Pathways maintaining physical health problems from childhood to young adulthood: The role of stress and mood

Objective: Poor physical health in childhood is associated with a variety of negative health-related outcomes in adulthood. Psychosocial pathways contributing to the maintenance of physical health problems from childhood to young adulthood remain largely unexamined, despite evidence that factors such as negative mood and stress impact physical health.

Design: The current study tested the direct and indirect effects of ongoing health, chronic stress, health-related chronic stress, and depressive symptoms at age 20 on the link between health problems in childhood and young adulthood (age 21) in a longitudinal sample (n = 384).

Main Outcome Measures: The hypotheses were tested using a multiple mediation path analysis framework; the primary outcome measure was a composite index of health status markers in young adulthood.

Results: The proposed model provided an adequate fit for the data, with significant total indirect effects of the four mediators and significant specific indirect effects of health-related chronic stress and depressive symptoms in maintaining health problems from childhood into young adulthood.

Conclusions: Health problems are maintained from early childhood into young adulthood in part through psychosocial mechanisms. Depressive symptoms and health-related chronic stress have significant, unique effects on the relationship between health problems in early childhood and young adulthood.     

Family/media approach to HIV prevention: results with a home-based, parent-teen video program.

We describe the first study with a home-based HIV prevention video program for parents and young teenagers. The objectives of the program are to inform parents and teenagers about the causes and prevention of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases, to increase family problem-solving skills, and to increase teen problem-solving and assertiveness skills. The objectives pertain to the goals of increasing skills needed to help teenagers avoid or manage high-risk behaviors and situations. Forty-five families with at least one 12- to 14-year-old were randomly assigned to either experimental (receive video program) or control (no video) conditions in a pretest-posttest design. After 6 months (Follow-Up 1), the experimental and control families were reassessed. The control families next received the video program, and the control families were assessed again (Follow-Up 2). The results indicate increases in parent and teen knowledge and skills only with video viewing. Approaches to improving the video program, particularly with teenagers, are discussed.     

Ear-catching? Real-world distractibility scores predict susceptibility to auditory attentional capture

Although many of the everyday distractions that we encounter are auditory, most research on distractor processing to date has focused on the visual domain. A common measure of everyday distractibility is the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes British Journal of Clinical Psychology 21: 1–16, 1982), which has previously been successfully linked with performance on controlled visual-attention tasks (e.g., Forster & Lavie Psychological Science 18: 377–381, 2007; Kanai, Dong, Bahrami, & Rees Journal of Neuroscience 31: 6620–6626, 2011; Tipper & Baylis Personality and Individual Differences 8: 667–675, 1987), such that high scorers tend to display greater distractor interference than do low scorers. We examined whether the same relationship would hold in hearing. Participants performed an auditory attentional-capture task, by responding to a target sound while ignoring an irrelevant singleton distractor (presented on half of the trials). We found that CFQ score successfully predicted distractor interference, since participants who reported being more distractible in everyday life produced more errors in the presence of the irrelevant singleton than did low scorers on the CFQ. This finding is the first to demonstrate a relationship between auditory distractor interference and everyday distractibility, and it confirms that performance on this type of laboratory-based attentional-capture task can successfully be related to behavior outside the laboratory.