Personality as a Source of Individual Differences in Cognition among Older African Americans

Previous research suggests that demographic factors are important correlates of cognitive functioning in African Americans; however, less attention has been given to the influence of personality. The present study explored how dimensions and facets of personality predicted individual variability in cognition in a sample of older African Americans from the Baltimore Study of Black Aging. Cognition was assessed by verbal learning and attention/working memory measures. Personality was measured by the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised. Linear regressions controlling for demographic factors showed that Neuroticism, Openness, and Agreeableness were significant regression predictors of cognitive performance. Individual facets of all five personality dimensions were also associated with cognitive performance. These findings suggest personality is important in understanding variability in cognition among older African Americans.     

Circadian rhythms in executive function during the transition to adolescence: the effect of synchrony between chronotype and time of day

To explore the influence of circadian rhythms on executive function during early adolescence, we administered a battery of executive function measures (including a Go-Nogo task, the Iowa Gambling Task, a Self-ordered Pointing task, and an Intra/Extradimensional Shift task) to Morning-preference and Evening-preference participants (N = 80) between the ages of 11 and 14 years who were tested in the morning or afternoon. Significant Chronotype × Time of Day interactions (controlling for amount of sleep the previous night) revealed that adolescents tested at their optimal times of day performed better than those tested at their nonoptimal times. Implications for our understanding of physiological arousal, sleep, and executive function during adolescence are discussed.     

Paternalism and the Ill-Informed Agent

Most anti-paternalists claim that informed and competent self-regarding choices are protected by autonomy, while ill-informed or impaired self-regarding choices are not. Joel Feinberg, among many others, argues that we can in this way distinguish impermissible ??hard?? paternalism from permissible ??soft?? paternalism. I argue that this view confronts two related problems in its treatment of ill-informed decision-makers. First, it faces a dilemma when applied to decision-makers who are responsible for their ignorance: it either permits too much, or else too little, intervention to satisfy its proponents. Second, the most promising rationales in favor of the view ignore the distinction between an agent??s voluntarily bringing about some state of affairs, on the one hand, and an agent??s voluntarily assuming a risk, on the other. I conclude that a decision-maker??s ignorance is irrelevant to the permissibility of intervention on her behalf. If it is permissible to intervene in a given ill-informed choice, it would be permissible to intervene in an otherwise similar but informed choice, at least provided that intervention would produce similar benefits in both cases. This shows that we should sometimes accept straightforwardly paternalistic rationales.     

Large quantity discrimination by North Island robins (Petroica longipes)

While numerosity—representation and enumeration of different numbers of objects—and quantity discrimination in particular have been studied in a wide range of species, very little is known about the numerical abilities of animals in the wild. This study examined spontaneous relative quantity judgments (RQJs) by wild North Island robins (Petroica longipes) of New Zealand. In Experiment 1, robins were tested on a range of numerical values of up to 14 versus 16 items, which were sequentially presented and hidden. In Experiment 2, the same numerical contrasts were tested on a different group of subjects but quantities were presented as whole visible sets. Experiment 3 involved whole visible sets that comprised of exceedingly large quantities of up to 56 versus 64 items. While robins shared with other species a ratio-based representation system for representing very large values, they also appeared to have developed an object indexing system with an extended upper limit (well beyond 4) that may be an evolutionary response to ecological challenges faced by scatter-hoarding birds. These results suggest that cognitive mechanism influencing an understanding of physical quantity may be deployed more flexibly in some contexts than previously thought, and are discussed in light of findings across other mammalian and avian species.     

Providers' voices on telebehavioral health: Survey of an outpatient counseling agency in Alaska

Hope Counseling Center sought to expand behavioral health services to underserved populations in Alaska by offering telebehavioral health services. Providers completed a questionnaire addressing their experiences, opinions, and training needs as they relate to telebehavioral health. Open conversations about the training needs, limitations, and benefits of telebehavioral health supported program development and led to training on new equipment, rapport building, and telebehavioral health outcome studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Mindfulness, body image, and drive for muscularity in men

Studies have shown that dispositional mindfulness, a construct characterized by awareness and attention to present moment experiences, is associated with body image constructs in women. However, little is known about the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and body image among men. Therefore, this study examined the unique associations between dispositional mindfulness and three body image variables in men: overall appearance evaluation, satisfaction with distinct body areas, and drive for muscularity. Undergraduate men (N=296) completed the Multidimensional Body Self-Relations Questionnaire-Appearance Scales, the Drive for Muscularity Scale, the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that mindfulness was uniquely associated with all three body image variables after accounting for body mass index and negative affect. Results are discussed with regard to the potential role of dispositional mindfulness in body dissatisfaction among men.     

The direct effects of manipulating body checking in men

The purpose of the current study was to examine how body checking affects men's state body image and state muscle dissatisfaction using an experimental design. Male undergraduates (N = 234) were randomly assigned to a high body checking group, in which they were asked to focus their attention on typically disliked body parts, and a low body checking group, in which they were asked to focus on their bodies as a whole and describe themselves using neutral, nonjudgmental terms. Contrary to initial hypotheses, regardless of condition, participants’ body image satisfaction decreased significantly following the body checking procedure and did not change significantly after a 10-min delay. Additionally, in both conditions, participants’ muscle dissatisfaction did not immediately change, but muscle dissatisfaction increased significantly following the 10-min delay. One mirror exposure session had similar effects on men's body image and muscle dissatisfaction regardless of how they were asked to examine their bodies.     

Dual-tasking alleviated sleep deprivation disruption in visuomotor tracking: an fMRI study

Effects of dual-responding on tracking performance after 49-h of sleep deprivation (SD) were evaluated behaviorally and with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Continuous visuomotor tracking was performed simultaneously with an intermittent color-matching visual detection task in which a pair of color-matched stimuli constituted a target and non-matches were non-targets. Tracking error means were binned time-locked to stimulus onset of the detection task in order to observe changes associated with dual-responding by comparing the error during targets and non-targets. Similar comparison was made with fMRI data. Our result showed that despite a significant increase in the overall tracking error post SD, from 20 pixels pre SD to 45 pixels post SD, error decreased to a minimum of about 25 pixels 0-6s after dual-response. Despite an overall reduced activation post SD, greater activation difference between targets and non-targets was found post SD in task-related regions, such as the left cerebellum, the left somatosensory cortex, the left extrastriate cortex, bilateral precuneus, the left middle frontal gyrus, and the left motor cortex. Our results suggest that dual-response helps to alleviate performance impairment usually associated with SD. The duration of the alleviation effect was on the order of seconds after dual-responding.     

Detecting and Deterring Insufficient Effort Responding to Surveys

Purpose  

Responses provided by unmotivated survey participants in a careless, haphazard, or random fashion can threaten the quality of data in psychological and organizational research. The purpose of this study was to summarize existing approaches to detect insufficient effort responding (IER) to low-stakes surveys and to comprehensively evaluate these approaches.     

Comparing Group-Contingency and Individualized Equivalence-Based Instruction to a PowerPoint Lecture to Establish Equivalence Classes of Reinforcement and Punishment Procedures with College Students

The Psychological Record - Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) involves the teaching of socially relevant material (e.g., academic material) with stimulus equivalence procedures. In the research...