A pilot study of women’s affective responses to common and uncommon forms of aerobic exercise

Objective: To test the extent to which participants exposed to an uncommon versus common exercise stimulus would result in more favourable affect at post-task.

Design: Experimental design. Participants (N = 120), American women aged 18–45 years, were randomly assigned to complete 30-min of either the uncommon (HOOP; n = 58) or common (WALK; n = 62) exercise stimulus.

Main outcome measures: Self-reported affect and intentions for future exercise were measured before and after the 30-min exercise bout.

Results: Analyses of covariance were run to compare post-task affect across the HOOP and WALK conditions. At post-task, participants assigned to HOOP reported more positively valenced affect, higher ratings of positive activated affect, lower ratings of negative deactivated affect, and stronger intentions for future aerobic exercise compared to participants assigned to WALK.

Conclusions: Participants who completed an uncommon bout of aerobic exercise (HOOP) reported more favourable affect post-exercise, as well as stronger intentions for future exercise, compared to participants who completed a common bout of aerobic exercise (WALK). Future work using a longitudinal design is needed to understand the relationships between familiarity with an exercise stimulus, affective responses to exercise, motivation for future exercise behaviour and exercise maintenance over time.     

Rousing the Partisan Combatant: Elite Incivility,Anger, and Antideliberative Attitudes

The claim that elite political incivility can rouse partisan, antideliberative attitudes has many adherents, but the empirical record demonstrating a relationship is surprisingly limited. Yet the extant research suggests that incivility can stimulate aversive feelings, of the sort that discrete and dimensional theories of emotion predict should induce a partisan, antideliberative mode of citizenship among those exposed. Leveraging two online experiments, I address the questions of whether elite incivility provokes anger, rather than enthusiasm and anxiety, and whether the affective reactions induced by incivility yield the changes in deliberative attitudes that theories of emotion predict. I find that elite incivility, when counterattitudinal, rouses anger, which in turn can provoke an active and combative form of partisan citizenship. Despite claims to the contrary, the link between proattitudinal incivility, anger, and antideliberative attitudes is less clear. The results provide insight into the dynamics of discourse in the digital age, when affective polarization is the norm and elites commonly employ uncivil rhetoric.     

Using equivalence‐based instruction to teach the visual analysis of graphs

Previous research has demonstrated low rater agreement when visually inspecting trends in single‐subject design graphs (see Wolfe, Seaman, & Drasgow, 2016). Didactic instruction of visual analysis of practicing behavior analysts has resulted in generally poor and unreliable performances (Danov & Symons, 2008; Diller, Barry, & Gelino, 2016). Therefore, a refined instructional technology to improve the reliability among behavior analysts is warranted. Developing research has focused on the application of equivalence‐based instruction (Brodsky & Fienup, 2018; Rehfeldt, 2011) for a variety of complex human behaviors. In the current study, equivalence‐based instruction was used to train four participants to identify functional relations displayed in five different classes of graphs. Training resulted in the formation of five equivalence classes by all participants consisting of three members (graph, functional relation rule, and functional relation statement). In addition, the skills were maintained for up to 2 weeks and generalized to novel graphs.     

Conversation: The challenges of teaching in a “nano department”

A panel at the 2016 American Academy of Religion conference staged, taped, transcribed, and edited this conversation about the challenges and opportunities of teaching in a “nano department” – an undergraduate religion or religious studies department (or combined religion and philosophy department) with only one, two, or three faculty members. Two things quickly become evident: one is the impossibility of coverage of the full religious studies curriculum, and the other is the necessity for collaboration with other departments. Neither of these is unique to nano departments, but there exists an intimacy between students and faculty in small departments, a necessary freedom to rethink the place of the study of religion in the liberal arts curriculum, and a disruptive value in what can be critiqued and contributed from a marginalized position. Arguably, nano departments are the canaries in the academic coal mine, charting the future of the humanities that cannot be discerned from the vantage point of Research‐1 contexts.     

Meta‐analysis of behavioral self‐management techniques used by students with disabilities in inclusive settings

This comprehensive review synthesizes findings from 29 studies in which students with disabilities utilized behavioral self‐management techniques in inclusive settings. Findings suggest that consistent with 2 earlier reviews of these types of studies, most behavioral self‐management techniques continue to be adaptable in inclusive settings with moderate to strong efficacy. This review identifies strengths as well common limitations of the studies, provides recommendations for future research and practice, and includes behavioral self‐management resources.     

A measure of perceived pain and tobacco smoking interrelations: pilot validation of the pain and smoking inventory

Mounting evidence indicates that pain can motivate cigarette smoking behavior, smokers have reliably endorsed the use of tobacco to cope with pain, and there is reason to suspect that pain may impede smoking cessation. Smoking-related outcome expectancies are among the best predictors of cigarette consumption and relapse, and the goal of this pilot study was to develop a standardized measure of how tobacco smokers perceive their pain and smoking behavior to be interrelated (i.e. pain as a motivator of smoking, expectancies for smoking as a means of coping with pain, and pain as a barrier to quitting). Participants (N = 75) completed an online survey that was designed to assess interrelations between pain and tobacco smoking. The nine-item Pain and Smoking Inventory (PSI) demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = .95). As expected, PSI scores were higher among smokers with chronic pain (vs. no pain), and were positively associated with established indices of both pain and tobacco smoking dependence. These results corroborate the notion that smokers can effectively communicate perceptions of interrelations between their pain and smoking behavior. Future research is needed to establish reliability and validity of the PSI among larger, more diverse samples of smokers with varying levels of pain. Future work should also examine PSI scores as predictors of smoking cessation outcomes, and whether PSI data may usefully inform the development of tailored interventions for smokers in pain.     

Regulatory mode and willingness to increase retirement savings contributions

This study examined how two self‐regulatory modes, locomotion and assessment, relate to the willingness to increase retirement savings. Locomotion is concerned with making things happen (“just do it”). Assessment is concerned with critical evaluation (“do the right thing”). We hypothesized that individuals who score high (vs. low) in locomotion, but not those who score high (vs. low) in assessment, would be more willing to increase their savings for retirement. In addition, because high (vs. low) assessment can lead to doing the right thing in terms of seeking to maximize economic returns, we hypothesized that combining high locomotion with high assessment would especially motivate willingness to increase retirement savings. We found support for both hypotheses from a survey of university employees.     

Does Semantic Relationism Solve Frege’s Puzzle?

In a series of recent works, Kit Fine (The Journal of Philosophy, 100(12), 605–631, 2003, 2007) has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle. Radically departing from previous solutions, Fine argues that Frege’s puzzle forces us to reject compositionality. In this paper we first provide an explicit formalization of the relational semantics for first-order logic suggested, but only briefly sketched, by Fine. We then show why the relational semantics alone is technically inadequate, forcing Fine to enrich the syntax with a coordination schema. Given this enrichment, we argue, that that the semantics is compositional. We then examine the deep consequences of this result for Fine’s proposed solution to Frege’s puzzle. We argue that Fine has mis-diagnosed his own solution–his attempted solution does not deny compositionality. The correct characterization of Fine’s solution fits him more comfortably among familiar solutions to the puzzle.     

A study named desire: Local focus increases approach motivation for desserts

When we desire something, our approach motivation is high. Recent research shows affective states high in approach motivation cause attentional narrowing (localization) (e.g.; Gable and Harmon-Jones in Psychological Science 19:476–482, 2008; Juergensen and Demaree in Motivation and Emotion 39:580–588, 2015). Does the reciprocal relationship exist? That is, when our attention is narrowed, does our motivation to approach something desirable increase? To test this, we primed participants with either global or local attentional focus before viewing images of desirable items (e.g., desserts) or neutral items (e.g., furniture). Relative to participants primed with global attentional focus, participants primed with local attentional focus demonstrated greater approach motivation to desirable desserts compared to neutral items on an Approach Avoidance Task. Despite greater approach motivation for desserts, participants with localized attention did not subjectively rate desserts as more desirable than participants with global attention. These results suggest that increased approach motivation following local priming is evidenced at an implicit level only: participants appear to be unaware of appetitive images’ increased desirability.