The effect of varied physician affect on recall, anxiety, and perceptions in women at risk for breast cancer: an analogue study.

Evaluated the effect of varied physician affect on subject recall, anxiety, and perceptions in a simulated tense and ambiguous medical situation. Forty women at risk for breast cancer viewed videotapes of an oncologist presenting--with either worried or nonworried affect--mammogram results. Although the mammogram results and the oncologist were the same in both presentation, analyses indicated that, compared to the women receiving the results from a nonworried physician, the women receiving the results from a worried physician recalled significantly less information, perceived the clinical situation as significantly more severe, reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety, and had significantly higher pulse rates. These results suggest that physician affect plays a critical role in patient reaction to medical information. Implications for compliance research, patient satisfaction, and physician training are discussed.     

On the relation between feeling of knowing and lexical decision: persistent subthreshold activation or topic familiarity?

Experiment 1 replicated Yaniv and Meyer's (1987) finding that lexical decision and episodic recognition performance was better for words previously yielding high-accessibility levels (a combination of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue ratings) in comparison with those yielding low-accessibility levels in a rare word definition task. Experiment 2 yielded the same pattern even though lexical decisions preceded accessibility estimates by a full week. Experiment 3 dismissed the possibility that the Experiment 2 results may have been due to a long-term influence from the lexical decision task to the rare word judgment task. These results support a model in which Ss (a) retrieve topic familiarity information in making accessibility estimates in the rare word definition task and (b) use this information to modulate lexical decision performance.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Biology of elderly suicide.

Most studies of suicide in younger patients have demonstrated significant alterations in the serotonin system. Although a high percentage of completed suicides occur in late-life, to date very few studies of the biology of suicide have focused on this age group. This chapter describes age-related changes in the central nervous system pertinent to the biology of suicide, then reviews post-mortem biological studies of the brains of suicides and suicide attempters. As suicide attempts in the elderly are characterized by the use of violent means, biologic studies of impulsive violence are discussed. Finally we describe data on the effect of degenerative diseases on the serotonin system and the possible link to increased suicidal behavior in affected patients. This review underscores the need for further study of the biology of suicide in the geriatric age group.     

Suppression of Regional Cerebral Blood during Emotional versus Higher Cognitive Implications for Interactions between Emotion and Cognition

Brain mapping studies using dynamic imaging methods demonstrate areas regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) decreases, as well as areas where increases, during performance of various experimental tasks. Task holds for both sets of cerebral blood flow changes (CBF), providing the opportunity to investigate areas that become and “activated” in the experimental condition relative to control state. Such data yield the intriguing observation that in areas in emotional processing, such as the amygdala, the posteromedial cortex, and the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, although flow as expected during specific emotion-related tasks, flow decreases performance of some attentionally demanding, cognitive tasks. Conversely, in some of the areas that appear to subserve cognitive functions, as the dorsal anterior cingulate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, increases while performing attentionally demanding cognitive tasks, but during some experimentally induced and pathological emotional Although the specific nature of such reciprocal patterns of regional remains unclear, they may reflect an important cross-modal interaction during mental operations. The possibility that neural activity is less in areas required in emotional processing during some higher cognitive processes holds implications for the mechanisms underlying interactions cognition and emotion. Furthermore, the possibility that neural in some cognitive-processing areas is suppressed during intense states suggests mechanisms by which extreme fear or severe may interfere with cognitive performance.