Dr Martin Fracker

Author: Martin Fracker

  • How Much More Is $100 Today Worth To You Than $200 Next Year? It Depends!

    Talk to a young adult who is planning to skip college so they can get a job and start working today. Try to explain to them that they could eventually make a lot more money if they graduated from college in four years with a marketable degree. Quite often they will be unmoved because $100 today is simply worth more to them than $400 four years from now. Psychologists call this relative judgment of worth “delay discounting.”

    Many of us think that delay discounting affects young people more than older adults, perhaps because greater maturity and wisdom enables older adults to more clearly see the benefits of waiting until our earning power has increased. There are actually several different theories to explain why delay discounting lessens as we age, but some of those theories predict that delay discounting isn’t linear with age but rather “U-shaped” where delay discounting decreases with age up to a point and then increases again as we continue to grow older. Such a U-shaped discounting effect may make sense to us if we consider that a delay of ten years, say, may loom larger to a seventy year old than to a thirty year old.

    Lu and colleagues decided to test the predictions of various theories of delay discounting by performing a meta-analysis of 105 relevant research studies. They found that those theories that predict a U-shaped discounting effect were indeed correct, but that the reasons for the U-shape are more complicated than just how many years one has left.

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  • Do Emotions Make It Harder to Think and Act Logically?

    In the classic television show “Star Trek”, the Vulcan character Mr. Spock was able to think and act more logically than his human shipmates because he did not experience emotions. The implication of course is that human emotions somehow interfere with thinking logically. But is this true?

    There have been many experiments designed to find out whether emotions interfere with something called “cognitive control”, which is the ability to ignore irrelevant information that would otherwise interfere with performing an important cognitive task. Results from these experiments have been confusing, so Zhang and colleagues decided to see if a meta-analysis of 71 of these studies would clear things up. Their results show that the kinds of emotions that can be studied in a laboratory setting don’t interfere much with cognitive control and may, under the right circumstances, even help. So perhaps Vulcans don’t have such a big advantage over us emotional humans after all.

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  • It’s Right in Front of You!

    You open the refrigerator looking for the ketchup but you don’t see it. You ask your spouse “Where did you put the ketchup?” They look and say “It’s right there in front of you!” And then, surprised, suddenly you see it. You have just experienced inattentional blindness (IB).

    Inattentional Blindness happens to most of us everyday. It may manifest as “refrigerator blindness” or “pantry blindness” or, more seriously, “pedestrian blindness” while driving. But what causes IB? There are two main theories: Attention Set and Load Theory (Attention Capacity). Attention Set predicts IB will occur when a person is looking for one thing and doesn’t see something else, which doesn’t seem to fit the “refrigerator blindness” example but could explain “pedestrian blindness”. Load Theory, on the other hand, predicts IB will occur when attention capacity is somehow overloaded, which could explain both refrigerator and pedestrian blindness. Hutchinson and colleagues set out to discover whether data from 81 different studies testing one or both of the theories could help determine which theory did a better job overall of explaining IB. Their conclusion: both theories do a pretty good job of explaining Inattentional Blindness but do so under different circumstances.

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  • We Look to See What Others Are Looking At

    We humans are social creatures. We form our world views, our understanding of reality, based on information and cues we receive from others in our social groups, especially our families and closest circles of friends. How does this alignment of world views happen? Probably in lots of little ways, and probably gradually rather than all at once.

    In this study reported by McKay and colleagues, the researchers showed that something as basic as where we look is influenced by where others are looking. Moreover, their meta-analysis of data from 4,239 participants showed that people were most likely to look where others were looking when they first made direct eye-to-eye contact with each other.

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  • One Session Treatments for Phobias in Young People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

    Children and young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) commonly experience various fears and phobias. Davis & Brennan reviewed evidence for the effectiveness of treatments of these anxiety disorders, including the adaptation of One Session Treatments for ASD youth.

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  • Two-Step Family Cognitive Behavior Therapy May Benefit Some Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Children with Anxiety

    Cognitive behavior therapies are generally effective for treating anxiety, but modifications may be needed when anxiety is accompanied by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Storch and associates evaluated the effectiveness of a two-step approach to family-based cognitive behavior therapy for anxiety with ASD children up to 14 years of age. The first step was parent-led with therapist assistance. The second step was therapist-led for children who had not shown improvement in step 1 (non-responders). These non-responders generally had higher levels of pre-treatment anxiety than those who had improved.

    All children were evaluated again 12 weeks following step 1. At this point, the authors reported no difference between those that had improved in step 1 and those that had continued into step 2. A major weakness of this study however was a high attrition rate: of the 76 children who started in step 1, only 45 completed their entire treatment program. The authors noted that this attrition rate is higher than that observed with more standard forms of Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and noted that some of the attrition may have been due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  • Cognitive Behavior Therapy can Help Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Improve Their Social Skills

    You and associates conducted a meta-analysis of seven randomized controlled trials studies selected from a total set of 1,730 papers to assess the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) to improve the social skills of patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These seven studies included nine data sets from 214 children with ASD. In spite of some limitations, their analysis showed that CBT was indeed effective in improving the social skills of ASD children.

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  • Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Anxiety Can Benefit From Cognitive Behavior Therapy

    Standard Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) focuses on teaching patients to recognize self-defeating ways of thinking and replace them with more constructive thoughts. Hollocks and colleagues knew that CBT treatments for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) patients with anxiety were most effective when tailored to the specific needs of ASD patients. They hypothesized that patient decision-making ability and sensitivity to reward contingencies might underlie the superiority of specially tailored CBT treatments. Accordingly, they assessed the decision-making ability and reward sensitivity of 148 children with ASD who were randomly assigned to standard CBT or tailored CBT treatments. Their results suggested that ASD patient decision-making ability and reward sensitivity accounted for the superiority of tailored CBT.

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  • Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Engage in More Verbal Aggression with Greater Intensity than Others

    Quetsch and colleagues compared 450 autistic children to 432 neurotypical controls based on caregiver reports of aggressive behavior. Their analysis of results indicated that, across development, autistic children engaged in more verbal aggressive behavior with greater intensity than neurotypical children, although the degree of difference diminished as the children grew older.

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  • Aggressive Behavior by Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Is Influenced by the Environment

    To what extent is the aggressive behavior of youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) moderated (or aggravated) by attributes of their environment? Brown and colleagues tried to answer this question based on caregiver reports for 511 ASD youth. Overall, their data indicated that demographic and environmental factors accounted for up to 40% of the variance in children’s aggressive behavior. The main factors influencing reported aggressive behavior were:

    • Family income
    • The child’s age and social communication skills
    • Parental distress arising from having to deal with a difficult child

    Besides these factors, the researchers also found a slight effect of family warmth as measured by the Family Environment Scale and Caregiver-Child Dyad Satisfaction, but this factor barely accounted for an additional one percent of the observed total variance.

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