درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of metacognitive therapy on dysfunctional beliefs, inflated sense of responsibility, and intolerance of uncertainty in patients with obsessive compulsive-disorder (OCD). The design used in the present study is semi-experimental, pretest-posttest with control group and a tree-month follow-up stage. The statistical population consisted of all patients with OCD in Mahallat, a city located in Markazi province, Iran in 2018. The participants first screened by using inclusion and exclusion criteria. Then sixteen patients with OCD selected as the sample of the study through available sampling method and assigned randomly into two groups: one experimental group and one control group (eight patients in each group). Each participant in the experimental group received 12 treatment sessions according to Well's metacognitive therapy method for OCD. The participants were measured both before and after interventions as well as three months later in the follow-up phase by the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Yale-BOCS; Goodman, 1989), the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire (OBQ-44; OCCWG, 2005), the Salkovskis Responsibility Attitude Scale (RAS; Salkovskis, 2000) and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS; Feriston, 1994). Data analyzed by multivariate co-variance analysis. The results indicated that metacognitive therapy had a significant effect on reducing dysfunctional beliefs, the inflated sense of responsibility and the variable intolerance of uncertainty (p˂0.050), and its effect remained three months after treatment (p˂0.050). The findings of the study support the effect of metacognitive therapy in improving the dysfunctional beliefs, inflated sense of responsibility and uncertainty of intolerance in patients with OCD.

Evidence has suggested that risk for schizophrenia is likely to occur in non-psychotic first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia. On the other hand, schizotypal personality disorder is genetically related to schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to compare schizotypal traits (i.e., positive schizotypy, negative schizotypy, cognitive disorganization, and impulsive nonconformity) among patients with schizophrenia and their non-psychotic first-degree relatives as well as normal controls. Thirty-four patients with schizophrenia and 50 of their non-psychotic first-degree relatives as well as 34 normal controls were included in this study. The data were collected by the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences, short version (sO-LIFE). The results showed that the three groups were significantly different from each other regarding mean scores of schizotypal traits. Patients with schizophrenia and their non-psychotic first-degree relatives exceeded normal controls on schizotypal traits. Patients with schizophrenia had higher scores on total schizotypal traits, positive schizotypy, cognitive disorganization, and impulsive nonconformity than their non-psychotic first-degree relatives. The findings revealed that hereditary factors had an important role in the development of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and it is explainable by the stress-vulnerability model.

This study investigated the quality of metacognition at its inter-individual level, i.e., socially-shared metacognition, across two collaborative writing tasks of different difficulty levels among a cohort of Iranian EFL learners. Moreover, it examined the correlation between the individual and the social modes of metacognition in writing. The analysis of think-aloud protocols of a number of pre-intermediate and advanced EFL learners revealed instances of episodes in which peers used metacognitive activities at pair level. Besides, comparing think-aloud protocols of tasks indicated more frequent and longer use of socially-shared metacognitive episodes in more difficult writing tasks. The study also found high correlation between the social mode of metacognition in L2 writing and learners’ individual metacognition. The pedagogical implications include the provision of learning opportunities in which learners are challenged to exploit metacognitive strategies, such as planning, monitoring, and self-evaluating.

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read sentences containing ambiguous relative clauses in their L1 and L2. The results showed that L2ers adopt the same strategy as that used by English native speakers in both of their languages, indicating a target-language like parsing pattern in their L2 and an attrition of L1 parsing routine. Additionally, their attachment preferences were not modulated by WMC in L2. This result highlights the “skill-through-experience” position adopted by researchers who question the role of WMC in L2 syntactic parsing. However, high-capacity L2ers' preferences in L1 had attrited (becoming English-like), and low-capacity ones had no preference. This modulation, too, can bear out the above position owing to the observation that L2ers failed to differentiate between their L1 and L2, and particularly that their differing WMCs did not contribute to native-like performance in their L1.

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond.