Lourdes Espinosa-Fernández

Age-related changes and gender differences in time estimation.

A study was carried out in which age and gender differences were studied in the performance of an empty interval production task. The duration of these intervals was 10 s, 1 and 5 min. The sample was made up of 140 subjects, half male and half female, in seven different age groups from 8 to 70 years old. The age range permitted us to identify when differences begin to be significant. The results show an age-related increase in the underproduction of the intervals. The differences between age groups attained significance from 51 to 60 years onward. With regard to gender, the main result was a greater underproduction of longer intervals (1 and 5 min) for women. These findings were interpreted in terms of different models of time estimation.

Exploring the relevance of expressed emotion to the treatment of social anxiety disorder in adolescence.

The role that the involvement of parents may play in the treatment outcome of their children with anxiety disorders is still under debate. Some studies dealing with other disorders have examined the role that the expressed emotion (EE) construct (parental overinvolvement, criticism and hostility) may play in treatment outcome and relapse. Given that some of these aspects have been associated with social anxiety for a long time, it was hypothesized that EE may be associated with lower treatment outcome. The sample was composed of 16 adolescents who benefited from a school-based, cognitive-behavioural intervention aimed at overcoming social anxiety. Then, parents were classified with high or low EE. The results revealed that the adolescents whose parents had low EE showed a statistically significant reduction of their social anxiety scores at posttest, as opposed to adolescents of parents with high expressed emotion. These findings suggest that parental psychopathology (parents with high EE) should be taken into consideration to prevent poor adolescent treatment outcome.

TIME ESTIMATION DURING PROLONGED SLEEP DEPRIVATION AND ITS RELATION TO ACTIVATION MEASURES

This is the first study to analyze variations in time estimation during 60 h of sleep deprivation and the relation between time estimation performance and the activation measures of skin resistance level, body temperature, and Stanford Sleepiness Scale (SSS) scores. Among 30 healthy participants 18 to 24 years of age, for a 10-s interval using the production method, we found a lengthening in time estimations that was modulated by circadian oscillations. No differences in gender were found in the time estimation task during sleep deprivation. The variations in time estimation correlated significantly with body temperature, skin resistance level, and SSS throughout the sleep deprivation period. When body temperature is elevated, indicating a high level of activation, the interval tends to be underestimated, and vice versa. When the skin resistance level or SSS is elevated (low activation), time estimation is lengthened, and vice versa. This lengthening is important because many everyday situations involve duration estimation under moderate to severe sleep loss. Actual or potential applications of this research include transportation systems, emergency response work, sporting activities, and industrial settings in which accuracy in anticipation or coincidence timing is important for safety or efficiency.

Selective intentional forgetting in adolescents with social anxiety disorder

Anxiety in young adults has recently been linked to reduced capacities to inhibit the processing of non-affective perceptual distractors. However, no previous research has addressed the relationship between social anxiety disorder (SAD) and the ability to intentionally inhibit no longer relevant memories. In an experimental study with adolescents diagnosed with SAD and matched nonclinical controls, a selective directed forgetting procedure was used to assess the extent to which anxious individuals showed lower memory impairment for to-be-forgotten information than their non-anxious counterparts. The results revealed that while the nonclinical sample group demonstrated the ability to selectively forget when instructed, the anxious adolescents demonstrated good memory for to-be-forgotten material and therefore failed to forget. Interestingly, more severe SAD symptomatology inversely predicted a degree of forgetting. We conclude that the main difference between socially anxious and non-anxious participants is specifically related to the ability to intentionally forget and could reflect cognitive functioning that is associated with vulnerability to anxiety. Impairment of the ability to make unwanted memories less retrievable could prompt some individuals to initiate or maintain anxiety disorders. Future psychological treatments could benefit from including modules on memory control training.

Optimal Cut-Off Score of Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory-Brief Form

No cut-off scores for the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory-Brief (SPAI-B) are available to screen for young adults with and without social anxiety disorder (SAD). In addition, there is a currently heated debate on the utility of the performance-only specifier in DSM-5. The present study is aimed at covering these gaps. Participants included 124 young adults in higher education with a clinical diagnosis of SAD and 81 healthy controls. The SPAI-B scores revealed a continuum of severity among the nonclinical population, performance-only specifier participants, and those with both performance and social interactional fears. Data suggested to use a rounded cut-off of 24 to screen for patients with both performance and interactional fears, and a rounded cut-off score of 23 for young adults with performance-only specifier. Findings demonstrated that the SPAI-B is particularly useful as a screening measure among young adults in higher education, but the limited discriminative capacity of the performance-only specifier may call into question the clinical utility of this recently established specifier.