Relation between self-reported affect and drug urges and cravings in continuing and withdrawing smokers.

In 2 experiments we investigated the effects of withdrawal and stress on the affective correlates of urges to smoke. In both, habitual cigarette smokers were divided into continuing and withdrawing smoker groups. In the 1st study, 44 adults reported current mood, urge, and expectations over a 24-hr period. In the 2nd, a controlled laboratory study, urge, affect, and physiological data were obtained from continuing and withdrawing groups (N = 64) exposed to high- or low-stress conditions. Urges among withdrawing smokers were positively associated with negative affect and negatively associated with positive affect; continuing smokers reported urges that were directly associated with positive affect and unrelated to negative affect. Stress and withdrawal produced urge self-reports that were related to negative affect. Moreover, subjects who smoked after exposure to withdrawal and stress reported greater pleasure and arousal than did other subjects.     

The false consensus effect: predicting adolescents' tobacco use from normative expectations.

A longitudinal sample of 916 adolescents was examined to assess the extent to which the perceived smoking prevalence of adults' or peers' smoking was related to cigarette smoking. Questionnaires were distributed to junior high school students in Grade 7 and again in Grade 9. Prevalence of perceived peers' smoking and prevalence of perceived adults' smoking were significantly related to cigarette smoking both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Adolescents who believed that half or more than half of all adults or peers smoked cigarettes showed the most smoking involvement, and those who believed that fewer than half of adults or peers smoked were least involved. These findings provide further evidence that adolescent normative expectations about cigarette smoking are an important determinant of smoking initiation.     

A Career Assistance Program for Elite Athletes

A program to assist elite athletes in coping with the transition out of active sport competition is presented. A life span development framework is used to describe the formulation of the program. An outline of the program is presented, and implications for counselors are discussed.     

The importance of cultural sensitivity and therapist self-awareness when working with mandatory clients

Systemic therapy emphasizes the importance of understanding each relationship in the context of its ecosystem. Considerations such as the influence of social agencies, culture, and the therapist's self-awareness are described in the literature as amplifying lenses within the therapeutic relationship. When a minority client is caught in the web of larger system agencies and is mandated to family therapy, systemic family therapy, which incorporates multiple lenses and attends to the context of social background, may provide a better understanding of the client's reality. Clinical cases show that therapists may slip into veiled racist and discriminatory attitudes with minority clients. Self-awareness, "soul searching," and appropriate supervision may be of tremendous help in learning from such experiences. A case example illustrates the application of this approach.     

Preexposure to the CS alone,US alone,or CS and US uncorrelated: Latent inhibition,blocking by context or learned irrelevance?

Three experiments on conditioned suppression in rats examined the extent to which preexposure to the CS, the US, or uncorrelated presentations of both interfere with future conditioning. Experiment 1 suggested that the interference caused by preexposure to the US alone may result from blocking by contextual cues: signaling the US during preexposure attenuated the interference. Experiment 2 demonstrated that signaling the US by another stimulus did not attenuate the interference caused by exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 and directly compared the magnitude of these deficits. The results of these experiments imply that the effects of exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US are not reducible to the sum of the effects of exposure to CS or US alone.     

Time for auditory processing of object names by aphasics

Ten Wernicke's and ten Broca's aphasics were compared with normal controls and brain-damaged nonaphasics with respect to the time required for the auditory decoding of object names. This value was obtained by using a subtraction method with two reaction time determinations, one of which included an auditory processing phase while the other did not. The overall mean of approximately 200 msec for Broca's aphasics did not differ significantly from the normal, while the mean of 650 msec for the Wernicke aphasics was much slower. All groups responded more quickly to high-frequency than low-frequency words and all but the Wernicke aphasics improved in the second trial block over their performance in the first trial block.     

Applications of combinatorial programming to data analysis: The traveling salesman and related problems

The Traveling Salesman and similar combinatorial programming tasks encountered in operations research are discussed as possible data analysis models in psychology, for example, in developmental scaling, Guttman scaling, profile smoothing, and data array clustering. In addition, a short overview of the various computational approaches from this area of combinatorial optimization is included.The research of the first author was supported by a research grant SOC-75-07860 from the National Science Foundation.