Distinguishing voluntary from involuntary attention to emotion

This study explored whether voluntary attention to emotion is distinguishable from involuntary attention to emotion. University students (N = 166) completed self-report questionnaires, designed for this study, intended to measure voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions. Moreover, participants completed questionnaires measuring other emotional constructs and distress. Finally, participants completed a dot probe task intended to obtain a behavioral measure of voluntary attention to emotion. Affect intensity was positively correlated with both voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion. As expected, dot probe emotional bias scores were associated with self-reported voluntary attention to emotion, but not with involuntary attention to emotion. Voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion were also differentially associated with clarity of emotion, anhedonic depression, and worry. The results of this study suggest it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions.     

Linking Work and Domestic Problems With Police Suicide

We reviewed the records of 134 police officers who had undergone their first fitness-for-duty evaluation at our center. Fifty-five percent admitted to previous suicide attempts. We examined possible contributing factors. A logistic regression model correctly classified 79.1% of subjects as to whether or not they attempted suicide. Results indicated that officers reporting marital problems were 4.8 times more likely to have attempted suicide, and 6.7 times more likely if they had been suspended. Interestingly, complaints of being administratively harassed were associated with a lower likelihood that an officer would attempt suicide. Variance explained due to age, race, gender, and substance use was nonsignificant.     

Today I'll use a condom, but who knows about tomorrow: a daily process study of variability in predictors of condom use

OBJECTIVE: Most models of health behavior change applied to condom use behavior have focused on individual differences in theoretical constructs to explain condom use or nonuse, while ignoring the possibility that day-to-day within-person changes in these constructs may contribute to understanding behavior. The goal of the present study was to investigate day-to-day variability in condom use attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions and assess the utility of this variability in predicting the likelihood of condom use each day. DESIGN: A 30-day Web-based structured daily diary was used to collect daily reports of sexual behaviors and data on theoretical predictors of condom use behavior from sexually active college students (N = 116). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The authors investigated whether condom use attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions vary day to day; whether this within-person variability predicts condom use behavior; and whether negative affective states explain this variability. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Within-person variability was found for each of the constructs. Within-person day-to-day changes in behavioral intentions and attitudes predicted the instances in which an individual used a condom and daily negative affect partially explained within-person day-to-day changes in behavioral intentions and self-efficacy. Implications for models of health behavior change and for behavior change interventions are discussed.     

Effects of Expectancy and Attention in Vibrotactile Choice Reaction Time Tasks

The orienting of attention in space has not been considered in the tactile domain. This issue is examined using a modified version of a visual paradigm initially adopted by Posner, Snyder, and Davidson (1980), which manipulates the probability of a stimulus occurring at different spatial locations. Slower RTs at an unexpected stimulus location are thought to reflect the time required to shift attention from the expected to the unexpected location. In two experiments involving vibrotactile choice RT between left and right hands, the two hands were either crossed or uncrossed, and the hands were held both on the left side of the body, both on the right, or one on either side of the midline. There was no evidence to suggest that spatial location (left or right) affected the orienting of attention in the tactual modality. As predicted, RTs were slower when the arms were crossed compared with uncrossed, though this effect was smaller for the expected trials. A coding conflict hypothesis may explain both these findings, but the smaller effect in the expected trials may also reflect attentional factors. Both the relative and absolute location of the hands affected the magnitude of the crossed-arm effect and indicated that attention may play a role in the perceptual division of space into left and right sides. Possible reasons for hand or hemispace asymmetries in different simple and choice RT paradigms were discussed.     

A ratio scale for social distance

Choosing a larger–later reward over a smaller–sooner reward may be thought of as altruism toward one's future self. A question that arises in this connection is: What is the relation between delay and social discounting? To begin to answer this question, social and delay discount functions need to be comparable. Delay is ordinarily measured on a ratio scale (time), which allows for meaningful division and addition. Social distance is ordinarily measured on an ordinal scale (rank order of social closeness). To convert social distance to a ratio scale we use a psychophysical distance function obtained via magnitude estimation (Stevens, 1956). The distance functions obtained are well described by a power function (median exponent = 1.9); we show how they may be used to rescale ordinal to ratio social discount functions.     

The Aesthetic Preference for Nature Sounds Depends on Sound Object Recognition

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow‐up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult‐to‐identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy‐to‐identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer‐generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed.