Stress and family health

This study investigates the difference between perceived everyday individual stress and levels of family health. Subjects completed the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale (FACES III), the Derogatis Stress Profile, and a personal data form. Quota sampling of 121 subjects was used to obtain 25 subjects in each of three groups: balanced, mid-range, and extreme family types. Individuals identified as members of mid-range families reported less overall stress than balanced or extreme family members. Significant differences appeared between the balanced and mid-range groups. Balanced individual family members reported slightly higher levels of stress than extreme family members.     

Strength of Subordinates’ Upward Influence Tactics and Gender Congruency Effects1

An empirical investigation with 117 superior-subordinate dyads examines the moderating effects of subordinate gender on the relationships between the strength of upward influence tactics and three outcome variables: performance ratings, psychosocial mentoring functions, and career-related mentoring functions. The results support predictions that men who employ stronger upward influence tactics obtain higher performance ratings and more career-related mentoring functions, and women who employ weaker upward influence tactics obtain more psychosocial mentoring functions. Implications of the findings for theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Individual differences in Stroop dilution: tests of the attention-capture hypothesis.

Kahneman and Chajczyk (1983) found that naming a colored bar was slowed when a color word was nearby but that this decrement was reduced when a neutral word was also present. This has been referred to as the dilution effect. They accounted for their results with an attention-capture hypothesis. Response time distributions to stimuli that contained a color word and a neutral word within individuals were examined. The dilution effect did not appear within individuals. Some individuals exhibited strong Stroop interference effects, whereas others exhibited no interference. Experiment 2 showed that the interference pattern within individuals was consistent across days. Experiment 3 showed that performance could not be explained by a selection strategy that was based on word length. These experiments showed that performance in a color-plus-neutral word condition reflects a systematic pattern of interference or noninterference that varies across individuals.     

Memory structure in the processing of advertising messages: how is unusual information represented?

Two models of memory structure--schema-copy-plus-tag (Graesser & Nakamura, 1982; Schmidt & Sherman, 1984) and associative-network/depth-of-processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Hastie & Kumar, 1979)--were tested in a 2 x 2 between-subjects design. Type of argument (typical vs. atypical) and measurement interval (immediate vs. 2-day delay in recognition and recall) were manipulated in a print-advertising context. Results indicated that atypical arguments (unusual information) prompt deeper processing of the entire message (implying an associative-network memory structure) rather than some part of the message (as would be hypothesized by the schema-copy-plus-tag formulation) and that this effect prevails under both immediate- and delayed-measurement conditions.     

Psychological tests and borderline patients

Psychological tests of 32 borderline or nonborderline (psychotic) patients were compared with the structural diagnoses arrived at on the basis of two kinds of clinical-research interviews: The DIB (following Gunderson's criteria) and the structural interview (following Kernberg's criteria). Test results were reported in terms of the diagnosis based on the full test battery, as well as in terms of the structural diagnosis implied by the presence or absence of thinking disturbances on the (structured) WAIS as compared with the (unstructured) Rorschach test. Statistically significant agreement was shown among these four approaches.     

Taking a long look at action and time perception

Everyone has probably experienced chronostasis, an illusion of time that can cause a clock's second hand to appear to stand still during an eye movement. Though the illusion was initially thought to reflect a mechanism for preserving perceptual continuity during eye movements, an alternative hypothesis has been advanced that overestimation of time might be a general effect of any action. Contrary to both of these hypotheses, the experiments reported here suggest that distortions of time perception related to an eye movement are not distinct from temporal distortions for other kinds of responses. Moreover, voluntary action is neither necessary nor sufficient for overestimation effects. These results lead to a new interpretation of chronostasis based on the role of attention and memory in time estimation.     

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time.     

Anxiety sensitivity, conscious awareness and selective attentional biases in children

The current study investigated whether physical anxiety sensitivity (AS) is associated with selective attentional biases to affective stimuli in children. The dot-probe paradigm was used to examine the deployment of attention towards words pertaining to anxiety symptomatology, socially threatening words, and positive words, in samples of 8-10-year-old children. Word pairs were presented under both masked and unmasked conditions. Irrespective of masking, children high in physical AS displayed an attentional vigilance for emotional words relative to neutral words, whereas those low in physical AS displayed a relative avoidance of such material. The results of this study are interesting as they not only suggest the presence of automatic AS-related biases in childhood, but that this is a general emotionality bias rather than one related to specific anxiety-related stimuli.