Children's CBT skills, metacognition, empathy, and theory of mind

Purpose Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for common mental health problems that affect children, young people and adults. The suitability of CBT for children has been questioned because it requires children to think about their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which cognitive and affective capacities predict children’s ability to relate thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Design/methodology/approach A total of 59 typically developing children aged between 8 and 11 years took part in the study. CBT skills were assessed on a story task that required children to relate the character’s thoughts to their feelings and behaviours. Children also completed an assessment of IQ, a feeling-of-knowing metamemory task that assessed metacognition, and a higher-order theory of mind task. Furthermore, parents rated their child’s empathy on the children’s empathy quotient. Findings The findings suggest that CBT is developmentally appropriate for 8–11 year old children; however, young children and children with mental health problems may have impaired metacognition and CBT skills. Metacognition and empathy may moderate the efficacy of child CBT and warrant further investigation in clinical trials. Originality/value This study provides evidence for the cognitive and affective skills that might predict the outcome of CBT in children. Metacognition and empathy predict children’s ability to relate thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and therefore may moderate the efficacy of CBT

SenseCam: A new tool for memory rehabilitation?

The emergence of life-logging technologies has led neuropsychologist to focus on understanding how this new technology could help patients with memory disorders. Despite the growing number of studies using life-logging technologies, a theoretical framework supporting its effectiveness is lacking. This review focuses on the use of life-logging in the context of memory rehabilitation, particularly the use of SenseCam, a wearable camera allowing passive image capture. In our opinion, reviewing SenseCam images can be effective for memory rehabilitation only if it provides more than an assessment of prior occurrence in ways that reinstates previous thoughts, feelings and sensory information, thus stimulating recollection. Considering the fact that, in memory impairment, self-initiated processes are impaired, we propose that the environmental support hypothesis can explain the value of SenseCam for memory retrieval. Twenty-five research studies were selected for this review and despite the general acceptance of the value of SenseCam as a memory technique, only a small number of studies focused on recollection. We discuss the usability of this tool to improve episodic memory and in particular, recollectio

Understanding metacognitive confidence : insights from judgment-of-learning justifications

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council Studentship awarded to Radka Jersakova [ES/J500215/1].This study employed the delayed judgment-of-learning (JOL) paradigm to investigate the content of metacognitive judgments; after studying cue-target word-pairs, participants predicted their ability to remember targets on a future memory test (cued recognition in Experiments 1 and 2 and cued recall in Experiment 3). In Experiment 1 and the confidence JOL group of Experiment 3, participants used a commonly employed 6-point numeric confidence JOL scale (0–20–40–60–80–100%). In Experiment 2 and the binary JOL group of Experiment 3 participants first made a binary yes/no JOL prediction followed by a 3-point verbal confidence judgment (sure-maybe-guess). In all experiments, on a subset of trials, participants gave a written justification of why they gave that specific JOL response. We used natural language processing techniques (latent semantic analysis and word frequency [n-gram] analysis) to characterize the content of the written justifications and to capture what types of evidence evaluation uniquely separate one JOL response type from others. We also used a machine learning classification algorithm (support vector machine [SVM]) to quantify the extent to which any two JOL responses differed from each other. We found that: (i) participants can justify and explain their JOLs; (ii) these justifications reference cue familiarity and target accessibility and so are particularly consistent with the two-stage metacognitive model; and (iii) JOL confidence judgements do not correspond to yes/no responses in the manner typically assumed within the literature (i.e. 0–40% interpreted as no predictions).PostprintPeer reviewe

Special issue: Research report Recollection in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder

a b s t r a c t Introduction: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder primarily affecting social interaction and communication. Recently, there has been interest in whether people with ASD also show memory deficits as a result of abnormal brain development. However, at least in adolescents with ASD, the recollection component of episodic memory has rarely been explored. This paper is an evaluation of recollection in three different experiments in adolescents with ASD, using both objective (source discrimination) and subjective methods (RemembereKnow judgments). Methods: Three experiments were designed to measure different aspects of contextual information: sensory/perceptual information (Experiment 1), temporal information (Experiment 2) and spatial information (Experiment 3). To measure objective and subjective recollection, for all three experiments, all participants were presented with information to learn in a specific context. At the recognition stage, they were asked whether they remembered the information or just knew the information was there (R/K response, subjective method). To assess the quality of these subjective judgments, participants justified their Remember responses using the contextual information. After the recognition task, to assess source memory (objective measure), all items presented at encoding were represented and participants have to recall the source for all these items. Results: All three experiments showed that adolescents with ASD could correctly recall source information. However, in the first experiment adolescents with ASD gave significantly fewer Remember responses than controls. Conclusions: These findings point to a specific and subtle recollection impairment in adolescents with ASD, at least when subjective methods are used. We discuss how these might relate to differences in the self and to the brain abnormalities in ASD.

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Episodic memory in healthy ageing. A special issue of the journal Memory

International audienceA characteristic feature of the aging process is a decline in episodic memory, that form of memory related to a particular time and place in an individual’s personal history. This volume gathers together articles by leaders in the field exploring aging and episodic memory in healthy adults. These articles provide interesting and novel findings on different aspects of episodic memory, including patterns of decline and sparing, heterogeneity in older adults’ memory performance, and cognitive and non-cognitive factors that potentially improve older adults’ memory performance. This volume presents a state of the art account of episodic memory function in older adults

Subjective states associated with retrieval failures in Parkinson's disease

Instances in which we cannot retrieve information immediately but know that the information might be retrieved later are subjective states that accompany retrieval failure. These are expressed in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences. In Experiment 1, participants with Parkinson's disease (PD) and older adult controls were given general questions and asked to report when they experienced a TOT state and to give related information about the missing word. The PD group experienced similar levels of TOTs but provided less correct peripheral information related to the target when in a TOT state. In Experiment 2, participants were given a Semantic (general knowledge questions) and an Episodic (word pairs) FOK task. PD patients failed to accurately predict their future memory performance (FOK) in response to both episodic and semantic cues. Results are interpreted in the context of recent frameworks of memory and metacognition

Overgeneral autobiographical memory in Parkinson's disease

Autobiographical memory (AM) concerns the ability to remember past events from one's own life and consists of autobiographical knowledge (personal facts) and autobiographical incidents (personal events). The novelty of this research was to assess both personal factual and personal event AM in Parkinson's disease (PD) for specified lifetime periods. An autobiographical fluency task was used in which participants were asked to recall personal events and personal facts from five separate lifetime periods. Previous findings as well the brain regions affected in PD lead to the hypothesis that Parkinson's patients would recall less autobiographical memories especially for the most recent lifetime periods. Sixteen non-demented and non-depressed Parkinson's patients and sixteen age-education-matched controls participated. The results showed a temporal gradient for the recall of personal events in Parkinson's patients as they recalled fewer events for recent time periods. The PD group also had more difficulties in recalling autobiographical events rather than an autobiographical knowledge. The difficulty in recalling autobiographical events was characterized by overgenerality, with PD patients failing to generate specific episodic memories