A pilot study on the motivational effects of an internet-delivered physical activity behaviour change programme in Nova Scotian cancer survivors

Objective: To examine the effects of an internet-delivered, distance-based physical activity (PA) behaviour change programme on motivation to perform PA in cancer survivors.

Design: Breast, prostate and colorectal cancer survivors (N = 95) were randomized to either an online Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)-based PA behaviour change programme (UCAN) or usual care.

Main Outcome Measures: Motivational variables from the TPB including intention, planning, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and underlying beliefs.

Results: UCAN had significant negative effects on self-efficacy (?.7; 95% CI = ?1.2 to ?.1; d = ?.53, p = .019), affective attitude (?.4; 95% CI = ?.8 to ?.0; d = ?.45, p = .044), instrumental attitude (?.5; 95% CI = ?.9 to ?.1; d = ?.43, p = .026) and confidence to perform PA in bad weather (?.8; 95% CI = ?1.6 to ?.1; d = ?.49, p = .030), despite health issues (?.7; 95% CI = ?1.3 to ?.1; d = ?.48, p = .031), despite pain/soreness (?.7; 95% CI = ?1.4 to ?.1; d = ?.52, p = .020), despite family responsibilities (?1.0; 95% CI = ?1.7 to ?.3; d = ?.62, p = .005) and when PA is boring (?.8; 95% CI = ?1.4 to ?.1; d = ?.54, p = .016).

Conclusion: UCAN had negative effects on motivational variables in cancer survivors. These findings may be explained by methodological issues related to measuring motivation and/or the absence of post-intentional constructs.     

Intensional verbs in event semantics

In Attitude Problems, I gave an account of opacity in the complement of intensional transitive verbs that combined neo-Davidsonian event-semantics with a hidden-indexical account of substitution failure. In this paper, I extend the account to clausal verbs.     

Parental coping socialization is associated with healthy and anxious early‐adolescents’ neural and real‐world response to threat

The ways parents socialize their adolescents to cope with anxiety (i.e., coping socialization) may be instrumental in the development of threat processing and coping responses. Coping socialization may be important for anxious adolescents, as they show altered neural threat processing and over reliance on disengaged coping (e.g., avoidance and distraction), which can maintain anxiety. We investigated whether coping socialization was associated with anxious and healthy adolescents’ neural response to threat, and whether neural activation was associated with disengaged coping. Healthy and clinically anxious early adolescents (N = 120; M = 11.46 years; 71 girls) and a parent engaged in interactions designed to elicit adolescents’ anxiety and parents’ response to adolescents’ anxiety. Parents’ use of reframing and problem solving statements was coded to measure coping socialization. In a subsequent visit, we assessed adolescents’ neural response to threat words during a neuroimaging task. Adolescents’ disengaged coping was measured using ecological momentary assessment. Greater coping socialization was associated with lower anterior insula and perigenual cingulate activation in healthy adolescents and higher activation in anxious adolescents. Coping socialization was indirectly associated with less disengaged coping for anxious adolescents through neural activation. Findings suggest that associations between coping socialization and early adolescents’ neural response to threat differ depending on clinical status and have implications for anxious adolescents’ coping.     

Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.     

The contributions of Rosenbaum's model of self-control and the transtheoretical model to the understanding of exercise behavior

ObjectivesRosenbaum's [1990. The role of learned resourcefulness in the self-control of health behavior. In M. Rosenbaum (Ed.), Learned resourcefulness: On coping skills, self-control, and adaptive behavior (pp. 3–30). New York: Springer Publishing Company; 2000. The self-regulation of experience: openness and construction. In P. Dewe, A. M. Leiter, &; T. Cox (Eds.), Coping and health in organizations (pp. 51–67). London: Taylor and Francis] model of self-control depicts learned resourcefulness as a key component of the goal attainment process. Despite this model's popularity, few studies have examined its importance in the maintenance of exercise. The transtheoretical model of change has been used instead. The two models, nonetheless, share strikingly similar components with the exception of learned resourcefulness.Design/MethodsOur 265 participants, ranging from wanting to be active to being regular exercisers, completed instruments assessing learned resourcefulness, stage of change for exercise, self-efficacy, reasons for exercising and the processes of change for exercise.ResultsAs predicted, participants in the maintenance stage for exercise were on average more highly resourceful than participants in the contemplation, preparation and action stages of change. Low resourceful participants in the contemplation stage of change were the least likely to be employing strategies to help facilitate activity.ConclusionImplications for exercise promoters are discussed.     

Church and Culture: Protestant and CatholicModernities

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.     

Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating Among Early Adolescents From Korea and the US

Multidimensional measures of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating were studied in samples of 12–15 years old middle school children. Consistent with feminist theories associating body dissatisfaction with rapid social change, Korean girls (n?=?272) exhibited the greatest body dissatisfaction and the most behaviors associated with disordered eating and were followed in order by Korean boys (n?=?276), US girls (n?=?251), and US boys (n?=?220). The results, which replicated Jung and Forbes (2006) report of greater body dissatisfaction among Korean than among US college women, suggest that (1) these differences originate prior to adolescence, and (2) the sociocultural variables producing greater body dissatisfaction in Korean girls and women also influence body dissatisfaction among boys.     

Representation-mediated extinction of conditioned flavor aversions

Conditioned flavor aversions were extinguished by presenting without consequence auditory stimuli that had been previously paired with the aversive flavor. In Experiment 1, rats that received tone-sucrose pairings, then sucrose-lithium chloride (LiCl) pairings, and finally repeated tone-alone presentations showed greater sucrose consumption in subsequent testing than rats that received similar sucrose-LiCl pairings and tone-alone presentations but no initial tone-sucrose pairings. Experiment 2 demonstrated the stimulus specificity of the mediated extinction observed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, rats that received first-order light-food and second-order tone-light pairings prior to sucrose-LiCl pairings did not show greater subsequent sucrose consumption when extinction of the second-order tone intervened. These results suggest that conditioned stimulus (CS)-evoked representations of events can substitute for those events themselves in the extinction of previously established associations.