Unraveling Perceived Ostracism: The Role of Antagonistic Traits and Attachment Orientation.

Perceived ostracism (e.g., feeling ignored and excluded) can lead to psychological distress.

Aphantasia and autism: An investigation of mental imagery vividness.

Objective: The present study investigated whether autistic adults report different levels of mental imagery vividness than non-autistic adults, and, moreover, if autism is associated with aphantasia which is defined as a condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery.

Design And Methods: Clinically diagnosed and self-identifying autistic participants were compared with non-autistic participants in their mental imagery vividness (vision, sound, smell, taste, touch, bodily sensation and emotional feeling) and autistic traits using an online survey (N = 121).

Results: The autistic group scored significantly lower than the non-autistic group on imagery vividness (d = -0.

A Process-Based Analysis of Cognitive Defusion in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Cognitive defusion is among the main components of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a contextual behavioral approach to psychotherapy. Defusion serves as a middle-level term, and, as such, may be useful for applying and disseminating behavior science, despite its lower precision. However, some authors argue that for middle-level terms in psychotherapy to be useful to clinicians, they need to be clearly linked to basic behavioral concepts, with higher precision; and that this is not currently the case with defusion.

On the lowest rung of the ladder: How social exclusion, perceived economic inequality and stigma increase homeless people's resignation.

Despite the relevance of social exclusion and economic inequality for homelessness, empirical studies investigating how these issues relate to homeless people's psychological well-being are scarce. We aimed to fill this gap by conducting two quasi-experimental studies on homeless and non-homeless groups. The first study (N = 200) showed that homeless (vs.

Tailoring Sexual Health Interventions for Middle-Aged and Older Adults, Including Vulnerable Populations: A Scoping Review.

Objective: This scoping review aims to synthesize existing literature on good practice in sexual health interventions for adults over 45 years and in vulnerable groups.

Methods: Using PRISMA-ScR guidelines, search terms focused on sexual health, good practice, and vulnerable groups, in over-45s.

Results: Of the nine studies that met the inclusion criteria, seven were focused on HIV and risk reduction.

Why We Are Not Acting to Save Ourselves: ACT, Health, and Culture.

Chronic health conditions are increasing at an alarming rate worldwide, and many could be prevented if people were to engage in specific lifestyle behaviors. Intervening on lifestyle behaviors is challenging due to the fact that the consequences associated with unhealthy behaviors are temporally distant and probabilistic, and the aversive functions of covert stimuli may interfere with people's engagement in healthy, preventative behaviors. This article explores the role of relational framing in the promotion of healthy lifestyle behaviors and summarizes research supporting the use of acceptance and commitment training (ACT) as a framework for prevention and intervention.

Music as a Cultural Inheritance System: A Contextual-Behavioral Model of Symbolism, Meaning, and the Value of Music.

Music is a pervasive cultural practice that has been present in ancient civilizations through to the present, yet its evolutionary significance has not been unequivocally determined. One position suggests that evolution favored music-related behaviors because such behaviors were linked to sexual selection and reproduction. A more recent perspective that is consistent with today's evolutionary science framework suggests that music is a cultural-level adaptation because of the survival advantages it affords members of a community.

A Pilot Study of the Impact of Brief Exposure to Images of Breastfeeding Mothers on Attitudes Toward Mother's Breastfeeding in Public.

The wider societal attitudes held toward mothers' breastfeeding in public seem to impact infant feeding choices. The present study employed an online ( = 396) experimental pretest-posttest design set to examine whether a of briefly viewing and rating the valence of four different images of public breastfeeding (i.e.

Cognitive arousal mediates the relationship between perceived ostracism and sleep quality but it is not moderated by experiential avoidance.

Previous research suggests that longer-term perceived ostracism is related to poor sleep quality. In this study, we investigated the mediating effect of cognitive arousal on the perceived ostracism-sleep quality relationship. We also investigated whether experiential avoidance was a moderator of the cognitive arousal-sleep quality relationship.

Profiles of Psychological Flexibility: A Latent Class Analysis of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Model.

There exists uncertainty for clinicians over how the separate subcomponent processes of psychological flexibility, a core construct of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model, interact and influence distress experienced. The present study ( = 567) employed latent class analysis to (a) identify potential classes (i.e.

The relationship between differential stimulus relatedness and implicit measure effect sizes.

Implicit measures have been hypothesized to allow researchers to ascertain the existence and strength of relations between stimuli, often in the context of research on attitudes. However, little controlled behavioral research has focused on whether stimulus relations, and the degree of relatedness within such relations, are indexed by implicit measures. The current study examined this issue using a behavior-analytic implicit-style stimulus relation indexing procedure known as the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST).

Anticipatory versus reactive spatial attentional bias to threat.

Dot-probe or visual probe tasks (VPTs) are used extensively to measure attentional biases. A novel variant termed the cued VPT (cVPT) was developed to focus on the anticipatory component of attentional bias. This study aimed to establish an anticipatory attentional bias to threat using the cVPT and compare its split-half reliability with a typical dot-probe task.

Effects of perceptual load and socially meaningful stimuli on crossmodal selective attention in Autism Spectrum Disorder and neurotypical samples.

The present study examined whether increasing visual perceptual load differentially affected both Socially Meaningful and Non-socially Meaningful auditory stimulus awareness in neurotypical (NT, n = 59) adults and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, n = 57) adults. On a target trial, an unexpected critical auditory stimulus (CAS), either a Non-socially Meaningful ('beep' sound) or Socially Meaningful ('hi') stimulus, was played concurrently with the presentation of the visual task. Under conditions of low visual perceptual load both NT and ASD samples reliably noticed the CAS at similar rates (77-81%), whether the CAS was Socially Meaningful or Non-socially Meaningful.

Using action dynamics to assess competing stimulus control during stimulus equivalence testing.

Previous studies have identified potential sources of competing stimulus control in tests for stimulus equivalence. The present experiment employed the Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote®) to investigate whether such competition would affect suboperant action dynamics (e.g.

The relation between stimulus function and equivalence class formation.

Fifty participants were exposed to a simple discrimination-training procedure during which six S+ functions were established for six arbitrary stimuli, and S- functions were established for a further six stimuli. Following this training, each participant was exposed to one of five conditions. In the S+ condition, participants were exposed to a stimulus equivalence training and testing procedure using only the six S+ stimuli as samples and comparisons.