Coping associated with compulsive buying tendency.

Research on general coping is limited within compulsive buying (CB) literature. Nevertheless, other behavioural addictions and hoarding might provide insights into coping in CB. One-hundred and ninety-nine participants (M age = 52.72, SD = 16.06; 50.3% female, 1% unknown sex) completed online questionnaires. Mental and behavioural disengagements were hypothesized to predict greater self-reported CB tendency. Whilst these relationships were found in the correlations, a regression analysis indicated that only mental disengagement significantly predicted CB tendency. Additionally, the exploration of denial and substance use identified that denial was an important predictor of CB tendency coping. The relationship between CB tendency and substance use could not be explored given the large degree of participants reporting minimal scores. CB tendency is associated with maladaptive mental disengagement, denial and lack of acceptance coping strategies, which could be useful to consider in therapy.

Working memory load affects early affective responses to concrete and abstract words differently: Evidence from ERPs.

Early posterior negativity (EPN) is an early-occurring, event-related, potential that is elicited by pictures and words that have highly arousing characteristics. Whilst EPN has been found with words presented in isolation several times, different types of words have shown quite different effects across different types of tasks. One possible reason for this is that memory and attentional demands may affect the way semantic features of words are processed, and this may modulate EPN. This was investigated in a silent reading task using abstract and concrete words of negative and neutral valence and a dual phonological working memory task to manipulate memory load. The results showed that abstract but not concrete words elicited EPN, and this may have affected downstream processing. Further analyses examining alpha desynchronization showed that negative concrete words appeared to be significantly affected by the memory load manipulation, unlike negative abstract words. These results provide evidence that the processing of features in negative concrete words is more affected by working memory and attentional demands than the processing of features in negative abstract words, and this may be responsible for the failure of negative concrete words to elicit EPN in this study. Thus, the extent to which words elicit EPN appears to be dependent on both their semantic representations and competing cognitive processes. These results provide a potential explanation for some of the differences that have been reported in previous experiments as well as insight into how memory and attention can affect the processing of the semantic features of words.