Dear colleagues, students, and friends,

We are very proud to announce that our PRG website is

now up and running, check it out at

http://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/psychology-and-social-science/research-activity/psychopathology-research-group

We won’t bombard you with information but every now and

then we’ll send you a brief email to keep you informed of our projects and other matters pertinent to psychopathology

research.

The PRG was formed in 2012 and we have now 16 post-graduate and undergraduate students, six academics of the

School of Psychology and Social Science at ECU, one

from UWA and one from Swinburne University (Melbourne).

1. Introducing the PRG

2. Researchers

3. Featuring Coralyn’s

Mindfulness study

4. Sam needs participants

Psychopathology Research Group at ECU (PRG)

Psychopathology Research Group (PRG) School of Psychology and Social Sciences, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup. Contact Dr Rodrigo Becerra Phone: 08 6304 2786 Email: r.becerra@ecu.edu.au

Director • Dr Rodrigo Becerra

Researchers • Professor Alfred Allan • Dr Kate Cruise • Dr Craig Harms • Dr Ken Robinson • Dr Guillermo Campitelli • Professor Sean Hood (UWA) • Dr Darryl Bassett (UWA and Notre Dame) • Professor Greg Murray (Swinburne University of Technology)

STUDENTS PhD Lauren McGillivray Leslie Linares Sam Shooter

Honours Anne Galambosi Elizabeth McGechie Glen Scott-Pillow

RESEARCHERS

Masters by Research Amanda England April Kane Claire Adams David Preece Jaymie White Monique Dupreez Nishma Naran Sanja Bojic Wallace Duarte Zeelnaz Parabia

Featuring: Coralyn’s Mindfulness study

Coralyn Dick completed her Masters in Clinical Psychology and graduated last year. She used Independent (parallel) groups, repeated measures factorial design to study the impact of a mind-fulness training program on three attention domains:

• ALERTING

• ORITENTING

• EXECUTIVE

Forty six participants (age range = 20 to 61 (M=33.9, SD=12.1) completed the study. They were allocated to either a control (waitlist) or a mind-fulness training group Pre and post assessment included the three at-tention domains (among other measures) as assessed by The Atten-tional Network Training (ANT; see below).

Mindfulness practice was modelled on Wallace (2006). As novice practi-tioners, the participants were in-structed to engage in 24 minutes of mindfulness practice daily.

A pre-recorded CD and daily diary were given to each

participant to guide and record their practice. Practice diaries were dis-tributed as a means to record and quantify the amount of practice in order to control for dosage effect.

Results

A series of one way ANOVA’s were conducted on baseline measures of psychological distress, executive functioning, or verbal learning and memory for both the mindfulness and waitlist groups. No significant differences were observed on these baseline measures between the two groups. Therefore, none of these variables were included in the main analysis as covariates.

After an eight week intervention of daily mindfulness practice, a sample of 23 randomly assigned novice uni-versity students demonstrated sig-nificantly improved orienting and executive control attention skills on the attention network test (ANT). No significant improvement was found for alerting. These findings are in line with previous research in the area.

ANT

‐ The The A en onal Network Training (ANT) is a computerised  assessment instrument which combines a flanker task using arrows with a cued reac on  me task.    ‐ It provides two measures of performance in response  me and accuracy.    ‐ The test consists of a 24 trial, full feedback prac ce block and three experimental blocks of trial with no feedback.    Each experimental block consists of 96 trials (4 cue condi ons x 2 target loca ons x 2 target direc ons x 3 flanker condi ons x 2 repe ons) which occur in random order.  

Participants are presented with:

target item (>) surrounded by flanker stimuli congruent (> > > > > ) neutral ( - - > - - ) incongruent ( <<><< )

Stimulus presentation is preceded by different cue conditions and the participant is instructed to identify the target stimulus

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Sam Shooter (BA Hons Psych)

MPsych/PhD Candidate s.shooter@ecu.edu.au

It is not clear whether there are dif-fering psychophysiological corre-lates of affective and cognitive Theo-ry of Mind (ToM) and whether both components are impaired (in depres-sion).

Psychophysiological research ex-ploring ToM has had limited method-ology such that only one physiologi-cal measure has been used.

It is unclear whether gender differ-ences account for differing scores in ToM measures among both a healthy and depressed sample.

The proposed research aims to ad-dress these limitations by conduct-ing three studies.

Study 1 will explore the effect of ToM tasks on psychophysiological re-sponse and whether the effect of ToM tasks on psychophysiological response varies according to the measure (skin conductance re-sponse and heart rate).

Study two will examine whether the psychophysiological correlates of

ToM, and ToM scores, are different between males and females.

Study three will examine whether affective and cognitive ToM corre-sponds to different levels in emotion-al reactivity, among people who score high on a depression scale.

SAM NEEDS YOU

It’s very cool to participate in Sam’s experiment. All you have to do is listen to a few stories whilst your hear rate

and your Galvanic Skin Responses are

Contact SAM

The ability to comprehend other peo-ples’ mental states has been termed Theory of Mind (ToM) and was original-ly coined by primatologists and psy-chologists Premack and Woodruff (1978).

Throughout the literature terminology used to describe ToM is broad. Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste and Plumb (2001) for example, refer to Tom as mind-reading, mentalising and so-cial intelligence.

ToM has also been referred to as em-pathy (Kalbe et al., 2007) and perspec-tive-taking (Hynes, Baird, & Grafton, 2006).

Among people who have intact ToM, they are able to recognise that other people have a perspective that is sepa-rate from their own