Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling

Recent evidence suggests that emotional well-being improves from early adulthood to old age. This study used experience-sampling to examine the developmental course of emotional experience in a representative sample of adults spanning early to very late adulthood. Participants (N = 184, Wave 1; N = 191, Wave 2; N = 178, Wave 3) reported their emotional states at five randomly selected times each day for a one week period. Using a measurement burst design, the one-week sampling procedure was repeated five and then ten years later. Cross-sectional and growth curve analyses indicate that aging is associated with more positive overall emotional well-being, with greater emotional stability and with more complexity (as evidenced by greater co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions). These findings remained robust after accounting for other variables that may be related to emotional experience (personality, verbal fluency, physical health, and demographic variables). Finally, emotional experience predicted mortality; controlling for age, sex, and ethnicity, individuals who experienced relatively more positive than negative emotions in everyday life were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period. Findings are discussed in the theoretical context of socioemotional selectivity theory.     

Turning Up the Heat: Inflammation as a Mechanism Linking Chronic Stress, Depression, and Heart Disease

ABSTRACT— Mounting evidence indicates that chronic stressors and depressive symptoms contribute to morbidity and mortality from cardiac disease. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms responsible for these effects or about why depressive symptoms and cardiac disease co-occur so frequently. In this article we outline a novel model that seeks to address these issues. It asserts that chronic stressors activate the immune system in a way that leads to persistent inflammation. With long-term exposure to the products of inflammation, people develop symptoms of depression and experience progression of atherosclerosis, the pathologic condition that underlies cardiac disease.     

The Effects of Numbered Heads Together with and Without an Incentive Package on the Science Test Performance of a Diverse Group of Sixth Graders

A clear and consistent finding of educational research has been the importance of active student responding. During lectures and discussions, active responding most often takes the form of student responses to teacher questions. This whole group responding to questions, however, does not permit every student to respond and does not assure that all students are actively engaged. Previous research has shown that Numbered Heads Together is an efficient and effective instructional technique to increase student responding and to improve achievement. Using an A-B-BC-B-BC design, we examined the effects of two versions of Numbered Heads Together on 6th graders daily quiz scores and pretest-posttest performance in chemistry. Findings indicated that the addition of a behavioral incentive package noticeably improved student performance during Numbered Heads Together instruction. Implications are discussed for teachers and educational researchers.     

Dissemination and Implementation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression in the Kaiser Permanente Health Care System: Evaluation of Initial Training and Clinical Outcomes

Notwithstanding its empirical status and strong recommendation in clinical practice guidelines, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) continues to be delivered infrequently and with low fidelity on the clinical front lines. Recently, organized efforts and policies within the public sector to disseminate and implement CBT and other evidence-based psychotherapies have yielded encouraging results and provided optimism for bridging the research-to-practice-gap. Following from these efforts, the current article examines the initial impact and experience of the implementation of an individualized approach to CBT training and treatment within the Kaiser Permanente health care system. Initial training outcomes, including changes in general and specific competencies, were assessed using divergent assessment methods within the initial cohort of therapists undergoing training. Initial patient outcomes, including changes in depression and anxiety, were assessed among patients receiving treatment from therapists in training. Results revealed training in and implementation of CBT-D was associated with overall large improvements in therapist competencies and in clinically significant improvements in both depression and anxiety among patients. Findings from the initial phase of dissemination and implementation within a large private system provide support for, and extend recent findings related to, the feasibility and effectiveness of training in and implementation of CBT-D in a real-world context.     

Responsibility for forgetting

Philosophical Studies - In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies...     

Establishing and accessing referents in discourse

Memory & Cognition - Four experiments explored the processes by which people understand references. Subjects read naturalistic stories one sentence at a time, and their reading-comprehension...