Michael Hock

Relationships between restrictive mother-child interactions and anxiety of the child

Abstract The “two-process model” postulates that there are specific associations between patterns of parental child-rearing styles and the development of the childs anxiety and coping dispositions. Besides parameters of parental feedback to the child, this model considers support and restriction to be the central dimensions of child-rearing behavior. The present study aims at assessing behavioral indicators for restriction. For this purpose, the working and intervention behavior of 47 mothers and their ten- to 13-year-old children was observed and registered during a 15-minute period of common problem-solving (putting together a difficult puzzle-like cube). In order to register processes of problem-oriented cooperation between mother and child, transitional probabilities between defined state and event classes were analyzed. Based on the theoretical definition of the child-rearing style “restrictio”, hypotheses concerning the significance of variable transitional probabilities are formulated and tested r...

Facets of Dynamic Positive Affect: Differentiating Joy, Interest, and Activation in the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)

This article proposes the differentiation of Joy, Interest, and Activation in the Positive Affect (PA) scale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; D. Watson, L. A. Clark, & A. Tellegen, 1988). Study 1 analyzed the dynamic course of PA before, during, and after an exam and established the differentiation of the three facets. Study 2 used a multistate-multitrait analysis to confirm this structure. Studies 3-5 used success-failure experiences, speaking tasks, and feedback of exam results to further examine PA facets in affect-arousing settings. All studies provide convincing evidence for the benefit of differentiating three facets of PA in the PANAS: Joy, Interest, and Activation do have distinct and sometimes even opposite courses that make their separation meaningful and rewarding.

Interactive effects of state anxiety and trait anxiety on emotional Stroop interference

This study examined main, interaction, and quadratic effects of state and trait anxiety on attentional bias toward threat related stimuli. Students (n=121) completed a card version of an emotional Stroop task. While there were no main effects for trait anxiety or state anxiety, regression analyses revealed a significant contribution of the interaction term of both variables. Only for individuals high in trait anxiety, was state anxiety positively related to Stroop interference. In contrast, the low anxious group showed the opposite response pattern. A quadratic effect of trait anxiety was also found but the interaction term proved to be the most important predictor. Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to divergent theoretical conceptions of attentional biases.

Coping dispositions and the processing of ambiguous stimuli.

This study examined associations between coping dispositions (vigilance, cognitive avoidance) and indicators of the processing of ambiguous stimuli. In the first phase of the investigation, 58 male participants were presented with a series of sentences that could be interpreted in a threatening or a nonthreatening fashion. The participants had to rate the unpleasantness of the events described in the sentences. Subsequently a previously unannounced recognition memory test for disambiguated (threatening and nonthreatening) variants of the sentences was carried out. Evidence based on ratings, reaction times, and recognition memory measures indicated that vigilant individuals are characterized by processing activities that favor the intake and storage of the threatening rather than the nonthreatening meanings of ambiguous stimuli. Highly avoidant nonvigilant individuals (repressers) showed a disproportionately large number of extremely delayed ratings.

Coping with threat and memory for ambiguous information: testing the repressive discontinuity hypothesis.

Two studies examined the influence of coping dispositions (repression, sensitization, and nondefensiveness) and anxiety on the encoding and memory representation of ambiguous threat-related stimuli. In Study 1, memory was tested shortly after encoding. Study 2 contrasted immediate and delayed testing. Repressers showed evidence of mixed affective reactions to ambiguous stimuli at encoding, accompanied by weak memory representation of potentially threatening implications of these stimuli. In contrast, sensitizers and anxious individuals manifested a processing bias in favor of threatening implications of ambiguous stimuli. Influences of coping on memory were most pronounced for delayed testing. Anxiety influences on memory were weak. An expectancy-based account of individual differences in processing ambiguous stimuli is discussed.

Assessing attention allocation toward threat-related stimuli: a comparison of the emotional Stroop task and the attentional probe task

This study examined the association of two widely used measures of attention allocation toward or away from threat-related stimuli: The emotional Stroop task and the attentional probe task. Fifty-three participants responded to computer versions of both tasks where stimuli were presented both subliminally and supraliminally. Thus, four indexes indicating attention allocation were computed for each participant. A correlation analysis showed that the attentional probe index and the emotional Stroop index were associated within each presentation mode while all other relations were nonsignificant. These results are discussed in terms of a distinction between preattentive and attentional processes operationalised by different stimulus presentation times.

Construct Validity of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index–3 in Clinical Samples

Using two clinical samples of patients, the presented studies examined the construct validity of the recently revised Anxiety Sensitivity Index–3 (ASI-3). Confirmatory factor analyses established a clear three-factor structure that corresponds to the postulated subdivision of the construct into correlated somatic, social, and cognitive components. Participants with different primary clinical diagnoses differed from each other on the ASI-3 subscales in theoretically meaningful ways. Specifically, the ASI-3 successfully discriminated patients with anxiety disorders from patients with nonanxiety disorders. Moreover, patients with panic disorder or agoraphobia manifested more somatic concerns than patients with other anxiety disorders and patients with nonanxiety disorders. Finally, correlations of the ASI-3 scales with other measures of clinical symptoms and negative affect substantiated convergent and discriminant validity. Substantial positive correlations were found between the ASI-3 Somatic Concerns and body vigilance, between Social Concerns and fear of negative evaluation and socially inhibited behavior, and between Cognitive Concerns and depression symptoms, anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, and subjective complaints. Moreover, Social Concerns correlated negatively with dominant and intrusive behavior. Results are discussed with respect to the contribution of the ASI-3 to the assessment of anxiety-related disorders.

A comparison of two approaches to the assessment of coping styles

Abstract This study examined the association of coping style classifications based on (a) dispositional vigilance (VIG) and cognitive avoidance (CAV) and (b) trait anxiety and social desirability (SD). 281 subjects (123 men, 158 women) completed questionnaires to assess these variables. By applying median splits, subjects were divided into high and low scorers on each dimension. According to both classifications, four coping style groups were operationally defined on the basis of the respective dichotomized variables. Results yielded convergent assignments of repressers (low anxiety and high SD; low VIG and high CAV, respectively), sensitizers (high anxiety and low SD; high VIG and low CAV), and low-anxious individuals (low anxiety and low SD; low VIG and low CAV), but not for individuals with high scores on both scales of each classification system. Implications of these findings concerning the conceptualization and measurement of coping styles are discussed.

Coping dispositions, actual anxiety, and the incidental learning of success- and failure-related stimuli

Abstract Coping dispositions (cognitive avoidance, vigilance) and actual anxiety (worry, emotionality) are investigated as determinants of the incidental learning of stimuli which are associated with the experience of success or failure. In a first trial of a laboratory study, 83 subjects (44 men and 39 women) had to solve 5-letter-anagrams of different degrees of difficulty within a period of 10 sec for each anagram. Interspersed in this sequence were unsolvable anagrams (“pseudo-anagrams”). For 50% of the 114 anagrams presented on a computer screen, the subject received feedback on the solvability of the item; for the remaining anagrams feedback was withheld. The central aim of the study was to analyze the recognition of success-related items (solved anagrams) as compared to failure-related items (unsolved but solvable anagrams with feedback). Furthermore, the recognition of pseudo-anagrams with no feedback concerning solvability (uncertainty items) was of interest. To this end, a second trial with a recognition test was carried out. In this trial, the subject was confronted with the anagrams of Trial 1 together with an equal number of new anagrams (distractors). The results yield person-specific relationships between actual anxiety and the recognition of success and failure items. For persons high in cognitive avoidance, anxiety was positively associated with the recognition of success items. No such relationship could be established for failure or uncertainty items. On the other hand, for individuals low in avoidance, anxiety was negatively associated with the recognition of unsolved anagrams.

Sensitive maintenance: a cognitive process underlying individual differences in memory for threatening information.

Dispositional styles of coping with threat influence memory for threatening information. In particular, sensitizers excel over repressors in their memory for threatening information after long retention intervals, but not after short ones. We therefore suggested that sensitizers, but not repressors, employ active maintenance processes during the retention interval to selectively retain threatening material. Sensitive maintenance was studied in 2 experiments in which participants were briefly exposed to threatening and nonthreatening pictures (Experiment 1, N = 128) or words (Experiment 2, N = 145). Following, we administered unannounced recognition tests before and after an intervening task that generated either high or low cognitive load, assuming that high cognitive load would impede sensitizers memory maintenance of threatening material. Supporting our hypotheses, the same pattern of results was obtained in both experiments: Under low cognitive load, sensitizers forgot less threat material than repressors did; no such differences were observed under high cognitive load.