Extending parasite-stress theory to variation in human mate preferences

In this commentary we suggest that Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) parasite-stress theory of social behaviors and attitudes can be extended to mating behaviors and preferences. We discuss evidence from prior correlational and experimental studies that support this claim. We also reanalyze data from two of those studies using F&T's new parasite stress measures.     

Development of an Evidence-Based Information Booklet to Support Parents of Children Without a Diagnosis

The aim of this study was to develop an evidence-based psychosocial information booklet for parents of children without a specific diagnosis, many of whom are seen through the genetic clinic. A mixed methods approach was adopted involving four phases. The first two phases involving a systematic review and in-depth interviews are summarised briefly but reported in detail elsewhere. Phase 3 comprised: (1) a grey literature search to identify relevant literature and resources from other patient organizations; (2) drafting the booklet using themes identified through the previous phases; (3) piloting the booklet with eight professional and support group stakeholders and (4) piloting the booklet with 14 parents (from Phase 2) to ensure the information reflected their experiences. In Phase 4, we assessed satisfaction with the booklet through a questionnaire completed by 38 parents. The booklet was well accepted. The importance of providing the booklet at the beginning of the parental ‘journey’ was identified. We have developed an evidence-based information booklet to support parents via a rigorous mixed methods approach. This booklet meets a largely unmet psychosocial need and could be used in practice to support parents of children without a diagnosis.     

Neighborhood context and adjustment in African American youths from single mother homes: the intervening role of hopelessness

African American youths from single mother homes are more likely to live in neighborhoods characterized by greater risk and fewer resources than youth from two parent homes or European American youths; in turn, such adverse conditions are associated with increased adjustment problems. Despite this well-established vulnerability, relatively little is known about variables linking neighborhood context to youth adjustment. With the aim of identifying a potential youth-focused intervening variable amenable to intervention, this study examined the intervening role of hopelessness in the association between neighborhood context and adjustment problems in a sample of 171 African American youths (11-16 year olds) from single mother homes. Findings revealed direct associations between neighborhood context and youth adjustment, as well as indirect associations through youth hopelessness, although findings varied by the marker of neighborhood context (sense of community or perceived crime) and adjustment (internalizing or externalizing problems). Building on prior work noting that hopelessness is amenable to psychosocial intervention, the present findings suggest that hopelessness may afford a valuable target for prevention and intervention programming among African American youths from single mother homes in the context of adverse neighborhood conditions.     

Sleep deprivation and stressors: Evidence for elevated negative affect in response to mild stressors when sleep deprived

Stress often co-occurs with inadequate sleep duration, and both are believed to impact mood and emotion. It is not yet known whether inadequate sleep simply increases the intensity of subsequent stress responses or interacts with stressors in more complicated ways. To address this issue, we investigated the effects of one night of total sleep deprivation on subjective stress and mood in response to low-stress and high-stress cognitive testing conditions in healthy adult volunteers in two separate experiments (total N = 53). Sleep was manipulated in a controlled, laboratory setting and stressor intensity was manipulated by changing difficulty of cognitive tasks, time pressure, and feedback about performance. Sleep-deprived participants reported greater subjective stress, anxiety, and anger than rested controls following exposure to the low-stressor condition, but not in response to the high-stressor condition, which elevated negative mood and stress about equally for both sleep conditions. These results suggest that sleep deprivation lowers the psychological threshold for the perception of stress from cognitive demands but does not selectively increase the magnitude of negative affect in response to high-stress performance demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The sound of the crowd: auditory information modulates the perceived emotion of a crowd based on bodily expressions

Although both auditory and visual information can influence the perceived emotion of an individual, how these modalities contribute to the perceived emotion of a crowd of characters was hitherto unknown. Here, we manipulated the ambiguity of the emotion of either a visual or auditory crowd of characters by varying the proportions of characters expressing one of two emotional states. Using an intersensory bias paradigm, unambiguous emotional information from an unattended modality was presented while participants determined the emotion of a crowd in an attended, but different, modality. We found that emotional information in an unattended modality can disambiguate the perceived emotion of a crowd. Moreover, the size of the crowd had little effect on these crossmodal influences. The role of audiovisual information appears to be similar in perceiving emotion from individuals or crowds. Our findings provide novel insights into the role of multisensory influences on the perception of social information from crowds of individuals.     

Retrieval from memory: vulnerable or inviolable?

We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency--namely, lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name--but only if it is meaningful (forward speech compared to reversed speech or words compared to nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrelated speech. That phonemic fluency--in which participants are cued with the first letter of words they are to report--was not disrupted by the mere presence of meaningful speech, only by speech in a related phonemic category, suggests that distraction is not mediated by executive processing load. The pattern of sensitivity to different properties of sound as a function of the type of retrieval cue is in line with an interference-by-process approach to auditory distraction.     

Broken expectations: violation of expectancies, not novelty, captures auditory attention

The role of memory in behavioral distraction by auditory attentional capture was investigated: We examined whether capture is a product of the novelty of the capturing event (i.e., the absence of a recent memory for the event) or its violation of learned expectancies on the basis of a memory for an event structure. Attentional capture-indicated by disruption of a focal visually presented serial recall task-was found when the voice conveying a concurrent irrelevant auditory sequence changed every 5 recall trials (from male to female or vice versa). There was no evidence of attentional capture when the irrelevant sequence was first encountered and hence novel; capture occurred only when an expectation for a particular voice had been learned and then violated. Furthermore, with the increasing predictability of (and hence expectancy for) the voice changes across the experimental session, the capture response diminished only to be reinstated when that session-wide expectation was itself violated by a break in the change-every-5-trials pattern. The results highlight the critical role of learned expectations, as opposed to novelty detection, in behavioral auditory attentional capture.