Aerobic fitness, psychological characteristics, and cardiovascular reactivity to stress

Examined the relations among aerobic fitness (AF), psychological characteristics, and cardiovascular reactivity using 62 men divided into highly fit and less fit groups based on a maximal treadmill exercise test. Several psychological and physiological variables were measured, and subjects' cardiovascular reactivity was assessed during a mental arithmetic task and during a video game task. Highly fit subjects showed a significantly smaller increase in both diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and heart rate (HR) and reported themselves to be less anxious and less angry than less fit subjects. Furthermore, controlling for subjects' scores on a scale assessing angry temperament reduced the relationship between AF and DBP reactivity to nonsignificant levels. These results suggest that degree of dispositional anger, which covaries with increased fitness, may contribute to the apparent relationship between AF and DBP--but not HR--reactivity.     

Predicting substance use behavior among South African adolescents: The role of leisure experiences across time

Using seven waves of data, collected twice a year from the 8th through the 11th grades in a low-resource community in Cape Town, South Africa, we aimed to describe the developmental trends in three specific leisure experiences (leisure boredom, new leisure interests, and healthy leisure) and substance use (cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana) behaviors and to investigate the ways in which changes in leisure experiences predict changes in substance use behaviors over time. Results indicated that adolescents' substance use increased significantly across adolescence, but that leisure experiences remained fairly stable over time. We also found that adolescent leisure experiences predicted baseline substance use and that changes in leisure experiences predicted changes in substance use behaviors over time, with leisure boredom emerging as the most consistent and strongest predictor of alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use. Implications for interventions that target time use and leisure experiences are discussed.     

Interoceptive and exteroceptive attention have opposite effects on subsequent somatosensory perceptual decision making

Evidence suggests that interoceptive and exteroceptive attention might have different perceptual effects. However, the effects of these different types of body-focused attention have never been directly compared. The current research investigated how interoceptive and exteroceptive attention affect subsequent performance on the somatic signal detection task (SSDT). In Experiment 1, 37 participants completed the SSDT under usual testing conditions and after performing an interoceptive heartbeat perception task. This task led to a more liberal response criterion, leading to increased touch reports in the presence and absence of a target vibration. This finding is consistent with suggestions that attending internally contributes to physical symptom reporting in patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). In Experiment 2, 40 participants completed the SSDT before and after an exteroceptive grating orientation task. This task led to a more stringent response criterion, leading to decreased touch reports in the presence and absence of the target, possibly via a reduction in sensory noise. This work demonstrates that internal and external body-focused attention can have opposite effects on subsequent somatic perceptual decision making and suggests that attentional training could be useful for patients reporting MUS.     

Beyond the fragments of the two Victoires: A fictionalised and incomplete memoir of the two women murdered by Pierre Rivière – His sister and his mother

This paper focuses on gendered spaces in which Pierre Rivière carried out the murder of his mother, his sister and his brother. The archival work of Foucault et al. provides multiple accounts of these family murders, including the very evocative memoir written by Pierre Rivière himself in prison. The position and perspectives of the women in that text, particularly those in his immediate family, are obscured, being seen very much through the eyes of men in general, and Pierre and his father specifically. Here we attempt to cut through that obscuration with a reflexive feminist excavation of fragments from this parricide case. We borrow from multiple sources including historical literature on women at that time, changing laws relating to equality and freedom, literary ways of coming to know the perspective of another through writing, magical realist strategies fostered in arts-based social research, and therapeutic strategies for remembering traumatic events. From these Victoire and her daughter are brought to life in a womanist reading that makes Victoire's position both imaginable and supportable. Specific historical material is confined to footnotes, so maintaining its coherence whilst allowing the foregrounding of the various narratives (from the research process, from original testimonies, and from attempts to write into the spaces left by those testimonies).