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There is evidence from the literature that the negative emotions and behaviours that bystanders expressed in reactions to witnessing bullying could have stemmed from self-debasing cognitive distortions and errors in thinking patterns which included personalisation, catastrophising, over-generalisation and selective abstraction. For this reason, the purpose of this qualitative descriptive-exploratory study was to explore and describe 10 early adolescent bystanders' experiences of school bullying following a self-debasing cognitive distortion restructuring intervention. Appraisal and cognitive theory were adopted as the overarching theoretical framework. This is because both theories demonstrated how individual thinking patterns could play a primary and significant role in the development and maintenance of emotional and behavioural responses to events witnessed or experienced. A descriptive-exploratory research design was used because it best suited the purpose of the study. The philosophical assumption underpinning this study emanated from an interpretivism paradigm which is a paradigm concerned with understanding the world from the perspective of people‟s experiences thereof. Purposive sampling was used to select 10 participants who were within the age range of 11 to 13 years for the study. Individual interviews were used as formal data collection strategies while a reflective research journal and audio recordings were used as additional data collection methods. The inductive thematic data analysis process was followed to analyse all data collected. The data was collected and analysed in two stages. The findings of this study, from the pre-intervention phase, indicated that personalisation evoked self-blame and feelings of guilt; catastrophising amplified anxiety and fear; overgeneralisation induced and exacerbated a negative perception of school safety and selective abstraction led to indirect co-victimisation. The findings that emerged at the first stage informed the common concepts that were addressed in the intervention. The findings of this study from the post-intervention phase revealed specifically that the self-debasing cognitive distortion restructuring intervention modified bystanders‟ experiences of school bullying. There were observable reduction in bystanders‟ negative emotional and behavioural reactions to witnessing bullying as a result of learning to challenge the validity and reality of distortions in their thinking patterns. Therefore, it is recommended that school counsellors and educational psychologists should provide adequate support to victims of bullying by equipping them with cognitive restructuring skills to root out the source of bias in their thought patterns. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Educational Psychology / PhD / Unrestricted

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Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / This study focused on the cognitive distortions of child sex offenders in a South African sample. Child sex offenders are a heterogeneous group but share some similarities. Firstly, the majority of child sex offenders are male. Secondly their sexual attraction to children seems to be influenced to some degree by their thoughts around child sex offending, and the world in general. / South Africa

Vicarious trauma can impact anyone working with a traumatized person. The constructivist self-development theory asserts that vicarious trauma can negatively distort how the helper thinks about the world and can cause increased stress. Researchers have explored stress and coping models and have studied how increased stress can negatively impact coping and health behaviors. However, researchers have not explored how vicarious trauma, coping, and health behaviors are related. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationships among vicarious trauma, health behaviors (healthy eating, physical activity, cigarette smoking, and risky drinking), and maladaptive coping. The study sample consisted of 102 Texas Children's Advocacy Center (TX CAC) and Texas Child Protective Services (TX CPS) employees with direct exposure to a client's trauma. Participants completed a self-administered online survey designed to measure vicarious trauma, health behaviors, and maladaptive coping. Linear and logistic regression analyses indicated vicarious trauma was significantly related to healthy eating and maladaptive coping. Maladaptive coping was significantly related to physical activity. However, maladaptive coping was not a significant mediating factor in the relationship between vicarious trauma and health behavior. The data indicated TX CPS and TX CAC employees continue to experience cognitive distortions associated with vicarious trauma, have some decreased health behaviors, and are using maladaptive coping strategies. Results of the study may be used to reduce the risk of vicarious trauma to TX CAC and TX CPS employees so they can continue to help children and families heal from trauma.

Studies have been conducted in both the United States (US) and Argentina to validate the Spanish version of the Gamblers’ Beliefs Questionnaire (GBQ-S). While similar factor structures of the GBQ-S were found in these studies, more detailed measurement invariance has not been explored. Determining measurement invariance across cultural groups would aid researchers in understanding what types of comparisons on latent constructs can be validly made between cultures using the GBQ-S. A secondary analysis was completed with data from two prior studies in Spanish-speaking samples from the US and Argentina. A modified baseline model that captured the two latent factors of Illusion of Control and Luck/Perseverance was selected for invariance testing. The evaluation of measurement invariance within a structural equation modeling framework established configural and metric, but not scalar, invariance. The GBQ-S can be validly used to measure the same latent variables across groups with comparable strengths between its items and factors; however, latent mean comparisons across groups may require further measurement refinement. The GBQ-S demonstrated notable degrees of measurement invariance between markedly different samples, providing further evidence for the existence of similar constructs and portability of the GBQ-S across populations.

Distorted thinking about food is common in both clinical and nonclinical populations from dieters to diabetics and eating disorder patients. This type of thinking is triggered by exposure to dieting culture (including related social media), familial dieting, and internalization of the thin ideal, among other factors. The consequences of distorted thinking about food include disordered eating, weight management problems, body dissatisfaction and many others. Despite these findings, distorted thinking about food in nonclinical samples remains poorly understood. Thus, the current research sought to investigate distorted thinking about food within a broad theoretical model that includes societal antecedents important to understanding the nature of this construct in the general population. This model, which is based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; Ajzen, 1991), was investigated in two studies. The first study is a psychometric validation study of a tool designed to measure distorted thinking about food, the Calorie Catastrophizing Scale (CCS; Monaghan & Santor, 2017) as well as the tool designed to measure dietary misinformation, the Dietary Misinformation Questionnaire (DMQ; Monaghan & Santor, 2017). Results lend support for defining and measuring distorted thinking about food as a distinct construct in nonclinical individuals and suggest that dietary misinformation is an important antecedent to this type of thinking and unhealthy eating behaviours. The second study is a randomized controlled trial of a CBT- and TPB-based workshop intervention aimed at reducing these antecedents. Results show that this intervention led to a significant reduction in distorted thinking about food, dietary misinformation, and other important clinical variables such as symptoms of eating pathology. These findings have a number of important implications for how subclinical eating problems are conceptualized, measured, and prevented.