Publications (12) View all
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Article: Assessing the development of inflated responsibility beliefs: the Pathways to Inflated Responsibility Beliefs Scale.
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ABSTRACT: Inflated responsibility beliefs are hypothesized to be a central feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; Rachman, 1998, 2002; Salkovskis, 1985), but the etiology of these beliefs remains untested. Salkovskis and colleagues (1999) proposed 5 primary pathways to the development of inflated responsibility beliefs (e.g., heightened responsibility as a child, exposure to rigid and extreme codes of conduct as a child). The current paper presents 2 studies developing a self-report measure--the Pathways to Inflated Responsibility Beliefs Scale (PIRBS)--of these hypothesized pathways. In the first study, an initial version of the scale is developed and the number of items are reduced. In the second study, the revised scale is shown to provide a reasonable match to the proposed structure and to have good internal consistency, retest reliability, and convergent and divergent validity. These initial data suggest that the PIRBS may be useful for studying the etiology of inflated responsibility beliefs that are hypothesized to be central to the development of OCD. Limitations and future directions are discussed.Behavior therapy 01/2009; 39(4):322-35. · 2.85 Impact Factor -
Article: Reported history of childhood abuse and young adults' information-processing biases for facial displays of emotion.
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ABSTRACT: The primary goal of this study was to examine the relations between young adults' reports of childhood abuse and their current attention and interpretation biases for facial displays of emotion. Consistent with prediction, individuals reporting a history of moderate to severe childhood abuse exhibited preferential attention to angry faces and increased sensitivity in the detection of angry expressions at lower levels of emotional intensity. Both the attention and interpretation biases were specific to angry rather than happy or sad faces. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that experiences of childhood abuse may contribute to the development of experience-specific information-processing biases.Child Maltreatment 12/2008; 14(2):148-56. · 2.77 Impact Factor -
Article: Receptive prosody in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome
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ABSTRACT: People with Williams syndrome (WS) are known to use prosodic devices extensively in conversation and narratives, but their ability to interpret prosody to comprehend speakers’ communicative intentions and emotional states has not been investigated systematically. We present findings from three experiments probing sensitivity to lexical stress and to affective prosodic cues considered at several processing levels. Adolescents and adults with WS were compared with age, IQ and receptive vocabulary-matched participants with learning or intellectual disabilities (LID), and with age-matched normal controls (NC). The WS group performed significantly better than the LID group only in recognising emotional tone of voice in filtered speech. Results reflect a relative sensitivity in the WS group to affective prosody, while the ability to use linguistic prosodic cues for semantic interpretation remains constrained by perceptual and cognitive limitations, suggesting a possible dissociation in sensitivity to different types of prosody in this population.LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES. 01/2007; 22:247-271. -
Article: Perceiving facial and vocal expressions of emotion in individuals with Williams syndrome.
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ABSTRACT: People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion recognition for basic emotions to three groups: adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome, age and IQ-matched participants with learning/intellectual disability, and age-matched nonimpaired controls. The Williams syndrome and learning/intellectual disability groups performed significantly worse than the typically developing controls on both subtests, especially on negative emotions. Error analysis indicated the same general pattern of performance across versions and subtests of the DANVA2 for all groups. These findings suggest that emotion recognition is not spared in Williams syndrome.American journal of mental retardation: AJMR 02/2006; 111(1):15-26. · 2.51 Impact Factor -
Article: Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases
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ABSTRACT: Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.Cognition and Emotion 09/2008; 22(6):1159-1173. · 2.52 Impact Factor
