Recent studies suggest that religion and spirituality can yield health benefits for young African-Americans. We examined the relationship between religious practices, spirituality, and excess weight among African-American adolescents (N = 212) residing in the Deep South. Results from modified Poisson regression analysis indicate that adolescents who prayed daily had a lower prevalence of excess weight (PR 0.77 [95% CI 0.62–0.96]) than those who did not. This relationship was only significant for 12–15 year-old participants in age-stratified analysis. These findings suggest that preventive interventions offered to children and younger adolescents can have implications for weight status across the lifespan.
People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' preferences: none at all, general information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a specific partner's preference. We found that participants' decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent's, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants did, however, adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information. 相似文献
In an earlier article (Boger, Richter, & Weatherston, 1983) the Perinatal Positive Parenting Program (PPP) was outlined. The basic tenets of the PPP program were discussed, and an overview of the in-hospital, at-home, and parents' support group components was provided. This article presents the results of a 15-month follow-up evaluation of treatment and control participants in the initial PPP demonstration. 相似文献
Two studies compared hemispatial bias for perceiving chimeric faces in patients having either atypical or typical depression and healthy controls. A total of 245 patients having major depressive disorder (MDD) or dysthymia (164 with atypical features) and 115 controls were tested on the Chimeric Faces Test. Atypical depression differed from typical depression and controls in showing abnormally large right hemisphere bias. This was present in patients having either MDD or dysthymia and was not related to anxiety, physical anhedonia, or vegetative symptoms. In contrast, patients having MDD with melancholia showed essentially no right hemisphere bias. This is further evidence that atypical depression is a biologically distinct subtype and underscores the importance of this diagnostic distinction for neurophysiologic studies. 相似文献
There is increasing evidence that the behavior of living systems can be conceptualized as a self-organizing dynamical system. Moreover, evidence suggests that inhibitory processes give these systems the flexibility that is necessary for efficient functioning in the face of changing environmental demands. The process of sensitization can be conceived as a breakdown of inhibitory neural processes that can lead to maladaptive, perseverative behavior. In this paper we describe a model of inhibition and sensitization from a dynamical systems perspective. We show that inhibition is important for adaptive behavior across a number of levels of system functioning. Using our work on attention, emotion, and anxiety disorders we show the importance of both central - for example gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-ergic - and peripheral - for example heart rate variability (HRV) - inhibitory processes and how they may be linked by a network of neural structures that guide the organism from one state of relative stability to another. 相似文献
In this article, the author presents evidence about 2 mechanisms of remembering that occur when target stimuli are presented in meaningful contexts. One occurs when the context has been seen previously; the other occurs when the context is new in the test. Both appear to result from the construction of expectations and evaluation of outcomes, but the former appears to depend on the formation of definite expectations, whereas the latter appears to depend on indefinite expectations. These 2 routes to remembering are affected by different factors and cause dissociated patterns of remembering. They also have differential significance for claims of clear recall versus a feeling of familiarity. The results are discussed in terms of the SCAPE framework of memory. 相似文献
Using the Dichotic Deafness Test, 145 university workers were separated into dichotic deafness and hearing groups based on minor ear responses to dichotic consonant-vowel stimuli. They were also separated into putative right and left brain-oriented groups by Zenhausern's Preference Questionnaire. Interestingly, members of the dichotically hearing group chose mainly right brain-oriented answers and vice versa. A correlation coefficient twice that obtained for Zenhausern's Preference Questionnaire resulted when subject groups separated by the novel Polarity Questionnaire were compared to Dichotic Deafness Test groups. Only 30% of Preference Questionnaire items, versus 90% of Polarity Questionnaire items, were significantly correlated with Dichotic Deafness Test groups. This is the first report of hemisphericity-type questionnaires showing significant correlations with a biophysical measure of brain laterality. 相似文献
"Learned helplessness" and its Pavlovian analog, learned irrelevance, are phenomena thought integral to understanding depression, PTSD, psychosomatic vulnerability, and a variety of diseases and immune disorders. The origin and development of research on learned helplessness is briefly overviewed with attention to the reasons for the controversy that surrounds the study of learned helplessness and derived physiological, psychological, and behavioral phenomena. The need to remedy past focus on American research and English language journals in this area is noted. The heuristic value as well as the wide ranging empirical value of the research domain is lauded. The meretricious emerging social and legal barriers to this research are noted to be unrealistic and unfortunate. 相似文献