Coordinating Actions

The motor system composes complex actions by combining simpler submovements. This presumably involves sharing information about the progress of one submovement with the centres controlling another submovement, to ensure that the second happens in an appropriate relation to the first. This process is called coordination. In this paper Idiscuss evidence that coordinating actions indeed involves an active process of sharing information about the current state of movements. Coordination appears to be qualitatively different from the process of reacting to external stimuli. This may reflect the importance of predictive representations in coordination. Finally, the processes underlying coordination appear to be organized in a response-specific fashion, as a number of relatively independent circuits. The development and tuning of these circuits may, in part, be what makes an action "skilled".     

Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention decreases the prevalence of depression and enhances benefit finding among women under treatment for early-stage breast cancer.

The authors tested effects of a 10-week group cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention among 100 women newly treated for Stage 0-II breast cancer. The intervention reduced prevalence of moderate depression (which remained relatively stable in the control condition) but did not affect other measures of emotional distress. The intervention also increased participants' reports that having breast cancer had made positive contributions to their lives, and it increased generalized optimism. Both remained significantly elevated at a 3-month follow-up of the intervention. Further analysis revealed that the intervention had its greatest impact on these 2 variables among women who were lowest in optimism at baseline. Discussion centers on the importance of examining positive responses to traumatic events--growth, appreciation of life, shift in priorities, and positive affect-as well as negative responses.     

Evidence against a predictive role for rhythm in speech perception

Some languages create the impression of being stress timed. Claims have been made that this timing of stressed syllables enables the listener to predict the future locations of informative parts later in a sentence. The fact that phoneme monitoring is delayed when targets in a spoken sentence are displaced has been taken as supporting this claim (Meltzer, Martin, Bergfeld Mills, Imhoff and Zohar, 1976). In the present study temporal displacement was induced without introducing phonetic discontinuities. In Dutch sentences a word just in advance of a target-bearing word was replaced by another one differing in length. Results show that the temporal displacement per se did not have any effect on phoneme-monitoring reaction times. Implications for a theory of fpeech processing are discussed.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.