Biomedical subjects

Jan De Houwer

Publications and source records attributed to Jan De Houwer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

Attentive processing of threat and adult attachment: a dot-probe study.

We examined selective attention to threat stimuli as a function of individual differences in adult attachment. Participants completed a dot-probe task in which a general threat word, attachment-related threat word, general positive or attachment-related positive word was presented together with a neutral word. Results showed that attachment anxiety and avoidance were associated with an attentional bias away from attachment threat words. This attentional avoidance effect was best predicted by the interaction between attachment anxiety and avoidance and not by their unique main effects. The findings are discussed in terms of attachment theory and its relation to attentional biases observed in psychopathology.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Implicit cognitive processes in psychopathology: an introduction.

Implicit or automatic processes are important in understanding the etiology and maintenance of psychopathological problems. In order to study implicit processes in psychopathology, measures are needed that are valid and reliable when applied to clinical problems. One of the main topics in this special issue concerns the development and validation of new or modified implicit tests in different domains of psychopathology. The other main topic concerns the prediction of clinical outcomes and new ways to directly influence implicit processes in psychopathology. We summarize the contributions to this special issue and discuss how they further our knowledge of implicit processes in psychopathology and how to measure them.

Association↗

PubMed2006

The identification-EAST as a valid measure of implicit attitudes toward alcohol-related stimuli.

The results of previous studies suggest that the EAST as introduced by De Houwer [(2003). The extrinsic affective Simon task. Experimental Psychology, 50, 77-85] does not perform well as a measure of interindividual differences in attitudes and other assocations in memory. This could be due to the fact that the target concepts in the EAST are task irrelevant and thus might not always be processed. We introduce a variant of the EAST in which participants do need to process the target concepts in order to perform the task. Using this variant, we measured implicit attitudes toward the target concepts beer and sprouts in people who consume many (heavy drinkers) or few (light drinkers) alcoholic drinks per week. As can be expected on the basis of a priori arguments, heavy drinkers had a more positive implicit attitude toward beer than light drinkers whereas both groups did not differ in their implicit attitude toward sprouts. Also, our measure of implicit attitudes was related to self-reported alcohol consumption even after controlling for explicit attitudes.

Alcohol Drinking↗

PubMed2006

Do children with obesity implicitly identify with sedentariness and fat food?

We investigated whether youngsters with obesity (n=39) differed from a control group (n=39) in their self-reported attitudes towards and in their implicit identification with physical activity and food. Self-reported attitudes were assessed using a rating scale; implicit identification was assessed using a self-concept Implicit Association Task (IAT). Results revealed a marked group difference on the implicit identification with food: Only youngsters without obesity identified themselves more with non-fat food than with fat food.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

A comparison of cue competition in a simple and a complex design.

Recent evidence suggests that controlled reasoning processes play an important role in cue competition in human causal learning (see De Houwer, J., Beckers, T., & Vandorpe, S. (2005). Evidence for the role of higher-order reasoning processes in cue competition and other learning phenomena. Learning &Behavior, 33(2), 239-249, for a review). Until now, this evidence comes almost exclusively from studies with simple designs that involved only a limited number of cues. Little is known about the role of controlled reasoning processes when the design is more complex. It is important to examine this issue because the complexity of the design could determine the resources that are available for reasoning and thus the role that reasoning plays in cue competition. We directly compared cue competition in a simple and a complex design. The results showed that complexity of the design affected retrospective cue competition but not forward cue competition. More fine grained analyses with respect to retrospective cue competition showed that unovershadowing but not backward blocking differed significantly between complexity conditions.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis.

Several theoretical views of automaticity are discussed. Most of these suggest that automaticity should be diagnosed by looking at the presence of features such as unintentional, uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven, unconscious, efficient, and fast. Contemporary views further suggest that these features should be investigated separately. The authors examine whether features of automaticity can be disentangled on a conceptual level, because only then is the separate investigation of them worth the effort. They conclude that the conceptual analysis of features is to a large extent feasible. Not all researchers agree with this position, however. The authors show that assumptions of overlap among features are determined by the other researchers' views of automaticity and by the models they endorse for information processing in general.

Automatism↗

PubMed2006

Reasoning rats: forward blocking in Pavlovian animal conditioning is sensitive to constraints of causal inference.

Forward blocking is one of the best-documented phenomena in Pavlovian animal conditioning. According to contemporary associative learning theories, forward blocking arises directly from the hardwired basic learning rules that govern the acquisition or expression of associations. Contrary to this view, here the authors demonstrate that blocking in rats is flexible and sensitive to constraints of causal inference, such as violation of additivity and ceiling considerations. This suggests that complex cognitive processes akin to causal inferential reasoning are involved in a well-established Pavlovian animal conditioning phenomenon commonly attributed to the operation of basic associative processes.

Animals↗

PubMed2006

People want to see information that will help them make valid inferences in human causal learning.

According to higher order reasoning accounts of human causal learning (e.g., Lovibond, Been, Mitchell, Bouton, and Frohardt, 2003; Waldmann and Walker, 2005) ceiling effects in forward blocking (i.e., smaller blocking effects when the outcome occurs with a maximal intensity on A+ and AX+ trials) are due to the fact that people are uncertain about the causal status of a blocked cue X in a forward blocking design when the outcome is always fully present on A+ and AX+ trials. This should not be the case for a reduced overshadowing cue Y (B- trials followed by BY+ trials). We tested this hypothesis by asking participants which additional information they preferred to see after seeing all learning trials. Results showed (1) that all participants preferred to see the effect of the blocked cue X over seeing the effect of the reduced overshadowing cue Y (Experiment 1), and (2) that more participants preferred to see the blocked cue X on its own when the outcome on A+ and AX+ trials was fully present than when the outcome on those trials had a submaximalintensity (Experiment 2).

Association Learning↗

PubMed2005

Implicit views of the self in social anxiety.

We investigated dysfunctional attitudes in high (N=29) and low (N=28) socially anxious participants following a social-threat activation task (being told to give a speech) using the implicit association task (IAT: [Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association task. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480]) and the Social Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ: [Clark, D. M. (2001). Social Attitudes Questionnaire, revised. Unpublished manuscript, University of Oxford]). The study also looked at anticipatory thoughts about the speech using questionnaire (Social Cognitions Questionnaire (SCQ): [Wells, Stopa, & Clark (1993). The social cognitions questionnaire. Unpublished]) and think aloud methods. High socially anxious participants endorsed more negative attitudes on the SAQ. In the IAT both groups showed a bias towards associating positive words with self and negative words with other but this was weaker in the high socially anxious group than in the low. The high socially anxious group endorsed more negative thoughts about the speech on the SCQ, believed these thoughts more, and had more thoughts overall on the think-aloud task. There were no differences between the groups on the think-aloud task, but there was an interaction between level of depressive symptoms and thought valence. The results are considered in relation to other studies that have used an IAT to measure associations in social anxiety and in relation to Clark and Wells' [(1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. G. Heimberg, M. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment and treatment. New York: Guilford] model of social phobia.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Self-esteem and depression revisited: implicit positive self-esteem in depressed patients?

The cognitive behavioural model of depression holds that negative cognitions related to the self have etiological importance for the maintenance and relapse of depression. This has been confirmed by research using questionnaires. Recent research using the Implicit Association Test, however, showed positive implicit self-esteem in formerly depressed participants, even after negative mood induction [Gemar, Segal, Sagrati, & Kennedy (2001). Mood-induced changes on the implicit association test in recovered depressed patients. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 282-289]. These results are not in line with cognitive theory of depression. Since this could be an artifact of the specific procedure that was used, we investigated implicit self-esteem of currently depressed participants and healthy controls using three different paradigms: The Implicit Association Test, the Name Letter Preference Task, and the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. The results of the three experiments are unequivocally indicative of positive implicit self-esteem in currently depressed patients. However, it remains an intriguing question what exactly these indirect measures assess.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activity in childhood obesity.

This study investigated differences in the explicit and implicit attitudes towards food and physical activities between children with obesity (n=38) and a matched control group (n=38). The implicit attitude was assessed using the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; J. Exp. Psychol. (50) (2003) 77), a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; J. Personality Social Psychol. (74) (1999) 1464). It was expected that both groups would report a positive explicit attitude towards healthy food and intense physical activities, and a negative explicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities. Of particular interest was the hypothesis that children with obesity would have a more positive implicit attitude towards unhealthy food and sedentary activities than the control group. Results revealed no differences between groups in the explicit attitude towards food and physical activity. Children and adolescents with obesity had a more pronounced positive implicit attitude towards food in general. The relevance of these findings in terms of prevention, treatment and further research is discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Blocking is sensitive to causal structure in 4-year-old and 8-year-old children.

In a contingency learning task, 4-year-old and 8-year-old children had to predict the outcome displayed on the back of a card on the basis of cues presented on the front. The task was embedded in either a causal or a merely predictive scenario. Within this task, either a forward blocking or a backward blocking procedure was implemented. Blocking occurred in the causal but not in the predictive scenario. Moreover, blocking was affected by the scenario to the same extent in both age groups. The pattern of results was similar for forward and backward blocking. These results suggest that even young children are sensitive to the causal structure of a contingency learning task and that the occurrence of blocking in such a task defies an explanation in terms of associative learning theory.

Child↗

PubMed2005

Automatic processing of dominance and submissiveness.

We investigated whether people are able to detect in a relatively automatic manner the dominant or submissive status of persons engaged in social interactions. We used a nonaffective variant of the affective Simon paradigm of De Houwer and Eelen (1998) in which participants responded by saying either "dominant" or "submissive" depending on the right or left spatial position of a target person who was engaged as either the dominant or the submissive agent in a social interaction. We observed that responses were facilitated when the status connotation of the target person and the correct response corresponded. These results provide new information about the automatic nature of information related to emotion-antecedent appraisals.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

Avoidance behavior can function as a negative occasion setter.

The authors put forward the hypothesis that avoidance learning can result from the fact that participants learn (a) that a stimulus is followed by an unconditioned stimulus (US) when the avoidance behavior is not emitted and (b) that the stimulus is not followed by the US when the avoidance behavior is emitted. As such, avoidance behavior is assumed to function as a negative occasion setter. The results of a contingency judgment experiment involving 65 students showed that avoidance behavior indeed has the unique functional properties of a negative occasion setter (resistance to counterconditioning and selective transfer of modulation).

Association Learning↗

PubMed2005

Outcome additivity and outcome maximality influence cue competition in human causal learning.

Recent research suggests that outcome additivity pretraining modulates blocking in human causal learning. However, the existing evidence confounds outcome additivity and outcome maximality. Here the authors present evidence for the influence of presenting information about outcome maximality (Experiment 1) and outcome additivity (Experiment 2) on subsequent forward blocking. The results of Experiment 3 confirm that, with outcome maximality controlled, outcome additivity affects backward blocking but not release from overshadowing. Finally, the results of Experiment 4 demonstrate that information about outcome additivity has a similar effect on forward blocking if presented after the blocking training instead of before. The results are compatible with the idea that blocking results from inferential processes at the time of testing and not from a failure to acquire associative strength during training.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations as a source of negative priming.

Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition condition if different responses were required for identical stimuli in the prime and probe (negative priming). Repeating the prime distractor in the probe facilitated responding if the same response was required in the prime and in the probe (positive priming). The same pattern of results was replicated in a letter-matching task without task switching (Experiment 4). Findings lend support to a new model that explains negative priming in terms of an automatic retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

The implicit association test as a general measure of similarity.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is widely used as a measure of semantic similarity (i.e., associations in semantic memory). The results of previous research and of a new study show that IAT effects can, however, also be based on other types of similarity between stimuli. We therefore put forward the hypothesis that the IAT provides a general measure of similarity. Given that similarity is highly dynamic and context-dependent, our view that the IAT measures similarity is compatible with existing evidence showing that IAT effects are highly malleable. We provide further evidence for this in a new study in which the outcome of an IAT depended on whether the perceptual or functional characteristics of the stimuli were made salient.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2005

Unintentional processing of motivational valence.

Recent motivational affective priming studies (Moors & De Houwer, 2001; Moors, De Houwer, & Eelen, 2004) showed that primes that indicate success on a goal-inducing task facilitate positive target responses whereas primes that indicate failure on that task facilitate negative target responses. In the current studies, we examined whether these priming effects depend on consciously intentional processing of the motivational valence of the primes. In Experiment 1, the outcome of success or failure was presented not only immediately before the target (i.e., the prime) but also a second time after the target response. This should encourage participants to ignore the prime. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to respond to the targets within 600 ms after target onset. As a result, participants had little opportunity to process the motivational prime valence in a consciously intentional way. Nevertheless, strong affective priming effects were found in both studies. These results provide additional support for the claim that motivational valence can be processed without the conscious intention to do so.

Adult↗