On the broad applicability of the affective circumplex: representations of affective knowledge among schizophrenia patients

Abstract - Studies of affective experience are guided by the assumption that the structure of affect generalizes across people. Yet this assumption has not been tested among educationally and economically diverse community residents or among individuals with psychopathology. This study explicitly examined the broad applicability of the valence-arousal circumplex and whether schizophrenia patients and nonpatients have comparable knowledge structures of affective phenomena. Patients and nonpatients completed similarity ratings of 120 pairs of affect words. Similarity judgments were analyzed separately for each group using a multidimensional scaling procedure, and solutions were compared. Results revealed the same two-dimensional valence-arousal solution for schizophrenia patients and nonpatients, although there were subtle differences between the groups. These findings provide additional evidence that the circumplex model is a useful formalism for representing affective phenomena across diverse populations, and they bolster confidence in existing interpretations of schizophrenia patients' reports of affective experience.     

Evaluation of A Single Presentation Format For Education About Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Disease1

This study explored the efficiency and effectiveness of a single presentation format for education about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease. Pretraining and posttraining questionnaires assessing knowledge and risk assessment were given to police officers attending a two-hour seminar on HIV disease. A one-way ANOVA was used to compare posttraining scores of 42 officers who attended the seminar one year ago with the pretraining scores of 63 officers currently attending the seminar, some of whom had attended the seminar one year earlier. Significant differences were found on knowledge items (p < .05). Post hoc analysis revealed no significant decline in knowledge scores after one year, while pretraining knowledge scores for those who had attended the seminar before were significantly greater than for those who had not. No significant differences were found on risk assessment items, suggesting that beliefs about on the job risk have become part of the officers' common culture.     

Beyond family‐level adversities: Exploring the developmental timing of neighborhood disadvantage effects on the brain

A growing literature suggests that adversity is associated with later altered brain function, particularly within the corticolimbic system that supports emotion processing and salience detection (e.g., amygdala, prefrontal cortex [PFC]). Although neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been shown to predict maladaptive behavioral outcomes, particularly for boys, most of the research linking adversity to corticolimbic function has focused on family‐level adversities. Moreover, although animal models and studies of normative brain development suggest that there may be sensitive periods during which adversity exerts stronger effects on corticolimbic development, little prospective evidence exists in humans. Using two low‐income samples of boys (n = 167; n = 77), Census‐derived neighborhood disadvantage during early childhood, but not adolescence, was uniquely associated with greater amygdala, but not PFC, reactivity to ambiguous neutral faces in adolescence and young adulthood. These associations remained after accounting for several family‐level adversities (e.g., low family income, harsh parenting), highlighting the independent and developmentally specific neural effects of the neighborhood context. Furthermore, in both samples, indicators measuring income and poverty status of neighbors were predictive of amygdala function, suggesting that neighborhood economic resources may be critical to brain development.     

Experiential tourist shopping value: Adding causality to value dimensions and testing their subjectivity

Previous literature on consumer behavior has tackled the experiential approach in retailing services in depth; however, most of the previous studies have concentrated on the simultaneous but not concatenated effects of value dimensions on satisfaction and/or loyalty. Furthermore, tourists' shopping behavior remains an underdeveloped area of study from the experiential perspective. This work explores experiential tourist shopping value, aiming to (a) explain tourists' loyalty to retailers by adding causality to experiential dimensions and (b) prove the subjectivity of these values. After a diachronic and synchronic review of the literature on experiential shopping value, a structural model with a chain of effects consisting of product quality, service quality, self‐esteem and shopping enjoyment on loyalty, and a multidimensional index as a second‐order model were built with partial least squares and tested on a purposive sample of 374 tourists in Valencia (Spain). Our findings revealed a sequential approach to tourists' shopping experiences where utilitarian values led to social and hedonic ones, all of which were antecedents of loyalty to retailers. Furthermore, the index showed differences by gender and nationality. Although our results are context specific, they add to the value creation process as they show a sequence of effects, and a fully subjective value provision, which changes according to demographics. The originality of this work is that it contributes to the suitability of the experiential paradigm in explaining tourists' shopping behavior by promoting interest in this specific, underdeveloped target area, and also by adding causality and proving the subjectivity of experiential value dimensions.     

Comparison of kinematic and kinetic methods for computing the vertical motion of the body center of mass during walking

The vertical excursion of the body center of mass (BCOM) was calculated using three different techniques commonly used by motion analysis laboratories. The sacral marker method involved estimating vertical BCOM motion by tracking the position of a reflective marker that was placed on the sacrum of subjects as they walked. The body segmental analysis technique determined the vertical motion of the BCOM from a weighted average of the vertical positions of the centers of mass of individual body segments for each frame of kinematic data acquired during the data trial. Anthropomorphic data from standard tables were used to determine the mass fractions and the locations of the centers of mass of each body segment. The third technique involved calculating BCOM vertical motion through double integration of force platform data. Data was acquired from 10 able-bodied, adult research subjects--5 males and 5 females--walking at speeds of 0.8, 1.2, 1.6, and 2.0 m/s. A repeated measures ANOVA indicated that at the slowest walking speed the vertical excursions calculated by all three techniques were similar, but at faster speeds the sacral marker significantly (p < 0.001) overestimated the vertical excursion of the BCOM compared with the other two methods. The body segmental analysis and force platform techniques were in agreement at all walking speeds. Discrepancies between the sacral marker method and the other two techniques were explained using a simple model; the reciprocal configuration of the legs during double support phase significantly raises the position of the BCOM within the trunk at longer step lengths, corresponding to faster walking speeds. The sacral marker method may provide a reasonable approximation of vertical BCOM motion at slow and freely selected speeds of able-bodied walking. However, the body segmental analysis or force platform techniques will probably yield better estimates at faster walking speeds or in persons with gait pathologies.