Effect of baseline self-efficacy on physical activity and psychological stress after a one-week pedometer intervention

Physical activity and psychological stress were hypothesized to improve more in participants with high self-efficacy than in those with low and medium self-efficacy after a one-week intervention. 39 female university students participated. The intervention had two steps: a lecture on self-monitoring and goal setting (160 min.) and a one-week pedometer intervention. Analyses were conducted on tertile groups according to self-efficacy at baseline. Pedometer step counts were higher in the high self-efficacy group than in the low self-efficacy group after intervention. Helplessness decreased time dependently after intervention only in the high-self-efficacy group. Because physical activity improved more in the high self-efficacy group after a one-week intervention, one hypothesis was supported.     

Cross cultural differences in unconscious knowledge

Previous studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small (local) letters. The strings constituted one sequence of letters at a global level and a different sequence at a local level. Implicit learning occurred at the global and not the local level for the Japanese but equally at both levels for the English. In Experiment 2, the Japanese preference for global over local processing persisted even when structure existed only at the local but not global level. In Experiment 3, Japanese and UK participants were asked to attend to just one of the levels, global or local. Now the cultural groups performed similarly, indicating that the bias largely reflects preference rather than ability (although the data left room for residual ability differences). In Experiment 4, the greater global advantage of Japanese rather English was confirmed for strings made of Japanese kana rather than Roman letters. That is, the cultural difference is not due to familiarity of the sequence elements. In sum, we show for the first time that cultural biases strongly affect the type of unconscious knowledge people acquire.     

Perspective-taking and depth of theory-of-mind reasoning in sequential-move games

Theory-of-mind (ToM) involves modeling an individual's mental states to plan one's action and to anticipate others' actions through recursive reasoning that may be myopic (with limited recursion) or predictive (with full recursion). ToM recursion was examined using a series of two-player, sequential-move matrix games with a maximum of three steps. Participants were assigned the role of Player I, controlling the initial and the last step, or of Player II, controlling the second step. Appropriate for the assigned role, participants either anticipated or planned Player II's strategy at the second step, and then determined Player I's optimal strategy at the first step. Participants more readily used predictive reasoning as Player II (i.e., planning one's own move) than as Player I (i.e., anticipating an opponent's move), although they did not differ when translating reasoning outcome about the second step to optimal action in the first step. Perspective-taking influenced likelihood of predictive reasoning, but it did not affect the rate at which participants acquired it during the experimental block. We conclude that the depth of ToM recursion (related to perspective-taking mechanisms) and rational application of belief-desire to action (instrumental rationality) constitute separate cognitive processes in ToM reasoning.     

Implicit phonetic symbolism in voicing of consonants and visual lightness using Garner's speeded classification task

The present study examines implicit phonetic symbolism which posits that arbitrary linguistic sound is related to certain aspects of characteristics of other modalities, such as color, touch, or emotion. In consonant discrimination and lightness discrimination using Garner's speeded classification paradigm, spoken sounds (voiced/voiceless consonants) and lightness of visual stimuli (black/white squares) were systematically varied to assess cross-modal interactions. Congruent audio-visual pairs (voiced consonants and black, and between voiceless consonants and white) facilitated consonant discrimination. In lightness discrimination, no congruent facilitation or congruence effect was observed. These results indicated that cross-modal interactions in implicit phonetic symbolism can be found in correlations between linguistic spoken sounds and visual lightness.     

阿尔茨海默病的诊治新进展

流行病学数据的更新表明阿尔茨海默病（A D ）已成为全球健康问题。早期应用生物标志物的AD新诊断标准广泛应用和临床试验不断失败的鲜明反差提示AD治疗的艰巨性。AD和其他慢性疾病的共病研究不断深入。生活方式干预作为非药物治疗备受重视。     

Strong interactions between hydrogen in solid solution and stress-induced martensite transformation of Ni–Ti superelastic alloy

The role of the dynamic interactions between hydrogen in a solid solution and the stress-induced martensite transformation in hydrogen embrittlement has been investigated using trained Ni–Ti superelastic alloy. In a cyclic tensile test in the stress plateau region caused by stress-induced martensite and reverse transformations after hydrogen charging, a further decrease in the critical stress for the martensite transformation is observed. In addition, the number of cycles to fracture for a trained specimen is significantly larger than that for a non-trained specimen. Since most of the charged hydrogen is preferentially trapped in defects induced by training, the hydrogen embrittlement is considerably suppressed as a result of decreasing interactions between the hydrogen and the transformation. The present results indicate that hydrogen in a solid solution more strongly interacts with the stress-induced martensite transformation than hydrogen trapped in defects, thereby further enhancing the hydrogen embrittlement related to phase transformations.     

Young Women’s Experience of Sexuality: A Battle of Pleasure and Sexual Purity in the Context of Malaysian Society

Little is known regarding the ways in which Malaysian women’s sexuality is constructed, and how their personal experiences, culture, religion and society influence their feeling, attitude and sexual behaviours. This study explored the sexual experiences of young adult women in the developing context of the country. A qualitative phenomenological approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was employed, and a total of 20 participants were recruited, comprised of the major ethnic groups in Malaysia. Four main themes emerged through the phenomenological analysis of the data, including: conditional pleasure; social honour and women’s purity; risk and responsibility; and transcendence of love and emotion. The findings of this study revealed that sexuality was experienced under the control of religion and society with the concern of conserving a woman’s purity and social honour; and imposing risks and responsibility on women. Despite the awareness of women’s right to experience sexual pleasure, it was commonly perceived that sexual activities beyond the social norms will result in social shaming and guilt. The authors recommend appropriate sexuality education regarding sexual assertiveness and communication, safe-sex practices, and improving sexual decision-making skills.     

Visual statistical learning at basic and subordinate category levels in real-world images

Visual statistical learning (VSL) has been proposed as a powerful mechanism underlying the striking ability of human observers to handle complex visual environments. Previous studies have shown that VSL can occur when statistical information is embedded at multiple levels of abstraction, such as at semantically different category levels. In the present study, we further examined whether statistical regularities at a basic category level (e.g., a regular sequence of a bird, then a car, and then a dog) could influence the ability to extract statistical regularities at the subordinate level (e.g., a regular sequence of a parrot, then a sports car, and then an Eskimo dog). In the familiarization phase, participants were exposed to a stream of real-world images whose semantic categories had temporal regularities. Importantly, the temporal regularities existed at both the basic and subordinate levels, or the regularities existed at only the subordinate level, depending on the experimental condition. After completing the familiarization, participants performed a surprise two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task for a familiarity judgment between two triplets in which the temporal regularities were either preserved or not preserved. Our results showed that the existence of statistical regularities at the basic level did not influence VSL at the subordinate level. The subsequent experiments showed these results consistently even when the basic-level categories had to be explicitly recognized and when the stimuli were not easily categorized at their subordinate level. Our results suggest that VSL is constrained to learn a particular level of patterns when patterns are presented across multiple levels.     

Reducing Implicit Stigmatizing Beliefs and Attitudes Toward Depression by Promoting Counterstereotypic Exemplars

Stigma prevents people with depression from seeking professional help, and effective strategies to reduce implicit stigmatizing beliefs and attitudes toward depression are needed. We developed stepwise strategies to promote counterstereotypic exemplars of people with depression and conducted an experiment (N?=?105) with a pretest–posttest control group design to examine effects of these strategies. Our results showed that implicit stigmatizing beliefs and attitudes were reduced more in the experimental group, in which the counterstereotypic strategies were implemented in addition to the provision of education regarding basic knowledge of depression, than in the control group, which received only education.