Examination of the Relationship Between Self-Efficacy and Affect at Varying Levels of Aerobic Exercise Intensity

Although proposed as an explanation for increases in positive and decreases in negative affect, little evidence supports the notion of a stronger efficacy-affect relationship as acute aerobic exercise intensity increases. Relationships between self-efficacy (SE), positive affect (PA), and negative affect (NA) were examined with respect to 3 randomly assigned conditions: (a) no exercise (control), (b) cycling at 55% VO_2max, and (c) cycling at 70% VO_2max. Twenty subjects (age = 22.6 years; M VO_2max= 47.8 ml · kg⁻¹· min⁻¹) participated in each. Preexercise SE predicted in-task NA and postexercise PA in the 55% condition and postexercise PA in the 70% condition ( ps < .05). Although SE significantly increased from pre- to postexercise, in-task affect failed to predict these increases in SE. These data suggest that in a fit college-aged population, a stronger reciprocal relationship between preexercise SE, in-task affect, and postexercise SE does not exist with increasing levels of exercise intensity. Contrary to self-efficacy theory, no evidence was found for a reciprocal relationship. However, the relationship between efficacy and affect was such that when collapsed across conditions and time, subjects with higher SE scores reported lower NA ( p < .05).     

The role of psychopathology and gender in respiratory self-regulation

A group of 12 male and 12 female psychiatric patients were recruited among an anxiety-disordered population, and their performance on a respiratory modulation test was compared with that of a matched non-patient sample. Inferior performance was expected in the patient group, and males were expected to show better respiratory modulation than females. Results supported the conclusion that females were less able than males in modulating respiratory muscle behaviour according to requested patterns, and female psychiatric patients showed a relative lack of flexibility in the thorax or abdomen regions or in both trunk levels.     

The Psychometric Properties of the Swedish Version of the General Self-Efficacy Scale: A Rasch Analysis Based on Adolescent Data

Self-efficacy describes people’s belief in their own ability to perform the behaviors required to produce a desired outcome. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) with an adolescent sample, using Rasch analysis. The scale was examined with a focus on invariant functioning along the latent trait as well as across sample groups. The data were collected 2009 and 2010 among 3764 students aged between 13 and 15 years, in the 7^th to 9^th grade, in compulsory schools in the municipality of Karlstad, Sweden. The item fit was acceptable, the categorization of the items worked well and the scale worked invariantly between years of investigations. Although the GSES worked well as a whole, there was some evidence of misfit indicating room for improvements. The targeting may be improved by adding more questions of medium difficulty. Also, further attention needs to be paid to the dimensionality of the GSES as well as to whether the psychometric properties of GSES are affected by using more recent data.     

Book reviews

Abstract

Oakhill, J. &; Garnham, A. (1988). Becoming a skilled reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 206. ISBN 0-631-15244X £27.50 (hardback), ISBN 0-631-15776X £8.95 (paperback).

Brewin, C. R. (1988). Cognitive foundations of clinical psychology. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd. Pp. 224. ISBN 0-86377-098-3 £24.50 (hardback), ISBN 0-86377-099-1 £8.95 (paperback).     

Modality-constrained statistical learning of tactile, visual, and auditory sequences

The authors investigated the extent to which touch, vision, and audition mediate the processing of statistical regularities within sequential input. Few researchers have conducted rigorous comparisons across sensory modalities; in particular, the sense of touch has been virtually ignored. The current data reveal not only commonalities but also modality constraints affecting statistical learning across the senses. To be specific, the authors found that the auditory modality displayed a quantitative learning advantage compared with vision and touch. In addition, they discovered qualitative learning biases among the senses: Primarily, audition afforded better learning for the final part of input sequences. These findings are discussed in terms of whether statistical learning is likely to consist of a single, unitary mechanism or multiple, modality-constrained ones.     

What do you get when you cross a scapegoat with a trojan horse: A special edition?

Any short commentary is necessarily going to be partial in the various senses in which that can be understood. Here, partiality will be owned as the concentration upon limited aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. To find a special edition on ‘Qualitative Social Psychology’ is an event. The focus here will be on two analytic moments of that event: concept and actualization.     

Alcoholism and memory: broadening the scope of alcohol-expectancy research

Current biopsychosocial research on the etiology of alcoholism has begun to focus on memory processes as a possible common pathway for drinking decisions. The alcohol-expectancy construct is rooted both in cognitive psychology and alcohol research and can serve as a vehicle for this study. Reexamination of one recent review of issues in alcohol-expectancy research provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of this research with theoretical and methodological alternatives to those suggested in that review. Most importantly, this article shows that expectancy findings, discussed by Leigh (1989a) as reflecting "psychometric" limitations, are instead quite consistent with recent network models of memory structure. Such models can provide an informative guide to future research activities. It is also recommended that alcohol-expectancy research remain open to inputs from expectancy theories already developed in several psychological domains, as well as to theories of social cognition and attitude structure in addition to those advanced by Leigh.     

Changes in Feeling States Following Aquatic Exercise During Pregnancy

Forty-four pregnant women participated in water aerobics 2 times per week for a period of 6 weeks, with each session lasting approximately 45 min. The hypothesis that participants would report greater feelings of positive well-being and less psychological distress and fatigue during the 6-week program as compared to preprogram reports was supported. Also supporting our hypothesis, similar improvements were noted following a single bout of exercise during each week of the program. Taken together, the results of the present study suggest that regular engagement in an aquatic exercise program is associated with improvements in positive feeling states and reductions in negative feeling states and fatigue for women during pregnancy.     

Statistically Induced Chunking Recall: A Memory-Based Approach to Statistical Learning

The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short-term memory is fundamentally shaped by long-term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word-like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two-alternative forced-choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature.