Body Awareness: a phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies

Enhancing body awareness has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action for therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches, such as yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method, Breath Therapy and others with reported benefits for a variety of health conditions. To better understand the conceptualization of body awareness in mind-body therapies, leading practitioners and teaching faculty of these approaches were invited as well as their patients to participate in focus groups. The qualitative analysis of these focus groups with representative practitioners of body awareness practices, and the perspectives of their patients, elucidated the common ground of their understanding of body awareness. For them body awareness is an inseparable aspect of embodied self awareness realized in action and interaction with the environment and world. It is the awareness of embodiment as an innate tendency of our organism for emergent self-organization and wholeness. The process that patients undergo in these therapies was seen as a progression towards greater unity between body and self, very similar to the conceptualization of embodiment as dialectic of body and self described by some philosophers as being experienced in distinct developmental levels.     

Neural temporal dynamics of contingency judgement

The present study captures the dynamics of neural processing across positively contingent, negatively contingent, and noncontingent relations. In the setting of a hypothetical chat room conversation, participants rated the contingency of emotional response between two individuals. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were time-locked to the onset of each emotional event. Although each event alone was ambiguous regarding contingency, its neural response was characteristic of the overall contingent relation and the subsequent contingency rating. Very early displays of contingency modified the ERP anterior N1 (AN1) component amplitude. In contrast, the ERP selection negativity (SN) component amplitude seemed to be more sensitive to display properties than contingency. Our results point to the recruitment of early attentional processes for contingency judgement and highlight the efficiency of statistical information processing.     

Developmental trajectories of marijuana use from adolescence to adulthood: personality and social role outcomes

Longitudinal trajectories of marijuana use from adolescence into adulthood were examined for adverse life-course outcomes among African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Data for marijuana use were analyzed at four points in time and on participants' personality attributes, work functioning, and partner relations in adulthood using growth mixture modeling. Each of the three marijuana-use trajectory groups (maturing-out, late-onset, and chronic marijuana-users) had greater adverse life-course outcomes than a nonuse or low-use trajectory group. The chronic marijuana-use trajectory group was highly associated with criminal behavior and partners' marijuana use in adulthood. Treatment programs for marijuana use should also directly address common adverse life-course outcomes users may already be experiencing.     

A five-year study of older adults' health incongruence: consistency, functional changes and subsequent survival

In later life, optimistic health appraisals promote well-being and survival, whereas pessimistic appraisals can be harmful. This study contrasted subjective health (SH) appraisals with objective health (OH) to identify realists, whose ratings were congruent (SH?=?OH), distinguishing them from health pessimists (SH??OH) with incongruent ratings. Health congruence and functional well-being of 757 older adults were assessed via two interviews conducted 5 years apart. We examined consistency in health congruence, and among those with persistent OH, we examined 5-year functional well-being changes that corresponded with SH shifts and determined whether SH shifts predicted 30-month survival. Most realists remained realists; health optimists and pessimists tended to become realists. Increased health optimism corresponded with enhanced functioning; increased pessimism corresponded with decreased functioning. Among realists, increasingly positive SH predicted survival. Findings have implications for quality and length of life among older adults with chronic health conditions.     

When deaf signers read English: do written words activate their sign translations?

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word pairs that were semantically related were judged more quickly when the form of the ASL translation was also similar whereas word pairs that were semantically unrelated were judged more slowly when the form of the ASL translation was similar. A control group of hearing bilinguals without any knowledge of ASL produced an entirely different pattern of results. Taken together, these results constitute the first demonstration that deaf readers activate the ASL translations of written words under conditions in which the translation is neither present perceptually nor required to perform the task.     

Prospective predictors of suicidality: defeat and entrapment lead to changes in suicidal ideation over time

Theoretical perspectives into suicidality have suggested that heightened perceptions of defeat and entrapment lead to suicidality. However, all previous empirical work has been cross-sectional. We provide the first longitudinal test of the theoretical predictions, in a sample of 79 students who reported suicidality. Participants completed self-report measures of suicidal ideation, depression, defeat, and entrapment at two time points, approximately 12 months apart. People higher in defeat became more suicidal over time (β= .45), with baseline levels of suicidality and depressive symptoms controlled. The current results support the posited role of perceived defeat in driving suicidal ideation.     

A Role for Biology in Gender-Related Behavior

We take the opportunity of the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles to examine the journal and the field of gender research from a biological perspective. We discuss the limited coverage of biological perspectives in the pages of the journal and likely reasons for it in light of historical perspectives on the role of biology in gendered psychological processes and behaviors, review briefly contemporary research on biological (especially hormonal) influences on gender-related behavior, advocate for greater attention to biological perspectives, and suggest ways to integrate biological and socialization approaches into questions of interest to gender researchers.     

Where Do Rural High School Students Go to Find Information About Their Futures?

Using data from a national study of rural high school youth, the authors examined where students go to receive information about their futures and which sources are most helpful. Results indicated that students in rural and low‐income schools were more likely to report going to teachers and found teachers to be most helpful compared with students in small town and higher income schools. Patterns of differentiation were also found on the basis of gender, ethnicity, and grade level.     

Nonverbal emotion displays, communication modality, and the judgment of personality

The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of nonverbal expressive cues on the attribution of the Big Five personality traits. Expressive cues of fear, disgust, happiness, and sadness were elicited in a sample of 22 encoders while watching films, narrating, and posing. Encoders’ personalities were rated by themselves and unacquainted raters who watched the encoders, and blind judges rated the traits of a typical student. Expressive cues influenced the raters’ attribution of personality, but this influence was weakest when the encoders expressed happiness (vs. negative emotions) and when they were narrating an emotional experience (when the cues were least potent). Negative and strong expressive cues interfered with the application of a normative, and more accurate, judgment strategy.     

Intelligence and interpersonal sensitivity: A meta-analysis

A meta-analytic review investigated the association between general intelligence and interpersonal sensitivity. The review involved 38 independent samples with 2988 total participants. There was a highly significant small-to-medium effect for intelligence measures to be correlated with decoding accuracy (r = .19, p < .001). Significant moderators included the type of decoding judgment (emotion vs. intended meaning judgments), decoding channel (audio-only vs. audio-plus-video channel), and target gender (both male-and-female targets vs. female-only targets). Interpersonal decoding accuracy requires some level of social sophistication and results of this meta-analysis suggest that part of that social sophistication involves the cognitive abilities comprising general intelligence.