Potassium supplementation induces beneficial cardiovascular changes during rest and stress in salt sensitive individuals.

The typical American diet includes high salt and low potassium, a pattern linked to elevated blood pressure (BP) in cross-cultural studies. This study compared resting and stress cardiovascular responses on a high salt, low potassium diet to those observed during 2 interventions: salt restriction and potassium supplementation. Forty-seven percent of the primarily normotensive sample (n = 67 adults) were salt sensitive, showing a decrease in mean arterial pressure > or = 5 mmHg during low salt and equivalent reductions during high potassium. The equivalent benefits of the interventions were maintained, but not enhanced, during exposure to behavioral stress (i.e., no effect on reactivity). Salt resistants (SRs) exhibited no change in resting or stress BP across the diets. High salt increased cardiac index in both groups, whereas vascular tone was decreased only in the SR group. High potassium produced hemodynamic benefits similar to low salt, even with continued high salt intake.     

Dual-coding, context-availability, and concreteness effects in sentence comprehension: an electrophysiological investigation.

Event-related potentials were recorded in 2 experiments while participants read sentences in a word-by-word congruency judgment task. Sentence final words were either congruent, semantically anomalous (Experiments 1 and 2), or neutral (Experiment 2) with respect to sentence context. Half of all final words referred to concrete and half to abstract concepts. A different scalp distribution of the N400 to concrete and abstract final words was found for anomalous and neutral, but not congruent sentences. Although the interaction of context and concreteness is consistent with the context-availability model, the differential scalp distribution of effects for concrete and abstract words, as well as larger context effects for concrete words, was interpreted as being more consistent with an extended dual-code account of semantic processing.     

Assimilation and contrast effects: The role of self‐construal and regulatory focus as moderators in collectivistic cultures of honour

Human judgments are context dependent. When answering a question about one's overall satisfaction with life, a previous question about one's romantic life might pose redundancy problems influencing one's judgment of life satisfaction, something known as item order effects. However, in order to detect such redundancy, one needs to pay attention to the context of the conversation. Any variable that influences the amount of attention given the context of the conversation can determine whether the presumed redundancy is detected or not. In three studies, two experiments and one correlational study, we tested the influence of induced self‐construal (study 1) and self‐regulatory focus (study 2) and self‐regulatory focus measured as an individual difference variable (study 3) as moderators of context effects among college students from Mexico. In study 1, participants induced to have an independent mindset were less likely to detect the redundancy posed by two questions, resulting, as predicted, in a contrast effect. In study 3, participants with lower levels of prevention focus were less likely to detect the redundancy posed by the same two questions as study 1, resulting, as predicted, in an assimilation effect. The implications of the results were discussed within the framework of the inclusion/exclusion model.