The effect of daily stress, personality, and age on daily negative affect

The current study examined whether stress reactivity becomes stronger or weaker with age. Daily stress and daily negative affect were modeled using 1,012 subjects from the National Study of Daily Events (NSDE), an 8-day daily diary study. Age ranged from 25 to 74. Data were modeled using within-person HLM techniques. Daily stress and neuroticism interacted in their effect on daily negative affect. There was a stronger association between daily stress and negative affect for persons high in neuroticism as compared to those low on the trait. In addition, daily stress and age interacted in their effect on daily negative affect. There was a stronger association between daily stress and negative affect for older as compared to younger adults. Results suggest heightened reactivity to stressors in older adulthood, perhaps due to kindling effects. Changes in the aging brain may explain this effect. Our investigations illuminate the complexities that characterize the set of associations among negative affect, stress, personality, and age, and point to potential aging or cohort effects.     

Vicarious agency: experiencing control over the movements of others

Participants watched themselves in a mirror while another person behind them, hidden from view, extended hands forward on each side where participants' hands would normally appear. The hands performed a series of movements. When participants could hear instructions previewing each movement, they reported an enhanced feeling of controlling the hands. Hearing instructions for the movements also enhanced skin conductance responses when a rubber band was snapped on the other's wrist after the movements. Such vicarious agency was not felt when the instructions followed the movements, and participants' own covet movement mimicry was not essential to the influence of previews on reported control.     

The relationship between metacognitive awareness of olfactory ability and age in people reporting chemosensory disturbances

When determining how much to rely on olfactory information, accurate estimates of olfactory ability are important. Nevertheless, metacognitive errors regarding olfactory ability are common in the normal population. Are older adults less accurate at estimating olfactory ability, or do they simply tend to make a particular type of estimation error? We examined data from 203 patients, all of whom self-rated olfactory ability and then were tested with the Odorant Confusion Matrix. The patients' self-reports did not match the objective measure of olfactory ability in 42% of the cases, thus demonstrating a high level of impairment in metacognitive knowledge. Neither the cause of loss nor the patient's age was related to the inability to accurately estimate olfactory loss, but both contributed to the type of metacognitive errors patients made. Younger patients tended to underestimate their olfactory ability, thus behaving similarly to patients with "blindsight" who demonstrate residual visual function in the absence of awareness. Older patients tended to overestimate their olfactory ability, thus making the metacognitive error of deficit unawareness that is observed in a number of other clinical syndromes. These findings indicate that older patients are not necessarily more likely to make errors in estimating their olfactory ability; rather, they are more prone to a particular type of metacognitive error than are younger patients.     

An own gender bias and the importance of hair in face recognition

There is a large literature on the own race bias, the finding that people are better at recognizing faces of people from their own race. Here an own gender bias is shown: Males are better at identifying male faces than female faces and females are better at identifying female faces than male faces. Encoding a person's hair is shown to account for approximately half of the own gender bias when measured using hit and false alarm rates. Remember/know judgements and confidence measures are taken. Encoding a person's hair is critical for having a "remember" recollective experience. Parallels with the own race bias and implications for eyewitness testimony are discussed.     

The course of 253 analyses from selection to outcome

Two studies of the clinical work of experienced psychoanalysts are presented. Study I is a retrospective study of all the analytic work--161 cases--of sixteen analysts from 1973 to 1977, including their evaluations of the treatments at outcome. Study II is a prospective study of the ninety-two cases started in analysis by a group of twenty analysts between 1984 and 1989 and followed to termination, including their reports. The history of each treatment as reported and evaluated by the analyst is examined in terms of: nature of the population, the analyst's view of the case when the initial recommendation was made, duration of treatment, therapeutic benefit, rating of analyzability at termination of treatment, nature of the termination, and cases changed to psychotherapy. Some old shibboleths are challenged as perspective on both the limitations and achievements of psychoanalysis emerges from the findings of the study.     

Trajectories leading to school-age conduct problems

The present study applied a semiparametric mixture model to a sample of 284 low-income boys to model developmental trajectories of overt conduct problems from ages 2 to 8. As in research on older children, 4 developmental trajectories were identified: a persistent problem trajectory, a high-level desister trajectory, a moderate-level desister trajectory, and a persistent low trajectory. Follow-up analyses indicated that initially high and low groups were differentiated in early childhood by high child fearlessness and elevated maternal depressive symptomatology. Persistent problem and high desister trajectories were differentiated by high child fearlessness and maternal rejecting parenting. The implications of the results for early intervention research are discussed, with an emphasis on the identification of at-risk parent-child dyads.     

Personality and the goal-striving process: the influence of achievement goal patterns,goal level,and mental focus on performance and enjoyment

The purpose of this study is to examine the mechanisms by which personality traits influence performance and satisfaction. Specifically, the authors examined how 3 personality characteristics derived from self-determination theory (autonomy, control, and amotivated orientations) influence performance and enjoyment through achievement goal patterns, goal level, and mental focus. Data were collected from 284 students at 5 points in time. In particular, mental focus emerged as an important aspect of the self-regulation process. The results suggest that global personality traits can help researchers to understand and predict the motivational strategies that people use while working toward goals in achievement settings.     

Selective attention improves under stress: implications for theories of social cognition

Three influential perspectives of social cognition entail conflicting predictions regarding the selectivity of performance under stress. According to the attention view, selectivity to the task-relevant attribute improves under stress because of reduced utilization of task-irrelevant attributes. According to the capacity-resource approach, stress depletes attentional resources wherefore selectivity fails for all but chronically accessible information. A third perspective, ironic process theory, similarly holds that selective attention fails under stress but adds that task-irrelevant information is rendered hyperaccessible. The theoretical derivations were tested in a series of experiments using 2 classes of selectivity measures, with special care taken to control for hitherto neglected factors of context The results showed that the selectivity of attention improved under stress, consistent with the prediction of the attention view.     

Decreased latent inhibition is associated with increased creative achievement in high-functioning individuals

Reductions in latent inhibition (LI), the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant, have been generally associated with the tendency towards psychosis. However, "failure" to screen out previously irrelevant stimuli might also hypothetically contribute to original thinking, particularly in combination with high IQ. Meta-analysis of two studies, conducted on youthful high-IQ samples. demonstrated that high lifetime creative achievers had significantly lower LI scores than low creative achievers (r(effect size) = .31, p = .0003, one-tailed). Eminent creative achievers (participants under 21 years who reported unusually high scores in a single domain of creative achievement) were 7 times more likely to have low rather than high LI scores, chi2 (1, N = 25) = 10.69, phi = .47. p = .003.