The importance of inhalation volume when measuring smoking behavior

Theoretical and technical considerations of measuring puff and inhalation volumes during cigarette smoking are reviewed. Measures of smoking behavior using a flowmeter and inductance plethysmography are described and demonstrated with seven subjects smoking over a 3-to 4-h period. Puff volume and duration, inhaled volume and duration, interpuff and intercigarette interval, and number of puffs varied for each individual over the session. The ratio of puff volume to inhaled volume changed with successive cigarettes. Smokers adjust the concentration of smoke by blending air with the smoke. Thus, to completely characterize smoking behavior, the volume of smoke and air inhaled into the lungs must be measured directly.     

A computational cognitive model of syntactic priming

The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R mechanisms, base-level learning and spreading activation, account for long-term adaptation and short-term priming, respectively. Our model simulates incremental language production and in a series of modeling studies, we show that it accounts for (a) the inverse frequency interaction; (b) the absence of a decay in long-term priming; and (c) the cumulativity of long-term adaptation. The model also explains the lexical boost effect and the fact that it only applies to short-term priming. We also present corpus data that verify a prediction of the model, that is, that the lexical boost affects all lexical material, rather than just heads.     

Occupational stress of professional nurses in South Africa

The objective of this study was to identify occupational stressors for professional nurses in South Africa. A cross-sectional survey design was used. A stratified random sample of professional nurses (n=818; females?=?97%) in hospitals in South Africa was used. The Nursing Stress Indicator (NSI) was administrated together with a biographical questionnaire. Three internally consistent stress factors, namely lack of organisational support, job demands and nursing-specific demands, were extracted. The most severe stressors for professional nurses included staff shortages, inadequate salaries and excessive administrative duties. Work overload, fellow workers not doing their job, health risks posed by contact with patients and demands of patients were also identified as stressors. Stress was associated with specific factors, including age, position (rank), care unit, and work experience.     

The Finnish red cross in refugee settlement: Developing the integration timeline as a tool for integration in the kotopolku project

Finland has quite a short history of receiving refugees. Compared to the other western countries, Finland has few immigrants living within its borders: they represent less than 2% of the population. The Finnish government has the responsibility of receiving refugees. Every immigrant who registers as an unemployed job seeker is entitled to a personal integration plan. The role of the NGOs is to supplement the elements and opportunities of these integration plans. What this system needs is the establishment of cooperation between the authorities, the NGOs and the immigrants. The Finnish Red Cross “Kotopolku” project assists the immigrants in their integration process and creates new tools for integration. “The Integration-Timeline” is a tool based on life span theories which aims to assist immigrants in analysing their own integration process in order to be able to make better plans and life strategies for themselves.     

Different Types of Religious/Spiritual Well-Being in Relation to Personality and Subjective Well-Being

In this study the authors attempt to present different types of Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (RSWB) and discuss their relation to personality and psychological well-being. The Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being 48 is employed for this study, which consists of 6 subscales. To find different types of RSWB, an agglomerative cluster analysis on these subscales was performed based on the responses obtained in a nonclinical adult sample (n = 463). A 4-cluster solution was accepted. The clusters were labeled as Religious/Spiritual High, Religiously Oriented, Existentially Oriented, and Religious/Spiritual Low, and were found to be substantially related to Sense of Coherence (n = 263) and Six Factors of Personality (n = 200) in two different subsamples. By presenting a first empirical model for a 4-field typology of RSWB, we hope to further contribute to the ongoing discussion on how to deal with religious/spiritual issues in personality research.     

Sensation seeking and the aversive motivational system

Sensation seeking (SS) has traditionally been viewed as a phenomenon of the appetitive motivational system. The limited SS research exploring contributions from the aversive motivational system reveals greater anxious reactivity to dangerous activities among low sensation seekers. The present study extends this line of work by comparing levels of fear and anxiety during anticipation of predictable and unpredictable aversive stimuli across high- and low-SS groups. Low sensation seekers displayed greater fear-potentiated startle (FPS) to predictable aversive stimuli, and only those low on SS showed FPS and skin conductance response effects during experimental contexts in which aversive stimuli were delivered unpredictably. Findings implicate enhanced apprehensive anticipation among those low on SS as a potential deterrent for their participation in intense and threatening stimulus events.     

Conditions of contact, common in-group identity, and in-group bias toward contingent workers

In a survey-based field study of 111 permanent Finnish restaurant employees, the authors investigated intergroup relations between permanent and contingent workers. On the basis of the common in-group identity model, the authors hypothesized that the conditions of contact (supportive norms and perceived intergroup competition) would be related to common in-group identity, which in turn would be negatively related to intergroup bias. The present results indicated that perceived competition and institutional support were related to in-group bias only through their influence on the common in-group identity, as the model predicted.