Comparing different boosters of planning interventions on changes in fat consumption in overweight and obese individuals: A randomized controlled trial

Single planning interventions have been found to promote short‐term dietary change. Repeated planning interventions may foster long‐term effects on behavior change. It remains unknown whether there is a critical number of boosters to establish long‐term maintenance of behavioral changes. This study aimed at investigating what social‐cognitive variables mediate the effects of the interventions on dietary behavior change. Overall, 373 participants (n = 270 women, 72.4%; age M = 52.42, SD = 12.79) were randomly allocated to one of five groups: a control group, a single planning group, and three groups with 3, 6, or 9 weeks’ repeated planning interventions. Follow‐ups took place 4, 6, and 12 months after baseline. Change in fat consumption was not promoted by any of the interventions. In terms of social‐cognitive variables, intentions, self‐efficacy and coping planning displayed a time × group interaction, with the 9 weeks’ planning group showing the most beneficial effects. Effect sizes, however, were very small. None of the tested planning interventions successfully promoted change in fat consumption across the 12 month period. This, however, could not be explained by problems with adherence to the intervention protocol. Potential explanations for this unexpected result are discussed.     

The interplay of received social support and self-regulatory factors in smoking cessation

Objective: In smoking cessation, individual self-regulation and social support have both proven to be useful. However, the roles of self-regulatory processes and social support are mostly examined separately. The present study aims at examining the unique and joint interactive effects of self-regulation as specified in the health action process approach (HAPA) and social support on smoking cessation. The study tested whether social support can compensate for low levels of self-regulation or whether synergistic effects emerge.

Design & Measures: Around a self-set quit date, 99 smokers completed baseline questionnaires on HAPA-variables, smoking-specific received social support and smoking cessation (continuous abstinence and point prevalence), with a follow-up Cpproximately 29?days after the quitdate.

Results: Social support moderated the association between volitional self-efficacy and smoking, as well as coping planning and smoking but not between action planning and smoking. No compensatory effect of social support for lower levels of individual regulation emerged but the combination of high levels of the individual variables and social support was related to successful smoking cessation, indicating a synergistic effect.

Conclusions: The results confirm the importance of examining both self-regulation and social factors in smoking cessation. This should be considered when developing future interventions for smoking cessation.     

Is Political Cognition Like Riding a Bicycle? How Cognitive Neuroscience Can Inform Research on Political Thinking

Our understanding of political phenomena, including political attitudes and sophistication, can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience—in particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding). From this perspective, different types of informational "building blocks" can be construed from which different types of political attitudes may arise. A reflection-reflexion model is presented that describes how these blocks combine to produce a given political attitude as a function of goals, primes, expertise, and inherent conflict in considerations relevant to the attitude. The ways in which neuroimaging methods can be used to test hypotheses of political cognition are reviewed.     

It takes two: the interpersonal nature of empathic accuracy

Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers' experience of social targets' emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers' ability to accurately assess targets' emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamentally interpersonal nature of empathy, and tested the prediction that empathic accuracy may depend on both targets' tendency to express emotion and perceivers' tendency to empathically share that emotion. Using a continuous affect-rating paradigm, we found that perceivers' trait affective empathy was unrelated to empathic accuracy unless targets' trait expressivity was taken into account: Perceivers' trait affective empathy predicted accuracy only for expressive targets. These data suggest that perceivers' self-reported affective empathy can indeed predict their empathic accuracy, but only when targets' expressivity allows their thoughts and feelings to be read.     

USING A FADING PROCEDURE TO INCREASE FLUID CONSUMPTION IN A CHILD WITH FEEDING PROBLEMS

Stimulus fading was combined with differential reinforcement and extinction to increase intake of a calorie‐dense fluid by a 6‐year‐old child with feeding problems. The fading procedure consisted of adding Carnation Instant Breakfast? Final acceptance and then milk to water (a fluid the child would drink).     

Psychological distance and emotional experience: what you see is what you get

Recent research suggests that perceiving negative emotion-eliciting scenes approaching intensifies the associated felt emotion, while perceiving emotion-eliciting scenes receding weakens the associated felt emotion (Muhlberger, Neumann, Wieser, & Pauli, 2008). In the present studies, we sought to extend these findings by examining the effects of imagining rather than perceiving such changes to negative emotion-eliciting scenes. Across three studies, we found that negative scenes generally elicited less negative responses and lower levels of arousal when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking, and more negative responses and higher levels of arousal when imagined moving toward participants and growing, as compared to the responses elicited by negative scenes when imagined unchanged. Patterns in responses to neutral scenes undergoing the same imagined transformations were similar on ratings of emotional arousal, but differed on valence-generally eliciting greater positivity when imagined moving toward participants and growing, and less positivity when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking. Moreover, for these effects to emerge, participants reported it necessary to explicitly imagine scenes moving closer or farther. These findings have implications for emotion regulation, and suggest that imagined spatial distance plays a role in mental representations of emotionally salient events.     

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past

The author used the remember/know paradigm and the dual process recognition model of A. P. Yonelinas, N. E. A. Kroll, I. Dobbins, M. Lazzara, and R. T. Knight (1998) to study the states of awareness accompanying recognition of affective images and the processes of recollection and familiarity that may underlie them. Results from all experiments showed that (a) negative stimuli tended to be remembered, whereas positive stimuli tended to be known; (b) recollection, but not familiarity, was boosted for negative or highly arousing and, to a lesser extent, positive stimuli; and (c) across experiments, variations in depth of encoding did not influence these patterns. These data suggest that greater recollection for affective events leads them to be more richly experienced in memory, and they are consistent with the idea that the states of remembering and knowing are experientially exclusive, whereas the processes underlying them are functionally independent.     

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

Abstract— As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.