Mastery matters most: How mastery and positive relations link attachment avoidance and anxiety to negative emotions

Attachment avoidance and anxiety are associated with negative emotions. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We investigated environmental mastery and positive relations with others as two mechanisms behind the attachment–emotion link in a sample of 343 adults. As predicted, attachment avoidance and anxiety were related to greater fear, hostility, envy and depression through lower mastery. Contrary to our hypothesis, positive relations mediated only the attachment–depression link. In addition, by adopting a moderated mediation approach, we were able to show that mastery mattered most for individuals high on avoidance: The indirect effect of avoidance through lack of mastery on fear, hostility and depression (but not on envy) increased with higher avoidance scores. Contrary to our predictions, poor relationships did not matter more as sources of negative emotions as anxiety increased. These findings underscore that the emotional life of avoidantly attached individuals is especially jeopardised by poor mastery.     

Thinking About What Might Have Happened: Counterfactual Thinking and Post‐traumatic Stress in Individuals Directly and Indirectly Exposed to the 2011 Oslo Bombing

Counterfactual thinking (CFT), that is thinking about what might have happened, is linked to post‐traumatic stress. We studied the relationship between type and frequency of CFT and post‐traumatic stress in a sample of directly (n = 50) and indirectly exposed (n = 50) ministerial employees 4 years after the 2011 Oslo bombing. The results showed that frequency of CFT was associated with levels of post‐traumatic stress, among both directly and indirectly exposed participants. In the directly exposed group, self‐reported frequencies of downward counterfactuals were associated with post‐traumatic stress. A similar trend was found for upward counterfactuals. In the indirectly exposed group, self‐reported frequencies of both upward and downward counterfactuals were associated with higher levels of post‐traumatic stress. These results point to the intriguing possibility that people may not only develop post‐traumatic stress disorder as a result of actual experiences, but also via mental simulations of traumatic events that could have happened. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changes of life satisfaction in the transition to retirement: a latent-class approach

Contradictory positions have been advanced as to whether retirement has negative, positive, or no effects on subjective well-being. The authors investigated changes in life satisfaction in 1,456 German retirees. Using latent growth mixture modeling, the authors found 3 groups of people who experienced retirement differently. In Group 1, satisfaction declined at retirement but continued on a stable or increasing trajectory thereafter. Group 2 demonstrated a large increase in satisfaction at retirement but overall declining satisfaction. In Group 3, satisfaction showed a temporary very small increase at retirement. Groups differed by retirement age, gender, socioeconomic status, marital status, health, unemployment before retiring, and region. Thus, retirement is not a uniform transition, and resource-rich individuals are less likely to experience retirement-related change in satisfaction.     

Habituation of exploratory activity to new stimuli, to the absence of a previously presented stimulus and to new contexts, in rats

Rats trained to run a shuttle-alleyway for food exhibited exploratory behaviour to a novel visual/tactual stimulus presented in a specific place of the alley. Intermittent presentation of the same stimulus in the same place resulted in reduction of the exploratory activity (habituation), both within and between sessions. The animals also directed exploratory activity to the absence of the previously presented stimulus at the place where the stimulus had been presented before; this latter response also habituated. The presentation (1) of the same stimulus to which the animals had already habituated in another place in the alleyway or when the animals were running in an opposite direction to the previous trials of stimulus presentation, or (2) of another stimulus, resulted, again, in the appearance of exploratory activity. These results lead to the conclusion that the animals code external events, store this information, and use it to detect spatial- and directional-contextual changes and to generate predictions about that specific environment.     

Retrieval-induced forgetting after trauma: a study with victims of sexual assault

The Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) paradigm is used to study how the repeated retrieval practice of particular memories impairs the retrieval of related memory traces. A study is reported where this automatic form of forgetting was investigated in a group of sexual-assault victims and a control group. Using a recognition-cued RIF task, the present study examined RIF with neutral, positive, negative and trauma-specific stimuli. Response time data showed that irrespective of previous trauma exposure, a RIF effect was observed for neutral material, but not for emotional material. No differences in RIF between the trauma group and the control group were found. Inconsistencies with previous literature and the implications for emotional memory are discussed.     

Familiarity,Cued and Free Odor Identification and Their Association with Cognitive Functioning in Middle Aged and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to examine the association between familiarity of odors, cued and free odor identification performance and cognitive function in elderly adults. It was further investigated how age affects performance on the various odor tasks. A third aim was to investigate the role of familiarity in explaining performance on the free identification task. One hundred and thirty-six participants (aged 45–79 years) with normal olfactory sensitivity were assessed with the Scandinavian Odor Identification Test (SOIT) and standardized tests of cognitive function. Familiarity did not correlate with any measure of cognitive function, while verbal identification performance was associated with several cognitive measures, although correlations were modest. In this sample, free odor identification was affected by increasing age to a marginally larger extent than cued identification performance and familiarity ratings. The results suggest that the different olfactory tasks involve different levels of cognitive processing.     

Coreferential Relations in Basque: The Annotation Process

In this paper we present the coreferential tagging of part of the EPEC Corpus of Basque. Although coreference is a pragmatic linguistic phenomenon highly dependent on the situational context, it shows some language-specific patterns that vary according to the features of each language. Due to the fact that Basque is not an Indo-European language, it differs considerably in grammar from the languages spoken in surrounding areas. We will explain these features and the decisions made in each case. After describing the criteria defined for coreferential tagging in Basque, the annotation process will be explained. Our annotation is based on a morphologically and syntactically annotated corpus that provides us with a manageable environment, in which the specific structures that are part of a reference chain can be more easily identified. A part of the corpus was tagged by two annotators who marked up the same text independently, and by another annotator that acted as judge, solving problems in case of disagreement. All this process has been automatized as a result of previous studies carried out in this field. The automatic detection of mentions (Soraluze et al., in: Proceedings of Konvens, 2012) has provided us with a better working environment, and given us the possibility to build a first significant corpus for a later computational treatment of automatic coreferential resolution.     

Perceptions of the cognitive compensation and interpersonal enjoyment functions of collaboration among middle-aged and older married couples

Perceptions of cognitive compensation and interpersonal enjoyment of collaboration were examined in three hundred middle-aged and older couples who completed measures of perceptions of collaboration, cognitive ability, marital satisfaction, an errand task and judged their spouse's affiliation. Older adults (especially men) endorsed cognitive compensation and interpersonal enjoyment and reported using collaboration more frequently than middle-aged adults. Greater need for cognitive compensation was related to lower cognitive ability only for older wives. Greater marital satisfaction was associated with greater interpersonal enjoyment. These two functions related to reports of more frequent use of collaboration and perceptions of spousal affiliation in a collaborative task.