Physically active students' intentions and self-efficacy towards healthy eating

This study investigated intentions and self-efficacy of physically active university students towards healthy eating. The application of Planned Behavior theory has shown that attitudes, intention, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms play an important role in shaping people's behavior. 96 students, who participated in physical activities, voluntarily completed the Questionnaire for the Planned Behavior Model and the Health Behavior Questionnaire. The former examines attitudes, intentions, perceived behavioral control, and the lately added attitude strength, and role identity towards the behavior factors. The latter assesses one's efficacy expectations towards healthy eating. The regression showed strong associations between the examined variables, signifying that attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and role identity could account for one's intention towards healthy eating behaviors. On the other hand, one's self-efficacy for healthy eating could be explained from the attitudes, intention, perceived behavioral control, and attitude strength held. Overall, systematic participation in physical activities appeared to be accompanied with a relatively healthier diet, while self-efficacy had a significant association with maintaining the healthy eating behaviors. Possible interpretations, limitations, and implications for health professionals are discussed.     

Factorial validity and internal reliability of Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire

Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire was derived from the same conceptual basis as Kolb's Learning Style Inventory and may provide a more reliable and valid measure of Kolb's learning style constructs. The Learning Styles Questionnaire has not been psychometrically evaluated as extensively as the Learning Style Inventory. Since there is no published information on how the Learning Styles Questionnaire scales were derived, an attempt was made to factor analyze the responses to the questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis of 284 psychology undergraduates' responses identified a four-factor oblimin solution as the most satisfactory model investigated. Implications for interpretation and use within higher education are discussed.     

Holocaust survivors in a primary care setting: fifty years later

Past studies have not assessed the prevalence of emotional disturbances in Holocaust survivors seeking medical treatment in a family practice environment. The present study examined the prevalence of lifetime (the presence of symptomatology at any time) and current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, general anxiety, and depression in Holocaust survivors seeking medical treatment in a primary care setting. 20 of the 27 Holocaust survivors in our sample received a current diagnosis of PTSD and reported significant symptoms of depression and general anxiety. Although 74% of the survivors were currently diagnosed with PTSD, participants in this study had reported an overall decline in reexperiencing, hyperarousal, and overall PTSD symptoms but exhibited increased avoidance and numbing symptoms throughout the lifespan. These preliminary results suggest that removing avoidance as a defense mechanism during the course of psychotherapy may leave these survivors without an adequate way for coping with their trauma, subsequently increasing their vulnerability to psychopathology. Implications for psychological interventions are provided.     

Learning subjective health complaints

Symptom episodes often show a spatio-temporal structure, that is, they occur in a specific context for a certain duration. Repeated experiences may therefore be construed as associative learning trials, in which context elements are turned into predictive cues, triggering anticipatory processes conducive to subjective health complaints. A series of experiments, using inhalations of air enriched with CO2 and external (odors) or internal (mental images) stimuli as cues, is discussed to show that subjective health complaints may occur upon presenting the cue alone. Learned symptoms may be unrelated to bodily responses and easily generalize to new related cues. Better learning occurs to cues with a negative affective valence and in participants scoring high for negative affectivity. Our findings are relevant to the understanding of medically unexplained ("functional") syndromes and the poor relationship between objective and subjective health indicators in general.     

Ego function assessment of nonclinical individuals

Ego Function Assessment was adapted into a self-report inventory yielding 12 operationalized function measures. 426 respondents from a stratified sample completed the inventory. In addition, 42 respondents completed the inventory twice within a 20-day period. A hierarchical algorithm was used to revise the 12 scales to maximize internal consistencies. Their stabilities were assessed by analyzing the retest scores. Standardization, reliability, and stability data are presented for the original and revised scales. Results show adequate reliability, suggesting that the tool may be useful to measure ego functioning in nonclinical populations.     

The Cross-Modal Coordination of Interpersonal Timing: Six-Week-Olds Infants' Gaze with Adults' Vocal Behavior

The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that 6-week-old infants are capable of coordinated interpersonal timing within social interactions. Coordinated interpersonal timing refers to changes in the timing of one individual's behavior as a function of the timing of another individual's behavior. Each of 45, first-born 6-week-old infants interacted with his or her mother and a stranger for a total of 14 minutes. The interactions were videotaped and coded for the gaze behavior of the infants and the vocal behavior of the mothers and strangers. Time-series regression analyses were used to assess the extent to which the timing of each of the infants' gazes was coordinated with the timing of the adults' vocal behavior. The results revealed that (a) coordinated timing occurs between infants and their mothers and between infants and strangers as early as when infants are 6 weeks old, and (b) strangers coordinated the timing of their pauses with the infants to a greater extent than did mothers. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of temporal sensitivity in social interaction.     

The impact of communal-mastery versus self-mastery on emotional outcomes during stressful conditions: a prospective study of Native American women

Past research has examined the stress resiliency of individuals high in sense of personal-mastery. However, it has been theorized that within more collectivist cultures, a sense of shared efficacy, which we call communal-mastery, may be more central to people's resiliency in the face of challenging life circumstances. We compared the impact of sense of self-mastery (i.e., I am the key to my success) to that of communal-mastery (i.e., I am successful by virtue of my social attachments) in a prospective study among a group of rural 103 Native American women residing on Indian Reservations in Montana. We found that women high in communal-mastery experienced less increase in depressive mood and anger, especially when faced with high stress circumstances, than women who were low in communal-mastery. In addition, the beneficial impact of communal-mastery was found to be more effective than self-mastery for these women.     

The nature of regularity and irregularity: evidence from Hebrew nominal inflection

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim lightning), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as regular or irregular different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.     

Intraadministration associations: conditional hyperalgesia elicited by morphine onset cues

There is evidence that exteroceptive cues associated with drug administration elicit conditional compensatory responding (e.g., hyperalgesia in organisms with a history of morphine administration). Recently it has become apparent that, within each administration, interoceptive early-drug onset cues (DOCs) may become associated with the later, larger drug effect (intraadministration associations). The present experiments evaluated DOC-elicited conditional hyperalgesia in rats intravenously infused with morphine. The results indicated that DOC-elicited hyperalgesia contributes to tolerance to the analgesic effect of morphine, and such DOC-elicited hyperalgesia is an associative phenomenon, rather than a sensitized response to the opiate. The findings suggest that associative analyses of tolerance should acknowledge the conditional responding elicited by DOCs, and extinction-based addiction treatments should incorporate extinction of DOC-elicited conditional responding.