Lifetime stress exposure and health: A review of contemporary assessment methods and biological mechanisms

Life stress is a central construct in health research because it is associated with increased risk for a variety of serious mental and physical health problems, including anxiety disorders, depression, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer's disease, certain cancers, and other diseases of aging. In this review, we examine how lifetime stress exposure contributes to elevated disease risk and explore ongoing measurement and scientific issues related to this topic. To accomplish these goals, we first review existing instruments that have been developed for assessing perceived stress, self‐reported life events, interviewer‐assessed life stressors, and lifetime stress exposure. Next, we describe laboratory‐based tasks that have been used for characterizing individual differences in psychological and biological stress reactivity. These methods have yielded an enormous amount of data showing how life stress influences the activity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis, sympathetic–adrenal–medullary axis, and immune system, and how such processes can in turn cause allostatic load and biological embedding of the stress effect at the level of the human brain and genome. At the same time, many critical measurement and scientific issues remain unresolved, and we discuss these topics last while describing some pressing issues and opportunities for future research on stress and health.     

First trial outcome but not training difficulty predicts performance in goldfish visual discrimination

Animal Cognition - The easy-to-hard effect in perceptual learning shows that training with easier examples can facilitate initially difficult or impossible distinctions between very similar...     

Art and achievement

Philosophical Studies - An increasingly popular view in the philosophy of art is that some artworks are good artworks at least partly because they are achievements. This view was introduced to...     

Children and adolescents coordinate group and moral concerns within different goal contexts when allocating resources

Coordinating complex social and moral concerns when allocating resources is a key issue in late childhood and early adolescence. This study explored resource allocation in three goal contexts that required children to focus to differing degrees on moral and group concerns. Children (9–11-years, M^age = 9.84, n = 190) and adolescents (14–16-years, M^age = 14.92, n = 154) were informed their school peer group held an in-group norm (competition, cooperation). Participants allocated resources between their in-group and an outgroup within one of three goal contexts (prosocial, learning-focused, and group-focused). Participants allocated in favour of their in-group to achieve a prosocial goal but attenuated this when the goal was focused on learning and cooperation. Adolescents, more than children, reasoned about the goals of resource allocation to justify their decisions. From 9 years old, children begin to coordinate peer group norms and goal information when deciding how to allocate resources within intergroup contexts.     

Neuroimaging evidence for agenda-dependent monitoring of different features during short-term source memory tests

A short-term source monitoring procedure with functional magnetic resonance imaging assessed neural activity when participants made judgments about the format of 1 of 4 studied items (picture, word), the encoding task performed (cost, place), or whether an item was old or new. The results support findings from long-term memory studies showing that left anterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is engaged when people make source attributions about reflectively generated information (cognitive operations, conceptual features). The findings also point to a role for right lateral PFC in attention to perceptual features and/or familiarity in making source decisions. Activity in posterior regions also differed depending on what was evaluated. These results provide neuroimaging evidence for theoretical approaches emphasizing that agendas influence which features are monitored during remembering (e.g., M. K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, & D. S. Lindsay, 1993). They also support the hypothesis that some of the activity in left lateral PFC and posterior regions associated with remembering specific information is not unique to long-term memory but rather is associated with agenda-driven source monitoring processes common to working memory and long-term memory.     

Preschoolers' use of spatiotemporal history, appearance, and proper name in determining individual identity

Humans construe their environment as composed largely of discrete individuals, which are also members of kinds (e.g., trees, cars, and people). On what basis do young children determine individual identity? How important are featural properties (e.g., physical appearance, name) relative to spatiotemporal history? Two studies examined the relative importance of these factors in preschoolers' and adults' identity judgments. Participants were shown pairs of individuals who looked identical but differed in their spatiotemporal history (e.g., two physically distinct but identical Winnie-the-Pooh dolls), and were asked whether both members in the pair would have access to knowledge that had been supplied to only one of the pairs. The results provide clear support for spatiotemporal history as the primary basis of identity judgments in both preschoolers and adults, and further place issues of identity within the broader cognitive framework of psychological essentialism.     

Rooting for (and Then Abandoning) the Underdog

Although people prefer to associate with winners, there is also a strong desire to support the lovable loser or underdog. In 4 studies, we demonstrate the underdog effect and its delimiting conditions. In Studies 1 and 2, participants rooted for the underdog in judgments of athletic, business, and artistic competition. In Study 3, participants watched animated clips of struggling and nonstruggling geometric shapes. The results showed that participants showed more rooting, sympathy, and identification with struggling shapes than with nonstruggling ones. Study 4 identified conditions under which people abandon the underdog, showing that participants rooted for the underdog only when both self‐relevance and consequences were high. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The effect of stressor severity on outcome following group debriefing

This analogue study reports data on the efficacy of group debriefing in the mitigation of distress for a stressful video, which had two levels of severity. It also provides a new procedure for use in experimental psychopathology studies. One hundred and nineteen participants were shown one of two stressful videos and, subsequently, 67 participants received group debriefing whilst 52 participants acted as a control. A statistical difference was found between the two groups for level of distress at follow-up, with those who had watched the more stressful video scoring higher on video distress and trauma-type symptomatology than those who watched the less stressful video. This was particularly the case for those who received debriefing -- adding further caution to the longer-term effects of systematised group interventions following harrowing events.     

Neuropsychological functioning in preschool-age children with sickle cell disease: the role of illness-related and psychosocial factors.

Cognitive and academic deficits have been identified in school-aged children with sickle cell disease (SCD). However, there have been very few identified studies that examine neuropsychological functioning in preschool-age children with SCD. It is important to understand effects of SCD from a developmental perspective and to consider the contribution of environmental factors in this at-risk population. Neuropsychological functioning of preschool-age children with SCD and no history of overt stroke (n = 26) was examined across several domains (language, immediate memory/brief attention, visuospatial/visuoconstructional, motor/visuomotor). The mean Full Scale IQ for the sample was 89.0. Performance on the Immediate Memory/ Brief Attention domain was significantly higher than the other domains, although the pattern of performance was relatively consistent, with mean standard scores ranging from 88.0 to 95.0. Disease severity was not significantly related to cognitive functioning in this group of young children with SCD. Socioeconomic status (SES) was significantly correlated with most domain scores and, based on regression analyses, accounted for 18% to 47% of the variance in functioning. Psychosocial factors, such as number of children living in the home and parental stress levels, were negatively associated with Motor/Visuomotor skills, and weekly hours in school/day care was positively associated with language-related skills. Results suggest that, at this young age, psychosocial risk factors appear to be appropriate targets for intervention, with the goal of improving long-term outcome in children with SCD. Further investigations should include comparison to a matched control group.     

An Evaluation of a Parenting Class Curriculum for Parents of Young Children: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Parenting the Strong-Willed Child</Emphasis>

Young children with high levels of acting out behaviors present a challenge for families, caregivers, and the childcare system. The Parenting the Strong-Willed Child (PSWC) parenting class curriculum program is a 6-week, group based parent education program designed for parents of children with noncompliance problems (ages 2–8). The PSWC program was offered at no cost to parents enrolled in 8 Head Start centers, and parents were invited to participate in a program evaluation study. Seventy-one families enrolled in the study and completed at least one PSWC session. From pre- to post-test, parents reported significant improvements in both the frequency and intensity of child behavior problems. Parents also reported significant reductions in parenting stress, as well as improvements in their parenting behaviors, including a reduction in the use of lax discipline techniques and emotional reactivity in the context of discipline encounters. All improvements were sustained six months later. These preliminary results are encouraging, and point to the need for a more rigorous, controlled evaluation of the PSWC parenting class curriculum.