New Research From Clinical Psychological Science

Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science:

Why Does Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Improve Mood? A Preliminary Test of Three Hypotheses

Kathryn R. Fox, Kaitlyn E. Toole, Joseph C. Franklin, and Jill M. Hooley

People who engage in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) often report that it makes them feel better. Why might this be? Researchers induced a negative mood in participants who had engaged in NSSI in the past year. Participants then completed a distraction task, sat quietly in a room (control), or experienced pressure-induced pain. Participants in the distraction condition experienced improved mood during and after the task, whereas only participants who were highly self-critical experienced improved mood during the pain-induction task. No improvement in mood was seen in the control condition. These findings support the view that NSSI improves mood by gratifying a desire for self-punishment and identifies non-pain distraction as a possible tool for mood improvement for those who engage in NSSI.

Amodal Atypical Neural Oscillatory Activity in Dyslexia: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Marie Lallier, Nicola Molinaro, Mikel Lizarazu, Mathieu Bourguignon, and Manuel Carreiras

It has been suggested that people with dyslexia have atypical neural oscillations in the auditory and visual modalities. The authors present a framework proposing that parsing mechanisms in the delta and theta ranges helps delimit orthographic and phonemic chunks through attentional shifting, whereas activity in the gamma range reflects sampling, encoding, and identification of phonemic content. They posit that deficits in these oscillatory mechanisms in either the visual or the auditory modality could lead to dyslexia; however, the manifestations of deficits will depend on the linguistic properties of the language, as the individual properties of each language may make disruptions of these processes more or less detrimental for reading and language acquisition.

The Role of Speed in ADHD-Related Working Memory Deficits: A Time-Based Resource-Sharing and Diffusion Model Account

Alexander Weigard and Cynthia Huang-Pollock

Preliminary research has suggested that working memory deficits in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be partially explained by slower processing speeds. Specifically, the time-based resource-sharing model (TBRS) hypothesizes that slower processing of tasks leaves less time available for refreshing information stored in working memory, thus increasing decay of the stored information. The researchers examined this by having children with and without ADHD perform a complex span task and a simple span task. The researchers manipulated children’s processing speed during these tasks. They found that, consistent with the TBRS model, reductions in processing speed increased cognitive load and reduced working memory capacity in children with ADHD.