonstrated that beliefs about controllability lead to significantly higher personal responsibility beliefs, negative affective reactions and decreased helping intentions in comparison to when the cause of mental illness was believed to be uncontrollable. A mediation analysis demonstrated that pity and anger fully mediate the relationship between beliefs about controllability and the willingness to offer personal help, and also demonstrated that pity and anger partially mediate the relationship between beliefs about controllability and the willingness to condone help provided by the state. The partial mediation may indicate that the effects of beliefs about controllability on state-sponsored may be mediated by pity in some people, but that in other people, beliefs have a more proximal effect on behavior.

Saudi normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting test, Stroop test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence-3, Picture Completion and Vocabulary (subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised).

OBJECTIVE: There are 2 aims for this study: first, to collect normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Stroop test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (TONI-3), Picture Completion (PC) and Vocabulary (VOC) sub-test of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised for use in a Saudi Arabian culture, and second, to use the normative data provided to generate the regression equations. METHODS: To collect the normative data and generate the regression equations, 198 healthy individuals were selected to provide a representative distribution for age, gender, years of education, and socioeconomic class. The WCST, Stroop test, TONI-3, PC, and VOC were administrated to the healthy individuals. This study was carried out at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Riyadh Military Hospital, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from January 2000 to July 2002. RESULTS: Normative data were obtained for all tests, and tables were constructed to interpret scores for different age groups. Regression equations to predict performance on the 3 tests of frontal function from scores on tests of fluid (TONI-3) and premorbid intelligence were generated from the data from the healthy individuals. CONCLUSION: The data collected in this study provide normative tables for 3 tests of frontal lobe function and for tests of general intellectual ability for use in Saudi Arabia. The data also provide a method to estimate pre-injury ability without the use of verbally based tests.

Subjective experience and the attentional lapse: task engagement and disengagement during sustained attention.

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience (thought probes and questionnaires) to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance (reaction time and errors) and psycho-physiological measures (heart rate and galvanic skin response). This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART, Robertson, Manly, Adrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997). The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: (A) task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the task and (B) a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed.

Task unrelated thought whilst encoding information.

Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation, for example a daydream. Three experiments were conducted on healthy participants, with two broad aims. First, to contrast distributed and encapsulated views of cognition by comparing the encoding of categorical and random lists of words (Experiments One and Two). Second, to examine the consequences of experiencing TUT during study on the subsequent retrieval of information (Experiments One, Two, and Three). Experiments One and Two demonstrated lower levels of TUT and higher levels of word-fragment completion whilst encoding categorical relative to random stimuli, supporting the role of a distributed resource in the maintenance of TUT. In addition the results of all three experiments suggested that experiencing TUT during study had a measurable effect on subsequent retrieval. TUT was associated with increased frequency of false alarms at retrieval (Experiment One). In the subsequent experiments TUT was associated with no advantage to retrieval based on recollection, by manipulating instructions at encoding (Experiment Two), and/or at retrieval (Experiment Three). The implications of the results of all three experiments are discussed in terms of recent accounts of memory retrieval and conscious awareness.

Patient and clinician agreement on personality using the SWAP-200.

The Shedler Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP-200; Westen & Shedler, 1999a) is a clinician-rated assessment providing descriptions of personality disorder prototypes using a Q-sort procedure. This study aims to investigate the degree to which there is agreement between patients' and clinicians' accounts of personality pathology on a modified version of the SWAP-200 using Bland Altman analysis with the data from 23 clinician-patient pairs. Poor agreement was found between clinicians and patients on personality prototypes. Even the best agreement found between patients and clinicians on the avoidant prototype was poor--the patients' ratings were up to 43.5 per cent below and 32.9 per cent above the clinicians' ratings. This is an unacceptable degree of variation. The difference between the clinician and patient ratings are large when expressed as a percentage of the possible scores (as obtained on the clinician rating scale). The patient ratings vary between being 40.8 to 91.1% below the clinician ratings, and 32.9 to 99.7% above the clinician ratings.

Task unrelated thought: the role of distributed processing.

Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation; for example, a day dream. Encapsulated models of cognition propose that qualitative changes in consciousness, i.e., the production of TUT, can be explained in terms of changes in the quantity of resources deployed for task completion. In contrast, distributed models of cognition emphasize the importance of holistic processes in the generation and maintenance of task focus and are consistent with the effects of higher order variables such as schemata. Three experiments were conducted on healthy participants using a categorical stimulus organization to contrast distributed and encapsulated views of cognition. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that despite the increased difficulty of the alphabetical verbal fluency task fewer TUTs were produced during category fluency condition. Experiment 3 replicated the categorical suppression of TUT while encoding and recalling information in a memory task. The results of these three experiments support the predictions derived from models of cognition emphasizing the importance of stimulus organization in the generation and maintenance of task focus and have potential importance for the scientific evaluation of cognition.