Personal Constructs of Mind-Body Identity in People Who Experience Medically Unexplained Symptoms

“Medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS) refers to chronic physical symptoms without a clear medical cause, which produce significant levels of distress and functional impairment. This project modified the repertory grid technique to explore how twenty participants experiencing MUS construed self and others in bodily and psychological ways. Findings suggested that symptoms are well integrated within participants' wider mind–body construct systems. Increased distance between how self in general is construed compared to self when symptoms are worst was associated with reduced anxiety. Measuring intrapersonal and interpersonal implicative dilemmas suggested that moral and relational construing of identity is affected by MUS.     

Attention to faces and gaze-following in social anxiety: preliminary evidence from a naturalistic eye-tracking investigation

Social attentional biases are a core component of social anxiety disorder, but research has not yet determined their direction due to methodological limitations. Here we present preliminary findings from a novel, dynamic eye-tracking paradigm allowing spatial–temporal measurement of attention and gaze-following, a mechanism previously unexplored in social anxiety. 105 participants took part, with those high (N?=?27) and low (N?=?25) in social anxiety traits (HSA and LSA respectively) entered into the analyses. Participants watched a video of an emotionally-neutral social scene, where two actors periodically shifted their gaze towards the periphery. HSA participants looked more at the actors’ faces during the initial 2s than the LSA group but there were no group differences in proportion of first fixations to the face or latency to first fixate the face, although HSA individuals’ first fixations to the face were shorter. No further differences in eye movements were found, nor in gaze-following behaviour, although these null effects could potentially result from the relatively small sample. Findings suggest attention is biased towards faces in HSA individuals during initial scene inspection, but that overt gaze-following may be impervious to individual differences in social anxiety. Future research should seek to replicate these effects.     

Sex-role behaviors and personality traits of male day care teachers

It was hypothesized that male day care teachers who had adopted the feminine role of caregiver would score feminine in their personality traits and would reinforce children for feminine behaviors and punish them for masculine behaviors. A random sample of 20 male caregivers was contrasted to 20 male engineers on personality traits as assessed by The Adjective Checklist (ACL). Twenty female caregivers were also contrasted to the personality traits and the sex-typed contingency behaviors of the male caregivers. Feminine traits were defined by raw scores on the Abasement, Nurturance, Affiliation, Succorance, and Deference scales of the ACL. Masculine traits were represented by raw scores on the Achievement, Dominance, Endurance, and Autonomy scales. The Fagot-Patterson Checklist was employed to determine sex-typed contingency behaviors. Both male and female caregivers reinforced children significantly more for feminine behaviors than masculine behaviors (as defined by The Fagot-Patterson Checklist) and punished masculine behaviors more than feminine behaviors. The personalities of the male caregivers corresponded to the feminine direction of their female counterparts, but they were not significantly more feminine than the male engineers. The female caregivers, however, scored significantly more feminine in personality than the male engineers.This study is based on a dissertation submitted by Bryan E. Robinson to the Department of Child Development — Family Relations, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D.     

Children's knowledge of prepositional phrase structure: An experimental test

A test of prepositional phrase structure in 4- to 6-year-old children's language is reported. Children's productions of PP and verb-particle sequences were elicited. Children produced pronominal and full NP objects of sequences corresponding to PPs and verb-plus-particle in the adult grammar. Prepositions freely took both pronominal and full NP objects (He's jumping over it. He's jumping over the table). In particle verb constructions, pronominal objects were placed immediately after the verb in all but a few cases (He's pushing it overnot He's pushing over it). With full NP objects, the preference was to place the verb after the particle (He's pushing over the table). These facts support an analysis in which if the child constructs a PP-over-P—NP structure for prepositional phrases but not for verb-particle sequences, and follows adultlike rules for these structures.This research was supported in its initial stages by NIH grant No. HD90647-03 to T. Roeper and S.J. Keyser and was completed while the author was supported in part by grants from the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and from the Spencer Foundation through the University of Wisconsin School of Education.     

Social status,cognitive ability,and educational attainment as predictors of liberal social attitudes and political trust

We examined the prospective associations between family socio-economic background, childhood intelligence (g) at age 11, educational and occupational attainment, and social attitudes at age 33 in a large (N = 8804), representative sample of the British population born in 1958. Structural equation Modeling identified a latent trait of ‘liberal social attitudes’ underlying attitude factors that are antiracist, socially liberal, and in support of gender equality. Another attitude factor—‘political trust’—was relatively independent from the latent attitude trait and has somewhat different pathways in relation to the other variables included in the analysis. There was a direct association between higher g at age 11 and more liberal social attitudes and political trust at age 33. For both men and women the association between g and liberal social attitudes was partly mediated via educational qualifications, and to a much lesser extent via adult occupational attainment. For women the association between g and political trust was partly mediated through both educational qualification and occupational attainment, and for men it was mediated mainly via occupational attainment. Men and women who had higher educational qualifications and higher occupational status tend to be more socially liberal and more trusting of the democratic political system. In terms of socio-economic background, people from less privileged families showed less political trust, but did not differ much in liberal social attitudes from those born into relatively more privileged circumstances. This study shows that social background, cognitive ability, education, and own social status influence perceptions of society.