Individual differences in children's comprehension of temporal relations: Dissociable contributions of working memory capacity and working memory updating.

In two experiments, we examined 9- to 12-year-old children's comprehension and processing of two-clause sentences with a temporal connective (before or after) in the sentence-medial or sentence-initial position. We obtained measures of individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and WM updating to test their contributions to comprehension. We measured the accuracy of children's responses to the questions "What happened first?" (Experiment 1; N = 74) and "What happened last?" (Experiment 2; N = 50) as well as their sentence reading times. Together, these experiments show continued development of comprehension of temporal relations in children in upper elementary school and suggest that children's comprehension difficulties (i.e., more comprehension errors and longer reading times) were influenced by clause salience and recency effects rather than sentence chronology or the familiarity of the connective. Our findings are consistent with a memory resource-limited account and suggest that individual differences in WM updating and WM capacity make dissociable contributions to processing and comprehension of sentences with temporal order information.

Internet-based affect-focused psychodynamic therapy for social anxiety disorder: A randomized controlled trial with 2-year follow-up.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with considerable individual suffering and societal costs. Although there is ample evidence for the efficacy of cognitive behavior therapy, recent studies suggest psychodynamic therapy may also be effective in treating SAD. Furthermore, Internet-based psychodynamic therapy (IPDT) has shown promising results for addressing mixed depression and anxiety disorders. However, no study has yet investigated the effects of IPDT specifically for SAD. This paper describes a randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of a 10-week, affect-focused IPDT protocol for SAD, compared with a wait-list control group. Long-term effects were also estimated by collecting follow-up data, 6, 12, and 24 months after the end of therapy. A total of 72 individuals meeting diagnostic criteria for DSM-IV social anxiety disorder were included. The primary outcome was the self-report version of Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Mixed model analyses using the full intention-to-treat sample revealed a significant interaction effect of group and time, suggesting a larger effect in the treatment group than in the wait-list control. A between-group effect size Cohen's d = 1.05 (95% [CI]: [0.62, 1.53]) was observed at termination. Treatment gains were maintained at the 2-year follow-up, as symptom levels in the treated group continued to decrease significantly. The findings suggest that Internet-based affect-focused psychodynamic therapy is a promising treatment for social anxiety disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record