The influence of emotional awareness and expressiveness on care-giving burden and health complaints in women and men

This study was designed to investigate the role of emotional awareness and expressiveness as influences on the experience of burden and impaired health for women and men maintaining a spouse or relative at home who had been diagnosed as having dementia. One hundred and thirty-one Caucasian care givers, 41 males and 90 females, participated in the study. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that women scored higher than men on measures of burden, health complaints, and awareness of others' emotions. Regression analysis indicated that self-awareness of emotions interacted with care-giver gender to decrease health complaints for female care givers but increased health complaints for male care givers. Self-awareness of emotions also increased feelings of burden for male care givers in general and for female care givers experiencing low levels of burden. Awareness of others' emotions tended to reduce feelings of burden. Emotional expressiveness did not influence burden or health complaint scores.This research was funded by grants from the Health Research Funds of Quebec, the Quebec Council for Social Research, and the Montreal Alzheimer Society. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Valerie Takeda, Charlene Stamegna, and Helene Fyfe for their work on the project, and to the families, patients, and staff of the various referral agencies for their cooperation with the study.To whom reprint requests should be addressed at Centre for Research in Human Development, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3G 1M8.     

The effect of conspecifics on corticoadrenal response of rats to a novel environment

The effect of housing conditions and the presence of a conspecific on corticoadrenal response to a novel environment was studied in male Sprague-Dawley rats. The response to a novel environment was the same in rats housed in groups and rats housed alone for 20 days before testing, suggesting that isolation during adulthood did not affect corticoadrenal response to a novel environment. The presence of a nonfamiliar rat (proceeding from another home cage) did not modify corticoadrenal response to the novel environment but the presence of a rat proceeding from the same home cage induced a higher corticoadrenal response to this stressful stimuli. These results can be explained considering that rats exhibit greater emotional reactivity, as measured by adrenal function, in situations which combine familiar (the other rat) and novel (the box) elements than those completely unfamiliar.     

Spelling,reading and adult illiteracy

Summary This is a study of the relationship of spelling to reading in adults. The spelling of six adult literacy students who read well or poorly was analysed to discover whether error patterns resembled those previously reported for children. Three tasks were administered, including dictation and free writting of real words, and dictation of nonsense words. Good readers made many more phonetic errors than poor readers did, indicating that their cognitive processes in spelling are similar to children's. In the nonword task, poor readers were less able than good readers in translating phonemes to graphemes. It is argued that implicit knowledge of the relationships of letters to sounds provides a strategy for dealing with unfamiliar written material and it is in this process that poor readers are impaired.     

Sexuality in children 9-14 years old

The aim of this study was to analyze sexual behaviors and attitudes of children 9-14 years old in Spain. In this article we present data from 470 children of which 52% are boys and 48% girls. In order to evaluate the sample, Information, Attitudes and Behaviors related to Health Questionnaire (CIACS-II) was used. Results evidence that boys 9 years old already show behaviors that evidence their interest towards sexuality. 8% have sometimes masturbated and 9% have used pornography for becoming excited. 14% of children 11-12 years old have already had sexual relations and 38% state to have sexual fantasies. Girls start to masturbate and to have sexual relations later than boys and show a prevalence of sexual fantasies and use of pornography very lower. It is necessary sexual education programs to be implanted since early ages in schools.     

A test of major assumptions about behavior change: a comprehensive look at the effects of passive and active HIV-prevention interventions since the beginning of the epidemic

This meta-analysis tested the major theoretical assumptions about behavior change by examining the outcomes and mediating mechanisms of different preventive strategies in a sample of 354 HIV-prevention interventions and 99 control groups, spanning the past 17 years. There were 2 main conclusions from this extensive review. First, the most effective interventions were those that contained attitudinal arguments, educational information, behavioral skills arguments, and behavioral skills training, whereas the least effective ones were those that attempted to induce fear of HIV. Second, the impact of the interventions and the different strategies behind them was contingent on the gender, age, ethnicity, risk group, and past condom use of the target audience in ways that illuminate the direction of future preventive efforts.     

Processing of threat-related information outside the focus of visual attention

This study investigates whether threat-related words are especially likely to be perceived in unattended locations of the visual field. Threat-related, positive, and neutral words were presented at fixation as probes in a lexical decision task. The probe word was preceded by 2 simultaneous prime words (1 foveal, i.e., at fixation; 1 parafoveal, i.e., 2.2 deg. of visual angle from fixation), which were presented for 150 ms, one of which was either identical or unrelated to the probe. Results showed significant facilitation in lexical response times only for the probe threat words when primed parafoveally by an identical word presented in the right visual field. We conclude that threat-related words have privileged access to processing outside the focus of attention. This reveals a cognitive bias in the preferential, parallel processing of information that is important for adaptation.     

Foveal vs. parafoveal attention-grabbing power of threat-related information

We investigated whether threat words presented in attended (foveal) and in unattended (parafoveal) locations of the visual field are attention grabbing. Neutral (nonemotional) words were presented at fixation as probes in a lexical decision task. Each probe word was preceded by 2 simultaneous prime words (1 foveal, 1 parafoveal), either threatening or neutral, for 150 ms. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the primes and the probe was either 300 or 1,000 ms. Results revealed slowed lexical decision times on the probe when primed by an unrelated foveal threat word at the short (300-ms) delay. In contrast, parafoveal threat words did not affect processing of the neutral probe at either delay. Nevertheless, both neutral and threat parafoveal words facilitated lexical decisions for identical probe words at 300-ms SOA. This suggests that threat words appearing outside the focus of attention do not draw or engage cognitive resources to such an extent as to produce interference in the processing of concurrent or subsequent neutral stimuli. An explanation of the lack of parafoveal interference is that semantic content is not extracted in the parafovea.     

Generalizing Behavioral Findings Across Times,Samples, and Measures: A Study of Condom Use1

Data from a Knowledge, Attitude, Belief, and Practices (KABP) Survey, administered to a sample of residents of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, were used to replicate a previous study (Fishbein, Trafimow, Francis, et al., 1995) that investigated the relative importance, as predictors of condom use, of selected theoretical variables from the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), and the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen & Madden, 1986). Besides addressing generalization problems, the study tested a more internally valid formulation of the role of past behavior that supported the argument that past condom use is better viewed as a predictor of current intention than as a criterion variable. Perhaps more important, the influence of past behavior was found to be partially mediated by its effect on attitudes and norms.     

LEX I and II: Two databases of surface word forms for psycholinguistic research in Spanish

Two databases of Spanish surface word forms are presented. Surface word forms are words considered as orthographically or phonologically specified without reference to their meaning or syntactic category. The databases are based on the productive written vocabulary of children between the ages of 6 and 10 years. Statistical and structural information is presented concerning surface word-form frequency, consonant-vowel (CV) structure, number of syllables, syllables, syllable CV structure, and subsyllabic units. LEX I was intended to aid in the study of reading processes. Entries were orthographic surface word forms; words were divided in their components following orthographic criteria. LEX II was designed for spoken language research. Accordingly, words were transcribed phonologically and phonological criteria were applied in extracting the internal units. Information about stress location was also provided. Together, LEX I and LEX II represent a useful tool for psycholinguists interested in the study of people acquiring Spanish as a first or foreign language and of Spanish-speaking populations in general.     

Protein-binding assays for adrenocorticoids

The measurement of the adrenocortical hormones, Cortisol and corticosterone, m blood plasma has previously best been done by procedures employing varying degrees of purification of the hormone, followed by photometric or fluorimetric quantitation. These methods have been relatively difficult or laborious, particularly in the case of the procedures that most specifically measure the hormoneof intent. These limitations are considerably overcome by new assays for Cortisol and corticosterone based on the principle of competitive protein-binding of the steroids in the presence of radioactively labeled steroid of the same molecular species. These methods are described and data on the specificity of such a method for corticosterone are presented and compared with one of the better fluorimetric assays.