Marital History and Current Marital Satisfaction in Chronic Depression

Marital functioning is an important consideration in the treatment of depression. Although there are several studies of the marriages of depressed individuals, there is little data on the marital lives of those with chronic depression. In this article, we compare the marital history and marital satisfaction in a sample of carefully diagnosed outpatients with chronic depression compared to those with nonchronic depression. The groups were similar in terms of a history of divorce and for the percentage who had ever been married. However, the chronic group had significantly lower levels of marital satisfaction. Increased attention to marital functioning in this group may be beneficial during treatment.     

Younger and older adults’ collaborative recall of shared and unshared emotional pictures

Although a group of people working together recalls more items than any one individual, they recall fewer unique items than the same number of people working apart whose responses are combined. This is known as collaborative inhibition, and it is a robust effect that occurs for both younger and older adults. However, almost all previous studies documenting collaborative inhibition have used stimuli that were neutral in emotional valence, low in arousal, and studied by all group members. In the current experiments, we tested the impact of picture-stimuli valence, picture-stimuli arousal, and information distribution in modulating the magnitude of collaborative inhibition. We included both younger and older adults because there are age differences in how people remember emotional pictures that could modulate any effects of emotion on collaborative inhibition. Results revealed that when information was shared (i.e., studied by all group members), there were robust collaborative inhibition effects for both neutral and emotional stimuli for both younger and older adults. However, when information was unshared (i.e., studied by only a single group member), these effects were attenuated. Together, these results provide mixed support for the retrieval strategy disruption account of collaborative inhibition. Supporting the retrieval strategy disruption account, unshared study information was less susceptible to collaborative inhibition than shared study information. Contradicting the retrieval strategy disruption account, emotional valence and arousal did not modulate the magnitude of collaborative inhibition despite the fact that participants clustered the emotional, but not neutral, information together in memory.     

Unaltered ethical standards for individual physicians in the face of drastically reduced resources resulting from an improvised nuclear device event

When disaster disrupts healthcare and other systems, the ethical allocation of resources should follow principles of justice, defined as fairness, established for normal clinical practice. Standards of clinical practice may be altered during disaster, but ethical standards must remain centered on prioritizing the treatment of patients according to need and the effectiveness of treatment. Should resources become extremely limited, it is fair to restrict their use to patients who have the highest needs, provided that the intervention is effective. When resources become more available, patients with lower priority can be increasingly accommodated.     

System justification and the defense of committed relationship ideology

A consequential ideology in Western society is the uncontested belief that a committed relationship is the most important adult relationship and that almost all people want to marry or seriously couple (DePaulo & Morris, 2005). In the present article, we investigated the extent to which the system justification motive may contribute to the adoption of this ideology. In Studies 1 and 2, we examined whether a heightened motive to maintain the status quo would increase defense of committed relationship values. In Study 3, we examined the reverse association, that is, whether a threat to committed relationship ideology would also affect sociopolitical system endorsement. As past research has found that the justification of political systems depends upon how much these systems are perceived as controlling, in Study 4 we tested whether the defense of the system of committed relationships would also increase when framed as controlling. Results from Studies 1-4 were consistent with our hypotheses, but only for men. In Study 5, using cross-cultural data, we sought to replicate these findings correlationally and probe for a cause of the gender effect. Results from more than 33,000 respondents indicated a relationship (for men) between defense of the sociopolitical system and defense of marriage in countries where the traditional advantages of men over women were most threatened. In Studies 6 and 7, we investigated when this gender difference disappears. Results revealed that when we measured (Study 6) or manipulated (Study 7) personal relationship identity rather than relationship ideology, effects also emerge for women.     

Potenciales evocados en respuesta a expresiones faciales de emociones

Resumen

En el presente experimento se analizaron los potenciales evocados (PEs) de 32 sujetos en respuesta a diapositivas en color de cuatro expresiones faciales presentadas 32 veces cada una: alegría, tristeza, ira y neutra. La estructura de los PEs, registrados en Fz, Cz y Pz, se analizó vía análisis de componentes principales (ACP). Los ANOVAs indicaron que las amplitudes de N150 y P200 mostraron un doble emparejamiento alegría-ira y tristeza-neutra. Estos componentes han sido relacionados en anteriores estudios con el análisis físico de los estímulos. La visibilidad o no de los dientes en las expresiones puede explicar tales emparejamientos. Los resultados de componentes posteriores (N250 y P300) mostraron diferencias significativas entre las expresiones neutra y de alegría. Estos datos pueden ser interpretados tanto en términos de procesamiento afectivo como cognitivo. En todos los casos, Fz y Cz fueron las localizaciones donde las amplitudes de los componentes estudiados fueron mayores.     

Exploring the Hierarchical Structure of the MMPI–2–RF Personality Psychopathology Five in Psychiatric Patient and University Student Samples

In this study our goal was to examine the hierarchical structure of personality pathology as conceptualized by Harkness and McNulty's (1994) Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY–5) model, as recently operationalized by the MMPI–2–RF (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2011) PSY–5r scales. We used Goldberg's (2006) “bass-ackwards” method to obtain factor structure using PSY–5r item data, successively extracting from 1 to 5 factors in a sample of psychiatric patients (n = 1,000) and a sample of university undergraduate students (n = 1,331). Participants from these samples had completed either the MMPI–2 or the MMPI–2–RF. The results were mostly consistent across the 2 samples, with some differences at the 3-factor level. In the patient sample a factor structure representing 3 broad psychopathology domains (internalizing, externalizing, and psychoticism) emerged; in the student sample the 3-factor level represented what is more commonly observed in “normal-range” personality models (negative emotionality, introversion, and disconstraint). At the 5-factor level the basic structure was similar across the 2 samples and represented well the PSY–5r domains.