The effects of self-focused attention, performance demand, and dispositional sexual self-consciousness on sexual arousal of sexually functional and dysfunctional men

Sexually functional (N=26) and sexually dysfunctional heterosexual men with psychogenic erectile disorder (N=23) viewed two sexually explicit videos. Performance demand was manipulated through verbal instruction that a substantial genital response was to be expected from the videos. Self-focused attention was manipulated by introducing a camera pointed at the participant. Dispositional self-consciousness was assessed by questionnaire. Performance demand was found to independently inhibit the genital response. No main effect of self-focus was found. Self-focus inhibited genital response in men scoring high on general and sexual self-consciousness traits, whereas it enhanced penile tumescence in low self-conscious men. Inhibition effects were found in both volunteers and patients. No interaction effects of performance demand and self-focus were found. Subjective sexual arousal in sexually functional men was highest in the self-focus condition. In sexually dysfunctional men, subjective sexual response proved dependent on locus of attention as well as presentation order.     

Obsessive-compulsive disorder as a disturbance of security motivation

The authors hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent nonrationality, have what might be termed an epistemic origin--that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal "feeling of knowing" that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system. The authors compare their satiety-signal construct, which they term yedasentience, to various other senses of the feeling of knowing and indicate why OCD-like symptoms would stem from the abnormal absence of such a terminator emotion. In addition, they advance a tentative neuropsychological model to explain its underpinnings. The proposed model integrates many previous disparate observations and concepts about OCD and embeds it within the broader understanding of normal motivation.     

A Review of Spiritual and Religious Measures in Nursing Research Journals: 1995--1999

Background: A series of systematic reviews has revealed relatively high levels of interest in religion and spirituality in different nursing specialties, but not in general nursing research journals. Purpose: To identify the extent to which spirituality and religiousness were measured in all quantitative and qualitative research articles published in Research in Nursing and Health, Nursing Research, Advances in Nursing Science (ANS), and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship from 1995 to 1999. Methods: A full-text search was conducted of ANS and Image using the Ovid search system. Nursing Research and Research in Nursing and Health were hand searched for spiritual/religious measures. Characteristics of selected studies, the measures taken, and their uses were coded for data analysis. Results: A total of 564 research studies were identified, of which 67 (11.9%) included at least one measure of spirituality or religiousness. A significant difference was found between the percentage of qualitative and quantitative studies that contained measures of these concepts. Of the 119 qualitative studies, 23 (19.3%) contained a measure of religion or spirituality, compared to 44 of the 445 (9.9%) quantitative studies. Nominal indicators of religious affiliation were the most commonly used measures in the quantitative studies and measures of religion and spirituality were rarely used in the analyses. Although only a few quantitative or qualitative studies intended to focus on religion or spirituality, these themes often emerged spontaneously in the qualitative research. Conclusions: Research in Nursing and Health, Advances in Nursing Science, Nursing Research, and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship all published research measuring spirituality and religiousness during the time-period studied. The rate at which spirituality and religion appeared in these nursing research articles is substantially higher than that found in most fields outside of nursing. Even more frequent inclusion of spiritual and religious variables and richer measures of spirituality and religiousness would help to increase the available scientific information on the role of spirituality and religion in nursing care.     

Psychological masculinity-femininity via the gender diagnosticity approach: heritability and consistency across ages and populations

Several aspects of the Gender Diagnosticity (GD) approach of Lippa (1995) to measuring the psychological trait of masculinity-femininity within sexes were explored in four samples ranging from 363 to 5,859 individuals, including Swedish and Australian adults, U.S. elderly, and Australian adolescents. Two ways of deriving GD scales yielded highly similar results. Moderate stability of individual differences was found across ages 12 to 16 among adolescents, but substantial shifts over age occurred in relationships with Eysenck scales. Considerable generality of GD scales was obtained across languages and populations. Substantial heritabilities (about 40%) and minimal effects of shared family environments suggest that within-sex masculinity-femininity behaves as a fairly typical personality trait. Cross-age continuity appeared mainly to reflect the influence of the genes.     

Repetition priming in task switching: Do the benefits dissipate?

In task-switching research, one process that has been implicated as a possible source of switch cost is repetition priming. In four experiments, an examination was made of the claim that repetition priming dissipates over the interval between trials and thereby causes switch cost to decrease with increases in the response-cue interval (RCI). In Experiments 1 and 2, RCI was manipulated within participants, producing the standard RCI effect on switch cost. In Experiments3 and 4, RCI was manipulated between participants and had no effect on switch cost. The role of experimental design and the mixed pattern of effects on switch and repeat trials in Experiments1 and 2 suggest that a passive architectural process such as priming dissipation is not responsible for the RCI effect on switch cost. Repetition priming may still be responsible for some or all of switch cost, but it appears to be more stable over time than was previously thought.     

Structural equation models for interchangeable dyads: being the same makes a difference

Structural equation modeling (SEM) offers a flexible method for studying the patterns of interdependence in partners' behavior, which lie at the heart of interactions and relationships. Although SEM has been applied to the study of distinguishable dyads, in which partners are distinguishable by type, such as male and female, it has rarely been applied to the study of interchangeable dyads, such as male-male or female-female pairs. The authors integrate a wide range of dyadic interdependence models--including actor-partner interdependence models, mutual-influence models, and common-fate or dyadic personality models--into an SEM framework for use with interchangeable dyads. The authors also address the use of latent variables at both the dyadic and individual levels, whereby substantive relationships in these models can be corrected for errors of measurement. Furthermore, the authors discuss the conceptual underpinnings of dyadic models and give examples of their application.     

The Relation Between Sluggish Cognitive Tempo and DSM-IV ADHD

To test the relation between sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) and DSM-IV ADHD symptoms, parent and teacher ratings of the 18 DSM-IV ADHD items and five potential SCT items were obtained in a community sample of 8-18 year-old twins that was overselected for ADHD and learning disabilities (n = 296). Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a three-factor model provided the best fit to the data for both parent and teacher ratings. DSM-IV inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms loaded on two factors consistent with the DSM-IV model, and five SCT symptoms loaded primarily on a third factor. The SCT and inattention factors were highly correlated, whereas SCT and hyperactivity-impulsivity were weakly related. Both raters indicated that children meeting symptom criteria for the combined and inattentive subtypes exhibited significantly more SCT symptoms than those meeting symptom criteria for hyperactive-impulsive type and the comparison group without ADHD. Children meeting symptom criteria for the inattentive type exhibited significantly more SCT symptoms than those meeting criteria for the combined type, based on teacher ratings. These results suggest that SCT is an internally consistent construct that is significantly associated with DSM-IV inattention.     

Tasks of a feather flock together: Similarity effects in task switching

Recent research on task switching has paid little attention to how tasks are represented and how the relations between task representations might affect the executive processes engaged to achieve a task switch. Two experiments investigated the effect of task similarity on task switching. Similarity was defined in terms of shared component operations--attentional control settings in Experiment 1 and response modality in Experiment 2--with tasks sharing more component operations said to be more similar to each other than tasks sharing fewer component operations. Across both experiments, task similarity facilitated task switching, seen in reduced switch costs for switching between similar tasks as opposed to dissimilar tasks. These results indicate that task similarity defined in terms of component operations can be used to define a multidimensional task space in which the executive processes of task selection and implementation are active.     

Healthy high-hostiles evidence low-alpha power (7.5-9.5Hz) changes during negative affective learning

The present experiment was designed to better understand the impact of positive and negative emotional processing among low- and high-hostile individuals. Based on previous research which found increased sympathovagal balance among low-hostiles to the negative version of the Affective Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AAVL), it was hypothesized that low-hostiles would experience increased cortical arousal to this stimulus whereas their high-hostile counterparts would not. As expected, low-hostiles experienced significantly reduced low-alpha power (7.5-9.5Hz) relative to high-hostiles during the presentation of the negative AAVL. In a replication of prior research, significant primacy and recency effects were noted for the negative and positive word lists, respectively. Results are discussed in terms of cerebral activation theory and the potential impact of emotional processing among high-hostile individuals and their likelihood to develop coronary heart disease.     

IQ stability: the relation between child and young adult intelligence test scores in low-birthweight samples

The stability of IQ from childhood to adulthood in low-birthweight subjects was measured in two independent samples with follow-up intervals of approximately 14 and 9.5 years. In both samples, intelligence was assessed with the WISC at a mean age of 9.5. Twenty-six subjects were retested with the WAIS at a mean age of 23.5, and 78 subjects with the BPP (the Danish Military Draft Board Intelligence Test) at the age of 19.1. Both samples obtained childhood and adult test scores below the expected means. For the Wechsler Verbal, Performance and Full-Scale IQs, the stability quotients were 0.86, 0.86, and 0.89 in the WAIS sample, and the retest correlations for the three IQs with the BPP score were 0.66, 0.65, and 0.74. Thus, the majority of children showed stable patterns of intellectual development from middle childhood to young adulthood.