Religious Affiliation Influences on the Health Status and Behaviours of Students Attending Seventh-Day Adventist Schools in Australia

Students attending Seventh-day Adventist (Adventist) schools in Australia have been shown to have better health status and behaviours compared to secular norms, yet these schools cater for a high percentage of non-Adventist students. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of religious affiliation (Adventist/non-Adventist) on the health status and behaviours of students attending Adventist secondary schools in Australia. The sample included 1734 students who responded to a health and lifestyle survey that captured demographic details, self-reported height and weight, self-reported health status, mental health and select health behaviours. Students who identified themselves as Adventist reported significantly better health behaviours than the non-Adventist students in several behavioural domains, especially among the male students. However, this did not translate to a difference in health status. Further research is needed to understand the causal mechanisms responsible for the potential health advantage of Adventist students, which may include family or church religious influences.     

Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction

Information that is presumed to be true at encoding but later on turns out to be false (i.e., misinformation) often continues to influence memory and reasoning. In the present study, we investigated how the strength of encoding and the strength of a later retraction of the misinformation affect this continued influence effect. Participants read an event report containing misinformation and a subsequent correction. Encoding strength of the misinformation and correction were orthogonally manipulated either via repetition (Experiment 1) or by imposing a cognitive load during reading (Experiment 2). Results suggest that stronger retractions are effective in reducing the continued influence effects associated with strong misinformation encoding, but that even strong retractions fail to eliminate continued influence effects associated with relatively weak encoding. We present a simple computational model based on random sampling that captures this effect pattern, and conclude that the continued influence effect seems to defy most attempts to eliminate it.     

Word list generation performance in Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia

Word list generation (WLG) was examined among clinical samples of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 73) or ischemic vascular dementia (IVD) (n = 85), equivalent in age, education, current and estimated premorbid intellectual functioning, and proportion of men and women. The AD group performed significantly better than did the IVD group on lexical WLG, and a trend was observed indicating superior performance among the IVD group on categorical WLG. Within-groups, comparisons of group means, and profile analyses of individual performance patterns all indicated that persons with AD demonstrated a lexical > categorical pattern significantly more often than did IVD participants. The absolute difference in average performance between the AD and IVD groups on lexical and categorical WLG was small; the findings, however, generally support the clinical utility of the lexical > categorical WLG pattern in the differential diagnosis of AD and IVD. The patterns of performance support the presence of relative impairment in semantic processing among the individuals with AD and global deficits in retrieval and processing speed in individuals with IVD.     

GENDER-RELATED PATTERNS OF HELPING AMONG FRIENDS

In this study, the social role theory of gender and helping (Eagly & Crowley, 1986) was applied to understand gender differences in helping behavior. Relationships among criterion variables of time spent helping and help quality; and key predictors of problem severity, empathic tendency, anger, sympathy, closeness, causal controllability, coping, and self-efficacy were applied. Participants from a large community sample ( N = 1,004) described situations in which they helped a friend and completed questionnaires describing factors that influenced their actions. Recipients of the help also filled out similar questionnaires. It was found that across many problem settings women spend more time helping, give higher quality help, and feel more empathy and sympathy in response to their friends' problems. Further, the presence of anger toward a friend is associated with more time spent helping but a lower quality of help. In contrast, men rate their friends' problems as more controllable/blameworthy and experience more anger. Further, controllability has a greater influence on a number of help-related variables. For both men and women, self-efficacy and perception of problem severity are the greatest direct predictors of helping.     

Parental Goal Orientations and Beliefs About the Competitive-Sport Experience of Their Child1

We examined the achievement goals of parents' in relation to their interpretation of their child's sporting behavior, preference for certain types of performance feedback about their child, the types of tasks they prefer their child to engage in, and their beliefs about the cause of their child's performance. The sample consisted of 96 parents whose children were in the first year (mean age 11.3) at a large comprehensive school in a major city in the United Kingdom. Parents' dispositional achievement goal orientations were differentiated by their responses to the Perception of Success Questionnaire (Roberts & Balague, 1989, 1991). Whereas differences in task orientation appear to be critical in the education setting (Ames & Archer, 1988), the findings of this study suggest that individual differences in ego orientation may be more significant in the competitive sport context.     

Psychosocial functioning of children: Relations between personality subtypes and academic achievement

Five hundred children from ages 6 to 12 who had been referred for neuropsychological assessment were clustered into six subtypes using a kmeans technique applied to 10 PIC scales. Five of the six subtypes were virtually identical to subtypes identified in previous research (viz., normal, somatic concern, mild anxiety, externalized psychopathology, and internalized psychopathology). A sixth subtype (conduct disorder) was also found. Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) Reading and Spelling scores discriminated between normal, somatic concern, and conduct disorder subtypes on the one hand vs. the more disturbed externalized and internalized psychopathology subtypes on the other;the latter groups scored higher on these measures. The internalized psychopathology subtype also showed large discrepancies between reading vs. arithmetic and spelling vs. arithmetic. The results support the view that psychosocial functioning is related to assets and deficits in cognitive/academic functioning in children, and that particular patterns of such assets and deficits are related to particular forms of psychopathology.     

Implicit Learning in a Simple Cued Reaction-Time Task

Implicit learning tasks usually involve the learning of complex rules. While this does reduce the likelihood of subjects becoming aware of the relationship to be learned, it also raises the possibility of explaining improved performance in terms of explicit processes. The current experiments are an attempt to develop a task which shows evidence of implicit learning, but which involves the learning of a very simple rule and so avoids these alternative explanations. In two experiments, we exposed subjects to learning trials in which a target letter (or shape) was immediately preceded by a cue letter (or shape) in otherwise random nine-letter (or 15-shape) sequences. In a test phase, subjects responded more quickly to cued than uncued targets if the learning phase had involved reliable cue–target pairings, but not following random control pairings. This was true of subjects who were classified as aware and those classified as unaware of the cue–target relationship.     

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.