Effects of anxiety sensitivity on emotional response to a stress task

The purpose of this investigation was to further define the role of anxiety sensitivity, in relation to physiological arousal and the cognitive perception of anxiousness, as a determinant of anxiety. One hundred and thirty-two undergraduates at an urban university served as subjects. Two physiological measures of arousal and two cognitive measures of anxiety were used following an anxiety inducing task (mental arithmetic). The general expectation, which was supported, was that individual differences in anxiety sensitivity levels are more closely related to subjects' reported anxiousness in stressful conditions than are the actual physiological changes. Additionally, anxiety sensitivity was related to poststress levels of anxiety whereas trait anxiety was only related to pre- and postrelaxation levels of anxiety. Implications of the findings are addressed.     

Dual diagnosis: Clinical issues in the treatment of substance abuse,and affective,personality, and psychotic disorders

Co-morbidity of alcohol and substance with the spectrum of other psychiatric diagnoses is examined with specific emphasis on diagnostic indicators for anxiety and mood disorders. Diagnostic issues for the chemically dependent person are examined with the context of borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Clinical research related to the dually-diagnosed patient is explored     

Religious aspects of bereavement

The purpose of this study was to learn more about the role of religious beliefs and practices in bereavement. Subjects were 312 adults each bereaved approximately one year. They were interviewed at the rate of about 50 per year over a 6 year period. Conclusions include: a) The opportunity to say goodbye to the deceased was significantly related to positive coping and outlook; (b) 47% of our subjects reported contact with the deceased following the death but such contact was not related to coping or outlook; c) grieving people are much more likely to turn to women than men for help; d) 77% said their religious beliefs were of considerable help in their grief.     

The Search for Employment: Motivation to Engage in a Coping Behavior1

The search for employment was examined as coping through engagement in motivated behavior. A model predicting social networking and employer contact behavior was tested with a sample of persons anticipating college graduation. Proposed relations among behavioral antecedents were primarily drawn from Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behavior, with the addition of cognitively appraised challenge. Structural equations analysis revealed general support for hypothesized relations among attitude, norms, perceived behavioral control, intentions, and behaviors. Cognitively appraised challenge partially mediated the effects of perceived behavioral control on job search intentions. Significant variance in job search attitude was attributed to a valence by outcome expectancy interaction. Findings may be useful in promoting job search efforts, as well as furthering theoretical delineation of the search process.     

Boundary regulation in family and personal systems: Perceptions of late adolescents

Examination of boundary regulation can provide family therapists with a framework to describe both the functioning of family systems and personal systems (i.e., the intrapsychic functioning of individual family members). In the present study, late adolescents' perceptions of boundary regulation within their family systems (i.e., ratings of family health, communication, leadership, expressiveness, cohesion, and family conflict) were related to regulation of their personal boundaries (i.e., self-reported personal competence, distress, and patterns of defense mechanism use). In addition, personal system variables reliably discriminated between adolescents who described their families as psychologically healthy versus psychologically unhealthy.     

Sexual responding of “nonrapists” to aggressive sexual themes: Normative data

The present study presents data relevant to the sexual responding to aggressive cues of a large sample of nonrapist males recruited from the community. Two hundred three subjects received physiological assessment of sexual arousal to heterosexual and rape stimuli. Results indicated that under instructions not to interfere with sexual responding, approximately 80% of the nonrapists would be correctly classified, which was significantly different from chance. However, under instructions to suppress arousal, classification was no better than chance. The rape index was not related to age, socioeconomic status, sexual experience, or amount of arousal shown in the laboratory. However, there was a small but significant relationship to IQ. Overall, the data suggest that for instructions not to interfere with responding, the error rate seen in this larger-scale sample was equivalent to that in previous studies using smaller normative samples and that classification in general is not biased by the subject characteristics measured in this study.Portions of this project were supported by USPHS Grant MH-34030-02 from the Center for the Studies of Crime and Delinquency and by Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Research Contract ID-0783 to the Department of Psychiatry.     

Decoding effects of cognitive complexity,tolerance of ambiguity,and verbal–nonverbal inconsistency1

The effects of inconsistency between the verbal and nonverbal components of a message were investigated. Subjects were 72 females who rated the attitudes of encoding confederates who communicated either consistent or inconsistent messages. Verbal and nonverbal components were varied as either positive or negative and each of the four possible combinations served as an experimental condition. The nonverbal cues of amount of eye contact, postural orientation, forward–backward lean, and head nodding were found to influence the judgment of the total message. Verbal and nonverbal components were found to have interactive rather than additive effects. Inconsistent nonverbal cues had a stronger effect when accompanying a positive verbal message than when accompanying a negative verbal component. The effects of decoders' levels of cognitive complexity and tolerance of ambiguity were also assessed. Evidence suggests that both complexity and ambiguity tolerance have effects on the utilization of inconsistent nonverbal cues. Low complexity/low tolerance subjects were less influenced by nonverbal cues in the positive verbal–negative nonverbal condition. These subjects were also found to differentiate less between supplied rating dimensions than other groups.     

Measurement error in direct observations: a comparison of common recording methods

Videotapes of three brief duration, three medium duration and three long duration types of stereotyped behaviour (of eight severely retarded children) were analysed to provide a criterion record of the true percentage duration of the behaviour. The criterion record was compared with the records produced by four time-sampling methods: a whole-interval method, two partial-interval methods and a momentary time-sampling method. As predicted, the whole-interval method grossly underestimated and the partial-interval methods grossly overestimated the true percentage duration of the behaviour, except when the duration of individual responses was much longer than the observation interval. Momentary time-sampling was not an errorless method but was consistently superior to the other methods.The implications of these findings for the detection of treatment effects by direct observations are discussed.