Cost-Benefit Analysis Mediation of the Relationship Between Sensation Seeking and Risk Behavior

Risk behavior during adolescence results in substantial morbidity and mortality. Sensation seeking consistently relates to engagement in risk behavior, but the psychological mediators of this relationship remain unclear. The current study demonstrates that adolescents’ judgments of the costs versus benefits of risk behavior were a significant mediator of this relationship. Participants were 406 racially and ethnically diverse adolescents ages 12-17 (M = 14.5, SD = 1.7; 48.3% female) who participated in a larger multi-site investigation of personality and neurocognitive predictors of risk behavior. Data were collected via self-report in a single laboratory session. Mediation of the relationship of sensation seeking to risk behavior was tested using structural equation modeling. Results indicated that higher levels of sensation seeking predicted weighing the benefits of risk behavior higher than its costs, which in turn predicted higher levels of risk behavior. Implications of these findings for understanding mechanisms underlying adolescents’ risk behavior and directions for future research are discussed.     

Keeping a Sound Marriage: How Couples with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Maintain Their Marriages

This study focused on strengths and variables that contribute to marital successes for couples with children with autism spectrum disorders (in this article, referred to as “autism”). Particularly, the purpose of this study was to examine what husbands and wives with children with autism in contrast to couples with children who are typically developing identify as helpful to maintaining their marriages. Concept mapping methodology was used for this research study. Couples with children with autism and couples with children who are typically developing participated in telephone interviews and then grouped and rated the statements generated from their interviews. Groupings were translated into pictorial maps showing relationships and patterns. Couples with children with autism shared common perceptions about factors that help to keep their marriages strong: communication and shared foundational ideas about marriage. Communication was a cluster for all groups of husbands and wives. Only mothers of children with autism identified time for self-care as a distinct cluster.     

Essential kinematic information,athletic experience,and affordance perception for others

The present study investigated the role of different types of movement in affordance perception, as well as the influence of sports experience. Perception of another actor’s maximum vertical jumping height and horizontal long-jumping distance was evaluated for basketball players, soccer players, and nonplayer controls after viewing point-light representations of the actors’ movements. Perceptual reports were more accurate after jumping-related movements (walking and squatting) were viewed than after nonrelated movements (standing and twisting). Vertical jump reports were more accurate than horizontal jump reports. Basketball and soccer players demonstrated higher accuracy than did controls. This research establishes that point-light displays contain essential kinematic information sufficient to support accurate affordance perception, and athletes appear better attuned to kinematic information specifying affordances for others as a result of their sports experience.     

Sensory information and associative cues used in food detection by wild vervet monkeys

Understanding animals’ spatial perception is a critical step toward discerning their cognitive processes. The spatial sense is multimodal and based on both the external world and mental representations of that world. Navigation in each species depends upon its evolutionary history, physiology, and ecological niche. We carried out foraging experiments on wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) at Lake Nabugabo, Uganda, to determine the types of cues used to detect food and whether associative cues could be used to find hidden food. Our first and second set of experiments differentiated between vervets’ use of global spatial cues (including the arrangement of feeding platforms within the surrounding vegetation) and/or local layout cues (the position of platforms relative to one another), relative to the use of goal-object cues on each platform. Our third experiment provided an associative cue to the presence of food with global spatial, local layout, and goal-object cues disguised. Vervets located food above chance levels when goal-object cues and associative cues were present, and visual signals were the predominant goal-object cues that they attended to. With similar sample sizes and methods as previous studies on New World monkeys, vervets were not able to locate food using only global spatial cues and local layout cues, unlike all five species of platyrrhines thus far tested. Relative to these platyrrhines, the spatial location of food may need to stay the same for a longer time period before vervets encode this information, and goal-object cues may be more salient for them in small-scale space.     

Responding to the Psychological Needs of Health-Care Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Case Study from the Medical College of Wisconsin

With the advent of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, health-care workers have been faced with an inordinately high level of trauma as frontline providers. The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) partnered with affiliate hospitals and community partners to mobilize a matrix of available support and interventions to deliver psychological services to reach all levels of health-care providers in timely, accessible formats. While virtual peer support groups were the most utilized resource among the support group options, other opportunities also provided unique benefits to learners whose education had been disrupted by the pandemic. Mental health must be prioritized for health-care workers in the event of future public health crises. Lessons learned from this pandemic indicate that it is critical to involve learners early on in the process in order to meet their educational needs and to increase access to evidence-based care.

     

Associations Between Maternal Mental Health and Child Emotional and Behavioral Problems: Does Prenatal Mental Health Matter?

This study examined associations between elevated symptoms of prenatal depression or anxiety and offspring emotional and behavioral problems during mid to late childhood taking into account the impact of later maternal mental health symptoms. The sample consisted of 2,891 women and their children (49 % male) from a prospective, community-based study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Women completed measures of depressive (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale) and anxious (Crown Crisp Experiential Index) symptoms at regular intervals beginning in pregnancy. Mothers and teachers assessed offspring emotional and behavioral problems using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire when children were 10–11 years old. Multivariable regression models were fit to address study hypotheses. Exposure to elevated symptoms of maternal depression during pregnancy was associated with increased total offspring emotional and behavioral problems, even after controlling for later maternal mental health problems and a range of sociodemographic and psychosocial characteristics, according to mothers’ but not teachers’ reports. Similarly, children exposed to elevated symptoms of maternal anxiety during pregnancy were reported to have increased total emotional and behavioral problems by mothers but not by teachers. We found support for modest associations between elevated symptoms of maternal depression and anxiety during the prenatal period and certain domains of offspring emotional and behavioral problems in mid to late childhood above and beyond the impact of later maternal mental health problems. These findings highlight the need for additional clinical and research attention to the prenatal period and to both maternal depression and anxiety.     

Effect of inequality on cooperation: Heterogeneity and hegemony in public goods dilemma

We conducted two studies to explain inconsistent findings on the effect of resource inequality based on two properties of heterogeneity: (a) level of inequality and (b) asymmetry of resource distribution. We confirmed that symmetrically heterogeneous groups cooperated less than homogeneous groups did. We also found that larger resource inequality led to less cooperation. More importantly, the effect of inequality was different among groups with different distributions of resources – cooperation declined in groups with a symmetrical distribution of resources but did not decline in groups with a hegemonic distribution. Hegemonic distribution also affected psychological states as resource inequality changed. High endowment members reported higher self-efficacy when distribution was hegemonic than symmetric. However, they also reported more fear of being a sucker in hegemonic groups.     

DILEMMATIC NEGOTIATIONS: THE (UN)TENABILITY OF FEMINIST IDENTITY

We explored how women talk about feminism and feminists and position themselves in relation to a feminist identity within a conversational setting. Nine pairs of female graduate and senior undergraduate students talked about feminism in sessions lasting 60 minutes. Sessions were analyzed using discourse analysis. Participants positioned themselves in multiple ways in relation to feminism. Notably, a feminist subject position was both difficult to take up and difficult to reject. In resolving the dilemma, to be or not to be feminist, participants drew on three interpretative repertoires: a liberal version emphasizing equality and rights, an extremist version emphasizing undesirable extremism, and a lifestyle feminist version entailing being feminist by virtue of how one lives. We discuss the implications of this multiplicity for conceptualizing feminist identity and for feminism as a political project.     

Worry and rumination: do they prolong physiological and affective recovery from stress?

Background: Anxiety and depression have been linked to repetitive negative self-regulation styles in the form of worry and rumination respectively. Following predictions of the metacognitive model [Wells, A., & Matthews, G. (1994). Attention and emotion: A clinical perspective. Hove: Erlbaum], the current study compared the effect on recovery from stress of three strategies: worry, rumination, and distraction using a stress exposure paradigm. It was predicted that worry and/or rumination would be associated with delayed recovery on physiological and/or self-report indices when compared to distraction.

Method: Fifty-four participants were randomly assigned to one of the self-regulation conditions and then completed a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test [TSST; Kirschbaum, C., Pirke, K. M., & Hellhammer, D. H. (1993). The “TSST” – A tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology, 28, 76–81. doi:10.1159/000119004]. Skin conductance and negative affect (NA) measurements were obtained at six different time points.

Results: Skin conductance indicated a prolonged recovery in the rumination condition when compared with the distraction condition. Individuals in the worry condition reported an immediate-delayed recovery from stress marked by higher NA scores in comparison to the distraction condition.

Conclusions: These findings may provide important insights into the effects of different forms of repetitive negative thinking on physiological and psychological recovery from stress. The different response patterns observed are discussed within the context of the metacognitive model.