A series of n-of-1 studies examining the interrelationships between social cognitive theory constructs and physical activity behaviour within individuals

Objectives: Research supports the ability of social cognitive theory (SCT) to explain physical activity (PA) behaviour, but most studies have examined this theory between individuals in large group studies. The aim of the present study was to examine the interrelationships between SCT constructs and PA within individuals of varying activity levels.

Design: Correlational n-of-1 studies.

Methods: Six adults aged 29–65 with varying levels of PA provided daily measures of PA, and completed probe measures over a four-week period of SCT constructs (e.g. barrier self-efficacy, goal setting, planning, social support, outcome expectations, perceived barriers, enjoyment). Data were analysed using cross-correlational time series analysis.

Results: Cross-correlation analysis showed that at least one SCT construct was associated with PA in five participants, although no individual had the same pattern of associations across the study. On some occasions, SCT constructs predicted subsequent PA, but at other times, PA engagement caused a subsequent change in the SCT construct. There were also examples of PA and SCT constructs being concurrently associated.

Conclusions: SCT factors are associated with variations in PA behaviour, but the cause and effect of these relationships within individuals is complex.     

Intensionality: Graeme Forbes

In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon', are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon', are invalid. Since 'a gorgon' and 'a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon' are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems .)     

A multimodal investigation of emotional responding in alexithymia

The personality construct of alexithymia is thought to reflect a deficit in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotional states. To explore the relations between alexithymia and emotional responding, 50 older adults (28 men, 22 women) were studied across different contexts: (1) initial exposure to an emotion‐evoking movie; (2) second exposure to that stimulus; (3) reports of rumination and social sharing; and (4) describing their emotional response (verbal re‐evocation). Facets of the alexithymia construct were associated at the initial exposure with lower emotional responses at the cognitive‐experiential level, but with higher emotional responses at the physiological level as measured by heart rate. At the second exposure, the results were replicated for physiological responses. Certain facets of alexithymia were associated also with lower reports of rumination and social sharing involving emotional aspects, and with a lower proportion of emotional words related to the emotional stimulus during the verbal re‐evocation.     

Race-Based Parsing and Syntactic Disambiguation

We present a processing model that integrates same important psychological claims about the human sentence-parsing mechanism: namely, that processing is influenced by limitations an working memory and by various syntactic preferences. The model uses time-constraint information to resolve conflicting preferences in a psychologically plausible way. The starting paint far this proposal is the Sausage Machine model (Fodor & Frazier, 1980: Frazier & Fodor, 1978). From there, we attempt to overcome the original model's dependence an ad hoc aspects of its grammar, and its omission of verb-frame preferences. We also add mechanisms far lexical disambiguation and semantic processing in parallel with syntactic processing.