Psychological factors influencing the vividness and affect of visitors’ recall of nostalgic life memories in museums

Current Psychology - This study investigated the effect of nostalgia on museum visitors’ memories of life episodes from the distant past following their encounters with museum objects they...     

Facets of Emotion Regulation and Emotional Disorder Symptom Dimensions: Differential Associations and Incremental Validity in a Large Clinical Sample

A growing literature suggests robust associations between dimensions of emotion regulation and emotional disorder psychopathology. However, limited research has investigated associations of emotion regulation dimensions across several emotional disorders (transdiagnostic associations), or the incremental validity of emotion regulation versus the higher-order construct of neuroticism. The current study used exploratory structural equation modeling and a large clinical sample (N = 1,138) to: (a) develop a multidimensional emotion regulation measurement model, (b) evaluate the differential associations between latent emotion regulation dimensions and five latent emotional disorder symptom dimensions (social anxiety, depression, agoraphobia/panic, obsessions/compulsions, generalized worry), and (c) determine the incremental contribution of emotion regulation in predicting symptom dimensions beyond neuroticism. The best-fitting measurement model of emotion regulation included four dimensions: Problematic Responses, Poor Recognition/Clarity, Negative Thinking, and Emotional Inhibition/Suppression. Although many zero-order associations between the four latent emotion regulation dimensions and five latent symptom dimensions were significant, few associations remained significant in a structural regression model that included neuroticism. Specifically, Negative Thinking and Problematic Responses incrementally predicted depression symptoms, while Emotional Inhibition/Suppression predicted both social anxiety and depression symptoms. Associations between neuroticism and the emotional disorder dimensions were similar regardless of whether the emotion regulation dimensions were held constant. These results suggest that self-reported emotion regulation dimensions are associated with the severity and expression of a range of emotional disorder symptoms, but that some emotion regulation dimensions have limited incremental validity after accounting for general emotional reactivity. Studies of emotion regulation should assess neuroticism as a key covariate.     

The relationship between sleep problems and working memory in children born very preterm

In two studies, the relationship between sleep and working memory performance was investigated in children born very preterm (i.e., gestation less than 32 weeks) and the possible mechanisms underlying this relationship. In Study 1, parent-reported measures of snoring, night-time sleep quality, and daytime sleepiness were collected on 89 children born very preterm aged 6 to 7 years. The children completed a verbal working memory task, as well as measures of processing speed and verbal storage capacity. Night-time sleep quality was found to be associated with verbal working memory performance over and above the variance associated with individual differences in processing speed and storage capacity, suggesting that poor sleep may have an impact on the executive component of working memory. Snoring and daytime sleepiness were not found to be associated with working memory performance. Study 2 introduced a direct measure of executive functioning and examined whether sleep problems would differentially impact the executive functioning of children born very preterm relative to children born to term. Parent-reported sleep problems were collected on 43 children born very preterm and 48 children born to term (aged 6 to 9 years). Problematic sleep was found to adversely impact executive functioning in the very preterm group, while no effect of sleep was found in the control group. These findings implicate executive dysfunction as a possible mechanism by which problematic sleep adversely impacts upon cognition in children born very preterm, and suggest that sleep problems can increase the cognitive vulnerability already experienced by many of these children.     

Posttraumatic Cognitions and Depressive Symptoms in War and Disaster Affected Widows in Sri Lanka: The Role of Community Support

In this study the authors evaluated the associations between war- and disaster-related problems and indicators of psychological distress (posttraumatic cognitions and culturally-specific symptoms of depression) among a sample of Tamil widows in the Eastern Provence of Sri Lanka. Furthermore, community support was evaluated as a mediator of these associations. Surveys were administered to women (N?=?156) in an interview format by trained research assistants who were native Tamil speakers. Mediation hypotheses were evaluated using path analysis. Results showed that war-related problems, but not disaster-related losses, was significantly associated with community support and posttraumatic cognitions, such that higher number of war-problems was associated with lower community support and more posttraumatic cognitions. Community support had a significant negative association with posttraumatic cognitions and depression. Additionally, we found evidence that war-related problems was indirectly associated with depression through community support. Although the magnitude of associations was small, results suggest that contextual problems resulting from years of armed conflict may be associated with less support from one’s community which, in turn, is associated with increased psychological distress. Limitations and implications for intervention and future research are discussed.     

iObjectify: Self‐ and other‐objectification on Grindr,a geosocial networking application designed for men who have sex with men

Grindr is a smartphone application for men who have sex with men (MSM). Despite its reputation as a ‘hook‐up app’, little is known about its users' self‐presentation strategies and how this relates to objectification. This article explores objectification on Grindr. The results of Study 1 showed that Grindr users objectified other men more than non‐Grindr users. A content analysis of 1400 Grindr profiles in Study 2 showed that profile pictures with objectifying content were related to searching for sexual encounters. Finally, a survey of Grindr users in Study 3 revealed that objectification processes and sexualized profile pictures were related to some objectification‐relevant online behaviors (e.g., increased use of Grindr, discussion of HIV status). Interestingly, the presence of body focused profile content was more related to sexual orientation disclosure (not being ‘out’) than to objectification. This article presents evidence that Grindr usage and online presentation are related to objectification processes.     

Reduced Value-Driven Attentional Capture Among Children with ADHD Compared to Typically Developing Controls

The current study examined whether children with ADHD were more distracted by a stimulus previously associated with reward, but currently goal-irrelevant, than their typically-developing peers. In addition, we also probed the associated cognitive and motivational mechanisms by examining correlations with other behavioral tasks. Participants included 8–12 year-old children with ADHD (n = 30) and typically developing controls (n = 26). Children were instructed to visually search for color-defined targets and received monetary rewards for accurate responses. In a subsequent search task in which color was explicitly irrelevant, we manipulated whether a distractor item appeared in a previously reward-associated color. We examined whether children responded more slowly on trials with the previously-rewarded distractor present compared to trials without this distractor, a phenomenon referred to as value-driven attentional capture (VDAC), and whether children with and without ADHD differed in the extent to which they displayed VDAC. Correlations among working memory performance, immediate reward preference (delay discounting) and attentional capture were also examined. Children with ADHD were significantly less affected by the presence of the previously rewarded distractor than were control participants. Within the ADHD group, greater value-driven attentional capture was associated with poorer working memory. Although both ADHD and control participants were initially distracted by previously reward-associated stimuli, the magnitude of distraction was larger and persisted longer among control participants.     

Learning Problem‐Solving Rules as Search Through a Hypothesis Space

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem property such as computational difficulty of the rules biased the search process and so affected learning. Experiment 2 examined the impact of examples as instructional tools and found that their effectiveness was determined by whether they uniquely pointed to the correct rule. Experiment 3 compared verbal directions with examples and found that both could guide search. The final experiment tried to improve learning by using more explicit verbal directions or by adding scaffolding to the example. While both manipulations improved learning, learning still took the form of a search through a hypothesis space of possible rules. We describe a model that embodies two assumptions: (1) the instruction can bias the rules participants hypothesize rather than directly be encoded into a rule; (2) participants do not have memory for past wrong hypotheses and are likely to retry them. These assumptions are realized in a Markov model that fits all the data by estimating two sets of probabilities. First, the learning condition induced one set of Start probabilities of trying various rules. Second, should this first hypothesis prove wrong, the learning condition induced a second set of Choice probabilities of considering various rules. These findings broaden our understanding of effective instruction and provide implications for instructional design.