Factors related to life satisfaction among urban African American adults receiving care at a publicly-funded sexual health clinic

Life satisfaction is linked to premature morbidity and mortality and it may be compromised for individuals living in economically-disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods. The present study explores how behavioral and social-environmental health factors are associated with life satisfaction among a sample of African American young adults. Participants (N = 307, M_age = 26.6 years, 53% male) were recruited from a publicly-funded clinic for a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Data from the baseline assessment of the RCT, which included measures of sleep, depression, anxiety, social support, alcohol and drug use problems, city stress, and life satisfaction, were used for the current study. Correlation analyses assessed bivariate associations between life satisfaction and the demographic and health-related factors. Linear regression using backward elimination determined the best fitting model of factors associated with life satisfaction. Backward elimination resulted in the following variables remaining as significantly associated with life satisfaction: age (b = ?2.40, p = .017), anxiety (b = ?5.32, p < .001), and social support (b = 2.89, p = .004). Feeling rested upon waking also remained in the best fitting model, although this association did not achieve statistical significance (p = .099). The results suggest that African American adults who are younger, less anxious, and report adequate social support are more likely to report satisfaction with life. These findings add to the literature aimed at examining health and social factors impacting the well-being of African Americans living in low-income, urban communities.     

Deficits on the Continuous Performance Test within the schizophrenia spectrum and the mediating effects of family history of schizophrenia

Individuals with schizophrenia spectrum personality disorders (SSPD) and schizophrenia show similar cognitive impairments. The authors examined the contributions of SSPD symptoms and familial risk for schizophrenia to impairments on the Continuous Performance Test--Identical Pairs Version. Participants included 103 schizophrenia patients, 66 first-degree relatives (29 SSPD), and 103 community controls (26 SSPD) screened for family history of psychosis. Patients and SSPD relatives performed significantly worse than non-SSPD relatives and SSPD and non-SSPD community controls. No differences in performance were observed among non-SSPD relatives and SSPD and non-SSPD community controls. Results suggest a continuum in which risk for schizophrenia-related cognitive impairments is highest among patients and SSPD relatives, intermediate among non-SSPD relatives, and lowest among SSPD and non-SSPD community controls. Results suggest that SSPD in the absence of a family history of psychosis may be a phenocopy.     

Passive‐Submissive and Active‐Emotional Trait Dependency: Evidence for a Two‐Factor Model

ABSTRACT Dependency plays an important role in both normal and abnormal personality, but the construct remains loosely defined, both in clinical practice and the research literature. Moreover, although a number of measures purport to measure trait dependency, little agreement exists as to the structure of dependency within or across these instruments. Furthermore, what constitutes the low end of trait dependency remains unclear. Five hundred nine undergraduates completed a battery of 14 dependency scales and subscales, a subset of whom (n=322) also completed a broad measure of personality pathology (SNAP‐2). Exploratory factor analysis of the dependency measures yielded two correlated factors—Passive‐Submissive and Active‐Emotional dependency—as well as a third, unrelated factor, Detachment/Autonomy, all with differential correlates to the pathological personality traits of the SNAP‐2. Taken together, these data suggest a clear, 2‐factor model for trait dependency that is distinct from detachment/autonomy.     

Using cumulative-recall curves to assess the extent of relational and item-specific processing

Although distinguishing between item-specific and relational information has proved to be a useful approach for understanding a variety of important memory phenomena, finding measurement tools for assessing the amount and type of information processed has proven difficult. Using the repeated-testing procedure, Burns (1993) demonstrated that item gains (the recall of items on a later test that were not recalled on earlier tests) and item losses (the forgetting of items on a later test that were recalled on earlier tests) reflected differences in amount of item-specific and relational information processed, respectively. Although several researchers have begun to use the measures with apparent success, the present research demonstrates that the accuracy of the item-gain measure is largely dependent on the rather arbitrary choice of recall-test length. We also show that a related but alternative measure, analysis of cumulative-recall curves, avoids some of the shortcomings of the item gain and loss measures. Moreover, we provide evidence for the generality of the cumulative-recall approach by demonstrating its effectiveness in mixed-list designs.     

The future-orientation of memory: Planning as a key component mediating the high levels of recall found with survival processing

In a series of papers, Nairne and colleagues have demonstrated that tasks encouraging participants to judge words for relevance to survival led to better recall than did tasks lacking survival relevance. Klein, Robertson, and Delton (2010) presented data suggesting that the future-directed temporal orientation of the survival task (e.g., planning), rather than survival per se, accounts for the good recall found with the task. In the present studies we manipulated the amount of survival and planning processing encouraged by a set of encoding tasks. Participants performed tasks that encouraged processing stimuli for their relevance to (a) both survival and planning, (b) planning, but not survival, or (c) survival but not planning. We predicted, and found, that recall performance associated with tasks encouraging planning (i.e., survival with planning and planning without survival) should exceed tasks that encouraged survival but not planning (i.e., survival without planning). We draw several conclusions. First, planning is a necessary component of the superior recall found in the survival paradigm. Second, memory, from an evolutionary perspective, is inherently prospective—tailored by natural selection to support future decisions and judgements that cannot be known in advance with certainty.     

Benevolently bowing out: the influence of self-construals and leadership performance on the willful relinquishing of power

Sometimes a group's best interest is served when powerful people relinquish power, but little theory or empirical research has investigated when and by whom power is willingly given-up. Using a simulated, online team competition, two studies demonstrated that people who were dispositionally high in interdependent self-construals were more likely to relinquish their position of leadership within a group when they perceived that their leadership performance on the task was unambiguously poor versus good. However, when given the ability to attribute performance to others rather than the self, leader's level of interdependent self-construal did not significantly influence their decisions to relinquish power. Overall, these findings suggest that factors such as perceived leadership performance, interdependent self-construals, and ability to defer blame all converge when making decisions in regards to how much power should be relinquished.     

Situating Moral Justification: Rethinking the Mission of Moral Epistemology

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology.     

Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated With Increased Susceptibility to Framing Effects

Previous studies suggest in line with dual process models that interoceptive skills affect controlled decisions via automatic or implicit processing. The “framing effect” is considered to capture implicit effects of task‐irrelevant emotional stimuli on decision‐making. We hypothesized that cardiac awareness, as a measure of interoceptive skills, is positively associated with susceptibility to the framing effect. Forty volunteers performed a risky‐choice framing task in which the effect of loss versus gain frames on decisions based on identical information was assessed. The results show a positive association between cardiac awareness and the framing effect, accounting for 24% of the variance in the framing effect. These findings demonstrate that good interoceptive skills are linked to poorer performance in risky choices based on ambivalent information when implicit bias is induced by task‐irrelevant emotional information. These findings support a dual process perspective on decision‐making and suggest that interoceptive skills mediate effects of implicit bias on decisions.     

Impact of genetic testing on causal models of heart disease and arthritis: An analogue study

Abstract

An analogue study investigated the impact of genetic testing on perceptions of disease. Using a 2 × 2 design, participants (n = 212) imagined receiving the information that they were at increased risk for either heart disease or arthritis. The type of risk information was either genetic or unspecified. Presentation of genetic risk information resulted in the condition being perceived as less preventable. Causal models of disease where investigated using principal components analysis. When hem disease was the stimulus condition, attributions to genes and chance were positively associated following unspecified risk information, and negatively associated following genetic risk information. When arthritis was the stimulus condition, presentation of genetic risk information was associated with attributions to genes becoming separated from the other attributions. One explanation for this is that providing genetic risk information may decrease perceptions of a sense of randomness or uncertainty in disease causation. The extent to which these effects occur in clinical populations. and their behavioural consequences. needs to be established.