Socioeconomic status and insomnia

This investigation compared the likelihood of insomnia and insomnia-related health consequences among individuals of different socioeconomic status. A random-digit dialing procedure was used to recruit at least 50 men and 50 women in each age decade from 20 to 80+ years old. Participants completed 2 weeks of sleep diaries as well as questionnaires related to fatigue, sleepiness, and psychological distress. Socioeconomic status was measured by education status assessed at 3 different levels: individual, household, and community. Results indicated that individuals of lower individual and household education were significantly more likely to experience insomnia even after researchers accounted for ethnicity, gender, and age. Additionally, individuals with fewer years of education, particularly those who had dropped out of high school, experienced greater subjective impairment because of their insomnia.     

Subjective and reinforcing effects of smoking during negative mood induction

Two notions strongly held by many smokers are that negative mood increases smoking behavior and that this increase is due to the ability of smoking to alleviate negative affect. This study used a modified mood induction procedure to examine both the impact of smoking on induced mood, as well as the effect of induced mood on actual smoking behavior. Forty-eight smokers were randomly assigned to a smoking or a water-drinking comparison group. Each participant attended 3 sessions during which 1 of 3 mood states (positive, negative, or neutral) was induced. Contrary to expectation, smoking did not attenuate negative affect. However, negative mood induction subsequently quickened latency to smoke and increased number of puffs consumed ad lib.     

Conjoint developmental trajectories of young adult alcohol and tobacco use

Developmental and etiological advances have set the stage for considering trajectories of problem behavior across the life course, but little work thus far addresses co-occurring problem behavior trajectories. Although recent work characterizes drinking and smoking trajectories, none has explored the course of concurrent drinking and smoking. Using panel data from the Monitoring the Future Project (N=32,087), the authors applied growth mixture modeling to 4 waves of heavy drinking and smoking in a young-adult sample. The authors extracted a single latent group membership factor from heavy drinking and smoking. Associations between trajectory classes and risk factors were relatively unique to the substance being predicted. The association of smoking with alcohol expectancies and delinquency appeared to exist by virtue of smoking's comorbidity with drinking.     

The effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child academic outcomes

This study examined the effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child outcomes. The authors followed 17,212 children from 992 schools in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten sample (ECLS-K) across the kindergarten school year. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the number of school-based transition practices in the fall of kindergarten was associated with more positive academic achievement scores at the end of kindergarten, even controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES) and other demographic factors. This effect was stronger for low- and middle-SES children than high-SES children. For low-SES children, 7 transition practices were associated with a .21 standard deviation increase in predicted achievement scores beyond 0 practices. The effect of transition practices was partially mediated by an intervening effect on parent-initiated involvement in school during the kindergarten year. The findings support education policies to target kindergarten transition efforts to increase parent involvement in low-SES families.     

Eye movements during search and detection in comparative visual search

Motivated by the fact that previous visual memory paradigms have imposed encoding and retrieval constraints, the present article presents two experiments that address how observers allocate eye movements in memory and comparison processes in the absence of constraints. A comparative visual search design (Pomplun, Sichelschmidt, et al., 2001) was utilized in which observers searched for a difference between two images presented side by side. Robust time course effects were obtained, whereby search was characterized by brief fixations and a high proportion of comparative saccades. Then, upon target detection, fixations were extended, more comparative saccades were elicited, and the search focus was narrowed. The saliency and presence of differences did not guide attention, and detection was contingent upon direct fixation of the targets. The results indicate that, when full control is given, observers adopt a strategy that cuts down on memory usage in favor of restricted encoding and active scanning.     

Borderline personality features predict alcohol use problems

This study assessed the relation between BPD features and problems associated with alcohol use 2 years later in young adults. Approximately 5,000 nonclinical young adults were screened for BPD features, and two cohorts of participants completed the laboratory phase of the study at Time 1 (total N = 421) and then again 2 years later at Time 2 (total N = 356). Measures included self-report and interview-based assessments of personality disorders, psychopathology in biological parents, Axis I psychopathology, and alcohol use problems. BPD features were found to significantly predict alcohol use problems 2 years later after controlling for parents' substance use disorders, Axis I psycho-pathology (including alcohol abuse/dependence), and non-BPD personality disorders. In addition, the BPD subscale that assesses impulsivity was found to be significantly associated with alcohol use problems once all predictors were entered into the model.     

Is Workplace Harassment Hazardous to Your Health?

We examined cross-sectional and lagged effects of sexual harassment (SH) and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) on incidence of self-reported illness, injury, or assault in a sample of over 1,500 university employees. SH and GWH, but not other job stressors, were related to increased odds of illness, injury, or assault. This was true when SH, GWH, and illness, injury, or assault were measured at the same time point, as well as when SH and GWH were measured in year prior to illness, injury, or assault.The data presented here are part of an ongoing longitudinal study of workplace harassment conducted at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grants AA09989 and AA13332). Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2004, Chicago, Illinois. The data were collected by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.     

Perceptions of self and of ideal mates: Similarities and differences across the sexes

For 19 mating-relevant traits, single males (N= 53) and single females (N= 86) rated (a) themselves relative to their same-sex peers, (b) their perceptions of the qualities desired by members of the opposite sex in an ideal partner, and (c) the qualities desired in their own ideal romantic partner. Several themes emerged from the data. First, males’ and females’ judgments of what members of the opposite-sex seek were generally accurate. Second, males and females both feel that they fall short of perceived opposite-sex expectations in a few areas. Third, both males and females desire an ideal partner better than themselves, but this is especially true for females. These findings are discussed in terms of evolutionary social psychological principles.     

The "one-shot" hypothesis for context storage

In 3 experiments motivated by the implicit memory literature, the authors investigated the effects of different strengthening operations on the list strength effect (LSE) for explicit free recall, an effect posited by R. M. Shiffrin, R. Ratcliff, and S. E. Clark (1990) to be due to context cuing. According to the one-shot hypothesis, a fixed amount of context is stored when an item is studied for at least 1 or 2 s. Beyond the initial context storage, increases in study time or different orienting tasks do not influence the amount of context that is stored, and thus only spaced repetitions should produce a positive LSE. Consistent with prior findings, spaced repetitions always produced a positive LSE, but increases in depth of processing, study time, and massed repetitions did not. A model implements the one-shot hypothesis, and a role for context storage as a link between episodic and semantic memory is discussed.