The effect of sensitization and coping style on post-traumatic stress symptoms and quality of life: two longitudinal studies

The present study investigated the effects of multiple trauma exposure and coping style on post-traumatic stress symptoms and quality of life. It was hypothesized that sensitization would occur in subjects repeatedly exposed to life-threatening situations (study 1), and different coping styles would act as a resilience or facilitating factor in symptom development (study 2). The results showed that the single-exposure group revealed a decrease in trauma specific stress reactions from three weeks to four months, with a persistent reduction at 12-month follow-up, while the repeated-exposure group showed an increase in symptom reporting over the 12-month period. The same pattern emerged for perceived quality of life-measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30). The second study revealed a correlation between scores on avoidant-focused coping style and the Impact of Event Scale-avoidance dimension, Post-traumatic Symptom Scale and GHQ-30. Furthermore, only subjects with a dominant coping style of emotion-focused or task-focused coping showed a reduction in trauma-specific symptom scores over time.     

The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: testing a dual process model

The issue of personality and prejudice has been largely investigated in terms of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. However, these seem more appropriately conceptualized as ideological attitudes than as personality dimensions. The authors describe a causal model linking dual dimensions of personality, social world view, ideological attitudes, and intergroup attitudes. Structural equation modeling with data from American and White Afrikaner students supported the model, suggesting that social conformity and belief in a dangerous world influence authoritarian attitudes, whereas toughmindedness and belief in a competitive jungle world influence social dominance attitudes, and these two ideological attitude dimensions influence intergroup attitudes. The model implies that dual motivational and cognitive processes, which may be activated by different kinds of situational and intergroup dynamics, may underlie 2 distinct dimensions of prejudice.     

Processing of temporal duration information in working memory after frontodorsal tumour excisions

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that impairments of temporal duration processing after frontal lobe lesions reflect deficits in executive monitoring functions rather than a domain-specific deficit in the maintenance of duration information in working memory. Patients with frontodorsal lesions, clinical controls with post-central lesions, and healthy controls performed recognition and classification tasks, which should allow for testing maintenance and monitoring functions, respectively. Results showed mild non-selective impairments of the frontal patients on both temporal and spatial recognition tasks, but a marked selective degradation on temporal classification while performance on spatial classification was unimpaired. This suggests that maintenance of duration information in working memory after frontal lesions is basically preserved but that, depending on executive task characteristics, there is a specific deficit in the strategic organization of this type of information.     

Priming visual face-processing mechanisms: electrophysiological evidence

Accumulated evidence from electrophysiology and neuroimaging suggests that face perception involves extrastriate visual mechanisms specialized in processing physiognomic features and building a perceptual representation that is categorically distinct and can be identified by face-recognition units. In the present experiment, we recorded event-related brain potentials in order to explore possible contextual influences on the activity of this perceptual mechanism. Subjects were first exposed to pairs of small shapes, which did not elicit any face-specific brain activity. The same stimuli, however, elicited face-specific brain activity after subjects saw them embedded in schematic faces, which probably primed the subjects to interpret the shapes as schematic eyes. No face-specific activity was observed when objects rather than faces were used to form the context. We conclude that the activity of face-specific extrastriate perceptual mechanisms can be modulated by contextual constraints that determine the significance of the visual input.     

Auditory language comprehension: an event-related fMRI study on the processing of syntactic and lexical information

The functional specificity of different brain regions recruited in auditory language processing was investigated by means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects listened to speech input varying in the presence or absence of semantic and syntactic information. There were two sentence conditions containing syntactic structure, i.e., normal speech (consisting of function and content words), syntactic speech (consisting of function words and pseudowords), and two word-list conditions, i.e., real words and pseudowords. The processing of auditory language, in general, correlates with significant activation in the primary auditory cortices and in adjacent compartments of the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Processing of normal speech appeared to have a special status, as no frontal activation was observed in this case but was seen in the other three conditions. This difference may point toward a certain automaticity of the linguistic processes used during normal speech comprehension. When considering the three other conditions, we found that these were correlated with activation in both left and right frontal cortices. An increase of activation in the planum polare bilaterally and in the deep portion of the left frontal operculum was found exclusively when syntactic processes were in focus. Thus, the present data may be taken to suggest an involvement of the left frontal and bilateral temporal cortex when processing syntactic information during comprehension.     

Key Word Index to Volume 52

Other Index

Key Word Index to Volume 52     

Reviews of current books

Conclusion Wise counseling can relieve the anxiety and inner conflict of parents torn between the dread of their retarded offspring becoming a parent and the fear of an operation they believe to be illegal, immoral, and castrating.By knowing where to refer patients, clergymen can make it possible for some of these deprived members of society to find support and love within marriage without being overburdened by children they are not capable of rearing properly.     

Intergenerational transmission of marital quality across the transition to parenthood

One of the most frequently reported changes across the transition to parenthood is a decline in marital quality after the birth of a first baby. Experiences in the family of origin may influence the trajectory of marital quality. Our study aimed to investigate the impact of recollections of family-of-origin marriage on marital quality (self-reports and clinical evaluation) from pregnancy to 1 year after the birth of a first child. A total of 62 first-time parents completed questionnaires (self-reported marital satisfaction) and clinical interviews (clinical evaluation of couples' dialogue quality). Although self-reported marital satisfaction and observed dialogue quality were highly associated, only self-reported marital satisfaction declined from pregnancy to 1 year after birth. This decrease was partly due to very high marital satisfaction during pregnancy. Different trajectories for self-reported marital satisfaction and observed dialogue quality were found for participants with recollections of low-, average-, and high-quality family-of-origin marriage. A structural equation model showed that participants who recollected a negative quality in their parents' relationship reported more negative changes in the quality of their own marriages. There seems to be an intergenerational transmission of marital quality that comes to light when couples are challenged by the birth and rearing of a baby.     

The role of change in the relationship between commitment and turnover: a latent growth modeling approach

Through the use of affective, normative, and continuance commitment in a multivariate 2nd-order factor latent growth modeling approach, the authors observed linear negative trajectories that characterized the changes in individuals across time in both affective and normative commitment. In turn, an individual's intention to quit the organization was characterized by a positive trajectory. A significant association was also found between the change trajectories such that the steeper the decline in an individual's affective and normative commitments across time, the greater the rate of increase in that individual's intention to quit, and, further, the greater the likelihood that the person actually left the organization over the next 9 months. Findings regarding continuance commitment and its components were mixed.