Examining the Relationships Between Personality,Coping Strategies,and Work–Family Conflict

Purpose  

The purpose of this study was to examine the processes through which personality characteristics may influence work–family conflict (WFC). Specifically, the mediating effects of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) behavioral stress-coping strategies on the relationship between personality characteristics and WFC were tested.     

Is interoceptive awareness really altered in somatoform disorders? Testing competing theories with two paradigms of heartbeat perception

Alterations in the perception of body signals (i.e., interoceptive awareness [IA]) are considered crucial for the development and maintenance of somatoform disorders (SFDs). However, competing theories come to different conclusions about whether IA is increased or decreased in SFDs. The present study investigated IA in 23 patients with SFDs (as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition) and in 27 healthy controls. IA was reliably assessed with two well-established heartbeat perception paradigms (heartbeat discrimination task and mental tracking task). The results of both paradigms showed no evidence for increased IA in patients with SFDs. Correlational analyses revealed that having a higher number of somatoform symptoms was significantly linked to lower (rather than higher) IA in SFDs. These findings are in line with recent cognitive approaches to SFDs that stress the importance of biased schema-guided processing of interoceptive information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Adding part-of-speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies

The SUBTLEX-US corpus has been parsed with the CLAWS tagger, so that researchers have information about the possible word classes (parts?\of?\speech, or PoSs) of the entries. Five new columns have been added to the SUBTLEX-US word frequency list: the dominant (most frequent) PoS for the entry, the frequency of the dominant PoS, the frequency of the dominant PoS relative to the entry??s total frequency, all PoSs observed for the entry, and the respective frequencies of these PoSs. Because the current definition of lemma frequency does not seem to provide word recognition researchers with useful information (as illustrated by a comparison of the lemma frequencies and the word form frequencies from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), we have not provided a column with this variable. Instead, we hope that the full list of PoS frequencies will help researchers to collectively determine which combination of frequencies is the most informative.     

Adrenal mediation of intermale aggression maintained by aromatized and reduced metabolites of testosterone

Individually housed CD-1 mice were either sham castrated or castrated and treated with testosterone (T), estradiol benzoate (EB), dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a combination of EB and DHT (EB+DHT), or the injection vehicle. Following 16 days of isolation and subcutaneous injections, animals were tested repeatedly for fighting behavior in paired encounters with nonaggressive stimulus males. Results indicated that the T and EB+DHT groups fought to the same extent as the gonadally intact group. Both the EB and DHT groups fought more than the vehicle-treated group but less than the T, EB+DHT and sham castrated groups. A similar study was subsequently performed with adrenalectomized animsls. Adrenalectomy eliminated agonistic responses in animals receiving metabolites of testosterone (EB, DHT, EB+DHT) but had only slight effects in gonadally intact and T-treated, castrated mice. The results suggested that a) EB and DHT, either singly or in combination, maintain aggression through a synergism with adrenal steroids; b) the combined effects of EB and DHT reflect an additive action rather than synergistic interaction, notwithstanding the synergism with adrenal steroids; c) metabolism of testosterone to estrogen and dihydrotestosterone does not sufficiently account for the action of testosterone.