Personality predictors of the time course for lung cancer onset

Numerous findings suggest that personality is linked to the incidence and experience of negative health outcomes. More specifically, trait negative affect is negatively related to a number of health outcomes. The current study expands our understanding of the link between personality and disease by examining the time course for lung cancer onset. In a sample of patients who had recently undergone surgical resection for lung cancer, a variety of negative affect related personality variables were assessed to determine their relationship with age at surgery. After controlling for smoking behavior, it was found that trait negative affect was associated with time course for lung cancer onset, such that those with higher (vs. lower) levels of trait negative affect manifested lung cancer earlier in their lives. Thus, trait negative affect represents an independent risk factor among those prone to lung cancer (i.e., smokers).     

Comparison of inhibition in two timed reaction tasks: the color and emotion Stroop tasks

The authors examined the cross-task consistency of the ability to inhibit the processing of irrelevant information. They compared interference scores on 2 widely used inhibition tasks and found that color word Stroop interference scores correlated with emotion word Stroop interference scores. An examination of physiological reactivity showed that, in general, the color Stroop was more arousing than was the emotion Stroop, most likely due to increased response conflict.     

Scale development to measure attitudes toward unauthorized migration into a foreign country

This study reports on the development and cross-national utility of a Likert type scale measuring attitudes toward unauthorized migration into a foreign country in two samples from "migrant-sending" nations. In the first phase a pool of 86 attitude statements were administered to a sample of 505 undergraduate students in Bulgaria (22.5% male; M age = 23, SD = 4.8). Exploratory factor analysis resulted in six factors, and a reduction to 34 items. The results yielded an overall alpha of (0.92) and alpha for subscales ranging from 0.70 to 0.89. In the second phase the 34-item scale was administered in a survey of 180 undergraduates from Sofia University in Bulgaria (16.7% male, M age = 23, SD = 4.8), plus 150 undergraduates from Hanoi State University in Vietnam (14.7% male, M age = 19, SD = 1.8). Results yielded a 19-item scale with no gender differences, and satisfactory alpha coefficients for a Vietnamese and Bulgarian sample of 0.87 and 0.89 respectively. This scale, equally applicable in both samples, includes items that reflect salient topics of concept of attitudes towards unauthorized migration. An exploratory principal component analysis of the Bulgarian and Vietnamese version of the 19-item scale yielded three factors accounting for 54% and 47% of the variance respectively. A procrustes analysis indicates high conceptual equivalence in the two samples for factor 1 and 2, and moderate for factor 3. This study lends support to the idea that despite different cultural meanings there is a common meaning space in culturally diverse societies.     

Role of context similarity in ABA, ABC, and AAB renewal paradigms: Implications for theories of renewal and for treating human phobias

Using barpress conditioned suppression, we studied the renewal of conditioned fear in rats, an animal model for the relapse of human fears and phobias. We demonstrated ABA renewal when the only differences between Contexts A and B included (1) their odor, (2) their location (i.e., side of room), and (3) unintended differences between copies of the same box at the two sites. Removing either the odor or location cues abolished the renewal effect. We then directly compared the effects of ABA and AAB procedures under two levels of context similarity. Although AAB renewal occurred, ABA renewal was stronger. Adding multiple context distinctions to the three listed above did not significantly enhance either form of renewal. Finally, we directly compared the strengths of AAB, ABC, and ABA renewal. AAB renewal, though again significant, was weaker than ABA and ABC renewal, which did not differ significantly. Fear renewal (relapse) can thus be reduced by extinguishing the fear in the acquisition context, regardless of the nature of the test context.     

Automatic and expectancy-based priming effects in a digit naming task

In a voice reaction time task, subjects named target digits that were horizontally flanked by noise digits or by a neutral symbol (#). For the control subjects, the noise digits were uncorrelated with the target digit, whereas for three experimental groups, the value of the noise digit predicted the target digit by an arithmetic rule (target = noise, target = noise + 1, target = noise - 1) on 75% of the trials. Patterns of reaction time facilitation and inhibition relative to the control condition among the four subject groups illustrated differing time courses of involuntary and expectancy-based priming. For prediction rules requiring an arithmetic transformation (expect N = 1 and expect N - 1), responses to predicted targets were slowed by response competition at short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOAs) but greatly facilitated by expectancy at longer SOAs.     

Neuroticism and selective encoding and recall of symptoms: evidence from a combined concurrent-retrospective study.

The association between Neuroticism (N) and elevated symptom reporting has been attributed to differences in the encoding but not in the recall of illness episodes. If high-N persons are selective only at the encoding of illness information, then retrospective reports should be no more exaggerated than concurrent reports. This study uses a concurrent-retrospective design to examine selectivity in concurrent and retrospective reports of symptoms. Concurrent daily reports gathered over 2 months were only moderately correlated with retrospective symptom reports covering the same time period. The direct path from N to recalled symptoms was larger than the indirect path from N through concurrent to recalled symptoms for 3 out of 4 symptoms. Discussion concerns implications of using recollection-based measures, suggestions for reducing selective memory effects, and explanations regarding how and why N relates to selective information processing about the self.     

Visual pattern matching: Effects of size ratio, complexity, and similarity in simultaneous and successive matching

An experiment on mental transformation of size, in pairwise comparison of simultaneously or successively presented figures with respect to shape, is reported. Regardless of type of presentation (simultaneous vs. successive), figural complexity, and similarity within pairs of different-shaped figures, median latencies of both same and different responses were approximately linearly increasing functions of the linear size ratio between the patterns to be compared. The slopes of the functions showed significant effects of figural complexity and similarity for simultaneous but not for successive matching. The results suggest that successive matching was done by encoding a subpattern of the first stimulus in a pair as a mental image, transforming the image to the size format of the other stimulus, and then testing for a match; in simultaneous matching the process of encoding, transformation, and comparison appeared to be executed several times for each pair of figures. The interpretation was illustrated by a random walk model, which provided a good fit to the results. Received: 31 March 1998 / Accepted: 22 August 1998     

Visual transformation of size.

To investigate human visual identification of different-sized objects as identically shaped, matching reaction times were measured for pairs of simultaneously presented random figures. In three experiments, reaction time for correct reactions to test pairs of figures of the same shape and orientation consistently increased approximately linearly as a function of the linear size ratio of the figures. In the second experiment, where this ratio was defined for control pairs as well as for test pairs, reaction time for correct reactions to control pairs showed a similar increase as a function of size ratio. The results suggest that the task was performed by a gradual process of mental size transformation of one of the members of each pair of figures to the format of the other one.