Georgia Panayiotou

Risky and aggressive driving in young adults: Personality matters

Young, novice drivers constitute a disproportionate percentage of fatalities and injuries in road traffic accidents around the world. This study, attempts to identify motivational factors behind risky driving behavior, and examines the role of personality, especially sensation seeking, impulsivity and sensitivity to punishment/reward in predicting negative driving outcomes (accident involvement and traffic offences) among young drivers. Gender and drivers age are additional factors examined in relation to driving outcomes and personality. Adopting the contextual mediated model of traffic accident involvement (Sümer, 2003), the study is based on the theory that personality, age and gender represent distal factors that predict accident involvement indirectly through their relationship with stable tendencies towards aberrant driving behavior. Results from correlations and Structural Equation Modeling using AMOS 6 indicated that direct personality effects on driving outcomes were few, whereas personality had significant correlations with aberrant driving behavior, showing that personality is a distal but important predictor of negative driving outcomes. These high risk traits appear to be at a peak among young male drivers. Thus, personality is important in understanding aggressive and risky driving by young adults and needs to be taken into consideration in designing targeted accident prevention policies.

Coping and experiential avoidance: unique or overlapping constructs?

The present study examined associations between coping as measured by the Brief COPE and experiential avoidance as measured by the AAQ-II and the role of both constructs in predicting psychological distress and well-being. Specifically, associations between experiential avoidance and other types of coping were examined, and factor analysis addressed the question of whether experiential avoidance is part of coping or a related but independent construct. Results showed that experiential avoidance loads on the same factor as other emotion-focused and avoidant types of coping. The higher people are in experiential avoidance, the more they tend to utilize these types of coping strategies. Both experiential avoidance and coping predicted psychological distress and well-being, with most variance explained by coping but some additional variance explained by experiential avoidance. ANOVAS also showed gender differences in experiential avoidance and coping approaches. Results are discussed in light of previous relevant findings and future treatment relevant implications.

Dimensionality of Coping An Empirical Contribution to the Construct Validation of the Brief-COPE with a Greek-speaking Sample

The construct of coping has received increasing attention over the past years in relation to psychological and physical health, yet its dimensional and conceptual understanding is not consistent across theoretical models. The present study investigates the dimensionality of coping in a sample of 1127 Greek-speaking adults using the Brief-COPE. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a structure comprised of eight factors, four of which were broader, and included active/positive, avoidant, support seeking and negative emotional approaches. Results indicated adequate psychometric characteristics for the Greek translation of the Brief-COPE for this population. Associations between coping strategies with gender, education, and psychological symptomatology are also discussed.

The better of two evils? Evidence that children exhibiting continuous conduct problems high or low on callous-unemotional traits score on opposite directions on physiological and behavioral measures of fear

The present study examines whether heterogeneous groups of children identified based on their longitudinal scores on conduct problems (CP) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits differ on physiological and behavioral measures of fear. Specifically, it aims to test the hypothesis that children with high/stable CP differentiated on CU traits score on opposite directions on a fear-fearless continuum. Seventy-three participants (M age = 11.21; 45.2% female) were selected from a sample of 1,200 children. Children and their parents completed a battery of questionnaires assessing fearfulness, sensitivity to punishment, and behavioral inhibition. Children also participated in an experiment assessing their startle reactivity to fearful mental imagery, a well-established index of defensive motivation. The pattern of results verifies the hypothesis that fearlessness, assessed with physiological and behavioral measures, is a core characteristic of children high on both CP and CU traits (i.e., receiving the DSM-5 specifier of limited prosocial emotions). To the contrary, children with high/stable CP and low CU traits demonstrated high responsiveness to fear, high behavioral inhibition, and high sensitivity to punishment. The study is in accord with the principle of equifinality, in that different developmental mechanisms (i.e., extremes of high and low fear) may have the same behavioral outcome manifested as phenotypic antisocial behavior.

Perceived social support helps, but does not buffer the negative impact of anxiety disorders on quality of life and perceived stress

PurposeAnxiety disorders are prevalent and substantially hinder quality of life, in all domains, including social connections, mental and physical health. Past research on stress indicates that perceived social support improves wellbeing both directly by providing positive experiences and indirectly through buffering the effects of stress. This study examined whether social support moderates the negative impact of anxiety disorders on quality of life.MethodThe study was conducted on a community sample in Cyprus, screened for anxiety disorders. The hypothesized model takes into account potential differences between individuals with and without anxiety in health, tendency to seek support, stressful life events, and depression. Furthermore, differences between different anxiety disorders on these variables were examined.ResultsResults indicate that perceived social support has a positive, direct effect on quality of life and perceived stress for all participants but that it does not appear to moderate the adverse effects of having a disorder on quality of life or stress. The negative effects of anxiety appeared to mostly be carried by comorbid depression.ConclusionsSocial support is important for quality of life. Potential interventions for anxiety disorders should take this into account, as well as the substantially detrimental role of co-morbid depression symptoms on wellbeing outcomes.

Do alexithymic individuals avoid their feelings? Experiential avoidance mediates the association between alexithymia, psychosomatic, and depressive symptoms in a community and a clinical sample.

OBJECTIVE Alexithymia is defined as the trait associated with difficulty in identifying and describing feelings as well as poor fantasy and imagery. While alexithymia is related to psychopathology in general, it has been associated with increased reporting of medically unexplained symptoms and depression in particular. This study attempts to assess the extent to which alexithymia represents a learned, avoidant coping strategy against unwanted emotions. In this way the study aims to identify a potential mechanism that may elucidate the relationship between alexithymia and psychological symptoms. METHOD Alexithymia is examined in two different samples, students from two universities in Cyprus and intensive outpatients/residents in an American anxiety disorder treatment program. We examine whether alexithymia predicts psychosomatic and depressive symptoms respectively through the mediating role of experiential avoidance, a coping mechanism believed to be reinforced because of the immediate relief it provides. RESULTS Experiential avoidance was found to correlate strongly with alexithymia, especially its difficulty in identifying feelings factor, while the mediation hypothesis was supported in all models tested. Furthermore, results from the clinical sample suggest that clinical improvement in depression was associated with a decrease in alexithymia, especially difficulty in identifying feelings, mediated by decreased experiential avoidance. CONCLUSIONS Alexithymia, and more specifically its difficulty in identifying feelings aspect, may be a learned behavior used to avoid unwanted emotions. This avoidant behavior may form the link between alexithymia and psychopathology. Implications for alexithymia theory and treatment are discussed.

Direct and indirect predictors of social anxiety: The role of anxiety sensitivity, behavioral inhibition, experiential avoidance and self-consciousness

Using mediated and moderated regression, this study examined the hypothesis that anxiety sensitivity, the tendency to be concerned about anxiety symptoms, and behavioral inhibition, the tendency to withdraw from novel and potentially dangerous stimuli, predict social anxiety indirectly through experiential avoidance as measured by the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II and self-consciousness, as measured by the Self-Consciousness Scale. Behavioral inhibition and anxiety sensitivity are operationalized as temperamental traits, while experiential avoidance and self-consciousness are seen as learned emotion regulation strategies. Study 1 included college student groups from Cyprus scoring high and low on social anxiety (N=64 and N=63) as measured by the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory. Study 2 examined a random community sample aged 18-65 (N=324) treating variables as continuous and using the Psychiatric Disorders Screening Questionnaire to screen for social anxiety. Results suggest that experiential avoidance, but not self-consciousness mediates the effects of anxiety sensitivity on predicting social anxiety status, but that behavioral inhibition predicts social anxiety directly and not through the proposed mediators. Moderation effects were not supported. Overall, the study finds that social anxiety symptomatology is predicted not only by behavioral inhibition, but also anxiety sensitivity, when individuals take actions to avoid anxious experiences. Modifying such avoidant coping approaches may be more beneficial for psychological treatments than attempts to change long-standing, temperamental personality traits.

Mental Verbs And Pragmatic Language Difficulties

BACKGROUND Pragmatic language impairment has recently been the subject of a number of studies that attempted to illuminate classification and diagnostic issues, and identify the profile of children with pragmatic language difficulties. Although much progress has been made, the nature of pragmatic difficulties remains unclear. AIMS To contrast typically developing children with those with pragmatic difficulties and specific language impairment as well as their ability to produce and comprehend pragmatic inferences about given or presupposed knowledge in mental state verbs; and to explore the general hypothesis that children with pragmatic difficulties make some, but not all, of the pragmatic inferences necessary for successful communication. METHODS & PROCEDURES Study groups consisted of 18 children with pragmatic language difficulties, 28 children with specific language impairment and 40 typically developing children. The groups were matched on non-verbal intelligence and age and differed in verbal intelligence, language achievement and pragmatic ability. OUTCOMES & RESULTS The language-impaired groups performed significantly more poorly than typically developing children on all mental verb measures. In addition, significant differences between specific language impairment and pragmatic difficulties groups were found in composite score performance, but not on individual test performance. CONCLUSIONS Both inferential mental verb tasks (pragmatics) and non-inferential mental verb tasks (semantics) were more difficult for the children with language impairments compared with typically developing peers. Inferential and non-inferential abilities showed significant differences between the two language-impaired groups in favour of the children with specific language difficulties. Childrens Communication Checklist scales in conjunction with mental verb measures were found to classify the three groups well.

A Review of the Factorial Structure of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI): Greek Evidence

This study extends the psychometric evidence on the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) in a sample of Greek-speaking adults (N = 818). Alpha coefficients for the nine dimensions indicated high consistency among the comprising items of each scale. The convergent and discriminant validity of the Greek-BSI were checked against the personality constructs on the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) and were both adequate. An exploratory factor analysis with principal components extraction and an oblique rotation yielded a single factor that appeared to measure a mild form of depression. Findings pose questions about the validity of the dimensional scores in nonclinical samples. The expression of psychopathology on the BSI may be constrained by sample characteristics. The search for a uniform factorial solution for the BSI across cultures and diagnostic groups might be a misguided one.

A startling absence of emotion effects: Active attention to the startle probe as a motor task cue appears to eliminate modulation of the startle reflex by valence and arousal

Research has shown that during emotional imagery, valence and arousal each modulate the startle reflex. Here, two imagery-startle experiments required participants to attend to the startle probe as a simple reaction time cue. In experiment 1, four emotional conditions differing in valence and arousal were examined. Experiment 2, to accentuate potential valence effects, included two negative high arousal, a positive high arousal and a negative low arousal condition. Imagery effectively manipulated emotional valence and arousal, as indicated by heart rate and subjective ratings. Compared to baseline, imagery facilitated startle responses. However, valence and arousal failed to significantly affect startle magnitude in both experiments and startle latency in Experiment 1. Results suggest that emotional startle modulation is eclipsed when the probe is significant for task completion and/or cues a motor response. Findings suggest that an active, rather than defensive, response set may interfere with affective startle modulation, warranting further investigation.