Research Digest 98
Contents
How the misreporting of a student dissertation wrecked the reputation
of bereavement counselling. P.2
Conservatives are less creative than liberals. P.4
To grasp physics, students need to know about knowledge. P.5
Fresh doubt cast on memories of abuse recovered in therapy. P.6
Reading is a team effort. P.7
Walking cane reveals dramatic sensory re-mapping by the brain. P.8
Further information
Editor/writer: Dr. Christian Jarrett
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Research Digest 98
How a student dissertation destroyed the reputation of bereavement
counselling
It has become the received wisdom in psychological circles that bereavement
counselling is at best ineffective and at worst harmful, especially when offered to
people experiencing 'normal' grief (see here for a recent example; p61).
Why the dire reputation? According to counselling psychologists Dale Larson and
William Hoyt, it's thanks largely to inappropriate reporting of an unpublished
student dissertation by Barry Fortner, in which it was claimed 38 per cent of
bereaved clients would have fared better if, instead of receiving counselling, they
had been in the no-treatment control group.
The trouble, Larson and Hoyt argue, is that Fortner's 1999 dissertation has only
been cited once, by his colleague Robert Neimeyer in 2000. Since then, over 14
studies have reported the 38 per cent figure, but each time they have cited
Neimeyer's published paper (a summary of past research), not Fortner, thus
giving the misleading impression that the result came from a piece of quality,
peer-reviewed empirical research.
Worse still, like a game of Chinese Whispers (or Telephone if you're American),
recent papers discussing the 38 per cent figure have cited not only Neimeyer, but
also subsequent papers citing Neimeyer, thus giving the impression that the 38
per cent figure has been corroborated by later investigations!
But now Larson and Hoyt have hit back. In a journal article and technical analysis
(the latter freely available on-line), they claim Fortner's methodology that led to
the 38 per cent figure is flawed. Moreover, they asked the APA Publisher Gary
VandenBos to submit Fortner's dissertation to a post hoc peer review. And
according to Larson and Hoyt, “The experts conclusively agreed that [Fortner's
methodology] is seriously flawed and that there is no valid basis for the claim that
38 per cent of grief counselling clients suffered deterioration.”
Apart from Fortner's 38 per cent statistic, the reputation of bereavement
counselling has also suffered from the reported outcomes of three key metaanalyses (where the outcome data from lots of studies is lumped together), one
of which is in Fortner's dissertation.
For example, the most extensive of the meta-analyses, published by Allumbaugh
and Hoyt in 1999, is often reported as having found poor efficacy for
bereavement counselling. But according to Larson and Hoyt, the efficacy rates in
the 35 assessed studies varied hugely, due mainly to differences in whether
clients had referred themselves and how long they had been bereaved. If the
analysis was confined to the recently bereaved, and to those who had chosen to
receive counselling, then compared to no-treatment control, counselling showed
the kind of benefits typically found for other types of psychological therapy for
other conditions.
Larson and Hoyt acknowledge the need for more research and conclude:
“...findings to date indicate that cautious optimism, rather than the recently
fashionable dire pessimism, is the attitude most congruent with empirical findings
on grief counselling outcomes.”
_________________________________
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Research Digest 98
Larson, D.G. & Hoyt, W.T. (2007). What has become of grief counselling? An
evaluation of the empirical foundations of the new pessimism. Professional
Psychology: Research and Practice, 38, 347-355.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.38.4.347
http://www.apa.org/journals/supplemental/pro_38_4_347/PRO_Larson20060072
_supplement.doc
Author weblink: http://www.scu.edu/Hospice/homepage.html
http://www.education.wisc.edu/cp/faculty/hoyt.htm
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Research Digest 98
Conservatives are less creative than liberals
People who hold conservative views tend to lack creativity relative to more
liberal-minded people, according to a new psychology study.
Stephen Dollinger established the conservatism of 422 university students by
asking them whether they favoured such things as legalised abortion, gay rights
and the immigration of foreigners.
The students demonstrated their creativity by completing a half-finished drawing
in any way they liked, and by taking 20 photos on the theme “who are you?” their efforts were then rated by judges. The students also indicated how often
they engaged in various creative activities, such as writing poetry.
The students with more conservative views tended to be judged less creative
based on their performance on the drawing and photography task, and their
record of creative activities. This remained true even when their scores on a
vocab test and a personality measure of openness to experience were taken into
account.
The content of the students' photos gave some insight into their differing
creativity. The 15 most conservative students depicted religious and family
values, for example with photos of the bible. The 9 least conservative students,
by contrast, tended to use unconventional ways to illustrate their lives. One
student photographed a car parking over the line, to portray his disdain for rules.
The findings build on earlier work showing that people with conservative attitudes
tend to favour simple representational paintings over more abstract art.
Professor Dollinger surmised: “Conservatives could be less creative than liberals
because of greater threat-induced anxiety (e.g. finding the ambiguity of creative
tasks threatening), their greater inclination to follow convention, and/or their
devaluing of imagination.”
__________________________________
Dollinger, S.J. (2007). Creativity and conservatism. Personality and Individual
Differences, 43, 1025-1035. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.02.023
Author weblink: http://www.psychology.siu.edu/faculty/Stephen_Dollinger.htm
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Research Digest 98
Sophisticated understanding of the nature of knowledge helps students
learn physics
The beliefs students hold about scientific knowledge can affect their ability to
understand physics - a finding that researchers say has implications for the way
students are taught.
Greek psychologists Christina Stathopoulou and Stella Vosniadou tested the
epistemological beliefs of 394 students aged about 15 years, all of whom had
taken courses in physics.
For example, the researchers measured the students' belief in the stability and
structure of scientific knowledge by gauging their agreement with statements like
“Physics textbooks present theories that have been confirmed by scientists and
are not going to change”.
Next, the ten per cent of the students with the most sophisticated beliefs about
knowledge, and the ten per cent with the least sophisticated beliefs, answered
questions on Newton's three laws of motion.
Those students with sophisticated beliefs about scientific knowledge, who
recognised that knowledge is changing and constantly reorganised, were
significantly more likely to show an understanding of Newton's laws of motion,
than were the students whose epistemological beliefs were less sophisticated. By
contrast, the students' past school grades in physics did not predict whether they
would understand Newton's laws.
Not all students with more sophisticated epistemological beliefs showed a deep
understanding of Newton's laws, but none of the students with less sophisticated
beliefs did. That is, sophisticated epistemological beliefs were necessary but not
sufficient for a deep understanding of Newton's laws.
“If we are interested in designing effective learning environments it is important
to pay more attention to students' epistemological beliefs and to develop curricula
and instruction explicitly designed to promote epistemological sophistication,” the
researchers said.
__________________________________
Stathopoulou, C. & Vosniadou, S. (2007). Exploring the relationship between
physics-related epistemological beliefs and physics understanding. Contemporary
Educational Psychology, 32, 255-281.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2005.12.002
Author weblink (second author): http://www.cs.phs.uoa.gr/en/index.html
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Research Digest 98
Fresh doubt cast on memories of abuse recovered in therapy
Memories of child abuse, long buried, but suddenly recovered in therapy, have
been a source of controversy for some time now. The fear is that such memories
are false; that they are the product of suggestion, hypnosis, visualisation or other
therapeutic technique.
Now Elke Geraerts and colleagues have cast fresh doubt on the reliability of these
therapy-recovered memories. They found that such memories are dramatically
less likely to be corroborated by third parties or other evidence, than are lost
memories of child abuse recovered outside of therapy, or abuse memories that
were never forgotten.
Seventy-one participants with never-forgotten memories of child abuse, and 57
participants with recovered memories responded to a newspaper advert posted
by the researchers. They were interviewed in detail about possible corroborating
evidence for their abuse, such as a third party who learned about the abuse soon
after it happened, or another person who reported having been abused by the
same alleged perpetrator.
Significant corroborating evidence was found for 45 per cent of the 71
participants who had never forgotten their memory of having been abused, and
37 per cent of the 41 participants who, at some point outside of therapy, had
recovered a lost memory of being abused. But in dramatic contrast, corroborating
evidence wasn't found for any of the 16 participants who recovered their
memories of abuse in therapy.
And yet the groups didn't differ on many variables that might explain this
difference in evidence, such as age when abused, severity of abuse, or how much
they talked about the abuse with others. In fact, the only difference between the
recovered-memory groups, aside from the amount of corroborating evidence, was
that the participants who recovered their memories in therapy were less surprised
by their newly discovered memories.
The researchers said their findings offered support for both sides of the recovered
memory debate. While memories recovered in therapy appeared to be false, the
corroborating evidence for memories recovered outside of therapy suggested that
some discontinuous memories can be genuine.
____________________________________
Geraerts, E., Schooler, J.W., Merckelbach, H., Jelicic, M., Hauer, B.J.A. &
Ambadar, Z. (2007). The reality of recovered memories. Corroborating
continuous and discontinuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Psychological
Science, 18, 564-568.
http://www.personeel.unimaas.nl/e.geraerts/PSCI1940_Geraerts%20et%20al.pdf
(full text).
Author weblink: http://www.personeel.unimaas.nl/e.geraerts
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Research Digest 98
Reading is a team effort
Psychologists Denis Pelli and Katharine Tillman have shown that reading is a team
effort in the sense that the three reading processes of letter decoding, whole
world recognition, and using sentence context, each make a unique, additive
contribution to reading speed.
Eleven participants read passages from the mystery novel Loves Music, Loves to
Dance by Mary Higgins Clark. The researchers knocked out the contribution of the
three reading processes, one at a time, or in combination, by manipulating the
text, and observed the effect this had on reading speed. This is the first time all
three processes have been studied at once in this way.
To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g. “Contribute others.
The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word recognition, they alternated
capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out
letter-by-letter decoding, they substituted letters in such a way that word shape
was maintained (e.g. “Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).
Letter decoding was found to account for 62 per cent of reading speed; whole
word recognition 16 per cent; and sentence context 22 per cent. Crucially, while
the influence of the different processes was additive, there was no redundancy.
So when letter decoding was knocked out, the contribution of the other processes
to reading rate didn't increase. That is, the three processes don't work on the
same words. Speed reading proponents will be interested to note that among the
faster readers, predicting words from sentence context made a bigger
contribution to reading speed than among the slower readers.
“That letters, words and sentences are all involved in reading is nothing new, but
finding that their contributions to reading rate is additive is startling” the
researchers said.
_________________________________
Pelli, D.G. & Tillman, K.A. (2007). Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple
dissociation. PloS one, 8, e680.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000680
Author weblink: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/pelli/
Link to speed reading discussion in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/74766/
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Research Digest 98
Walking cane reveals dramatic sensory re-mapping by the brain
There is a force-field like zone around our bodies, known as peripersonal space, in
which our brains integrate information across the senses. For example, we have
individual neurons that respond when we sense touch and sound occurring in the
same place, such as at or near our hand, at the same time. If you could record
the activity of all the relevant individual neurons, you could plot an imaginary
border around our bodies within which this sound-touch integration occurs.
Now Andrea Serino and colleagues have shown there is dramatic flexibility in
where this sensory integration zone begins and ends. Recording single neurons in
healthy participants would be a little intrusive, so the researchers instead took
advantage of the fact that where tactile and auditory information is integrated,
participants will be quicker to respond to a tactile stimulus when it is
accompanied by a sound.
Sixteen sighted participants were blindfolded and held a cane. At first, as
expected, they were quicker to respond to a mild electric shock on their hand
when that shock was accompanied by a sound located at their hand rather than
by a sound at the end of the cane (or no sound at all).
But then they trained for ten minutes with the cane, practising locating objects
blindfolded. After the training, the participants were just as quick to respond to a
shock on their hand whether it was accompanied by a sound located at their
hand, or at the end of the cane - in both cases the accompanying sound speeded
their reaction compared with when there was no sound.
This shows there had a been a dramatic remapping of the sound-integration
boundary – participants were now integrating sound information at the end of the
cane with touch information at their hand. However, by the next day, without any
further practice, the boundary had returned to near space and the reaction time
advantage was once again only conferred by sounds near their hand.
More extreme, longer-term re-mapping can also occur. The researchers also
tested eight blind participants who routinely used a cane. Remarkably, among
these participants, touch stimulation at the hand was actually integrated more
with sound at the end of the cane than with sound located near the hand.
___________________________________
Serino, A., Bassolino, M., Farne, A. & Ladavas, E. (2007). Extended multisensory
space in blind cane users. Psychological Science, 18, 642-648.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01952.x
Author weblink: http://tinyurl.com/2zvmk9
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