Psycho-physiological impact on women with chronic fatigue syndrome in the context of their couple relationship

The quality of dyadic adjustment is likely to play an important role in patients' relational problems and may also be associated with the clinical presentation of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) symptoms. The objective of this study was (1) to determine whether CFS patients and their partners have similar perceptions of their dyadic adjustment and (2) to evaluate whether the influence of dyadic satisfaction in women with CFS, as well as common psychological parameters such as anxiety, may correlate with physiological responses at rest and/or when performing very low intensity exercise. Forty females with CFS and their partners completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale. The cardiovascular adaptation of patients was evaluated during resting conditions and on a precalibrated cycle ergometer while performing very low intensity exercise. Patients and partners had similar perceptions of their marital relationship. Both at rest and during very low workload, various physiological parameters in the patient group showed statistical correlations with certain psychological parameters. Several psychological variables, such as anxiety and dyadic adjustment, were associated with the cardioventilatory response monitored at rest and during very low intensity exercise. Further studies are needed to determine the nature of this association.     

Social intuition as a form of implicit learning: Sequences of body movements are learned less explicitly than letter sequences

In the current paper, we first evaluate the suitability of traditional serial reaction time (SRT) and artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments for measuring implicit learning of social signals. We then report the results of a novel sequence learning task which combines aspects of the SRT and AGL paradigms to meet our suggested criteria for how implicit learning experiments can be adapted to increase their relevance to situations of social intuition. The sequences followed standard finite-state grammars. Sequence learning and consciousness of acquired knowledge were compared between 2 groups of 24 participants viewing either sequences of individually presented letters or sequences of body-posture pictures, which were described as series of yoga movements. Participants in both conditions showed above-chance classification accuracy, indicating that sequence learning had occurred in both stimulus conditions. This shows that sequence learning can still be found when learning procedures reflect the characteristics of social intuition. Rule awareness was measured using trial-by-trial evaluation of decision strategy (Dienes & Scott, 2005; Scott & Dienes, 2008). For letters, sequence classification was best on trials where participants reported responding on the basis of explicit rules or memory, indicating some explicit learning in this condition. For body-posture, classification was not above chance on these types of trial, but instead showed a trend to be best on those trials where participants reported that their responses were based on intuition, familiarity, or random choice, suggesting that learning was more implicit. Results therefore indicate that the use of traditional stimuli in research on sequence learning might underestimate the extent to which learning is implicit in domains such as social learning, contributing to ongoing debate about levels of conscious awareness in implicit learning.     

Bullying as strategic behavior: relations with desired and acquired dominance in the peer group

To examine whether bullying is strategic behavior aimed at obtaining or maintaining social dominance, 1129 9- to 12-year-old Dutch children were classified in terms of their role in bullying and in terms of their use of dominance oriented coercive and prosocial social strategies. Multi-informant measures of participants’ acquired and desired social dominance were also included. Unlike non-bullying children, children contributing to bullying often were bistrategics in that they used both coercive and prosocial strategies and they also were socially dominant. Ringleader bullies also expressed a higher desire to be dominant. Among non-bullying children, those who tended to help victims were relatively socially dominant but victims and outsiders were not. Generally, the data supported the claim that bullying is dominance-oriented strategic behavior, which suggests that intervention strategies are more likely to be successful when they take the functional aspects of bullying behavior into account.