Predictors Of Self-Reported Physical Symptoms in Low-Income, Inner-City African American Women: The Role of Optimism, Depressive Symptoms, and Chronic Illness

In this study we examined the association of optimism and depressive symptoms with self-reported physical symptoms in 241 low-income, inner-city African American women with or without a chronic illness (HIV). Although optimism was not a unique predictor of self-reported physical symptoms over and above depressive symptoms, optimism interacted with depressive symptoms and health status. In the community sample, but not the chronically ill sample, optimism buffered the association between depressive symptoms and self-reported physical symptoms. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Berufsbezogene Werthaltungen

Job related work values were assessed in 68 participants of a psychotherapy training program and 30 students of two management courses. All three were academic based programs. Two inventories were used to identify potential differences, namely the Work Values Inventory (Seifert and Bergmann 1983) and the Questionnaire on Work and Job Related Behavior and Emotion Patterns (Schaarschmidt and Fischer 1996). There were significant group differences concerning job involvement, ambition, need for change and autonomy, willingness for overexertion, ability to keep distance and work values oriented toward income and career. No differences were found concerning the subjective importance of work, the tendency to resignation, the quality of life, the experience of social support and values related to work climate. These findings corroborate some of the stereotypes associated with these two areas of work.     

The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion-an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1-6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7-10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12. Implications for the roles of intuitive theories in models of concepts and cognition are discussed.     

Qualitative Evaluation of Medical Information Processing Needs of 60 Women Choosing Ovarian Cancer Surveillance or Prophylactic Oophorectomy

Thirty women who had prophylactic oophorectomy (PO) and thirty women undergoing ovarian cancer surveillance (OCS) completed a one-time in-depth telephone interview exploring information gathering and decision-making processes. There were close similarities between groups, including age, race, marital status, education, menopausal status, number undergoing genetic testing for BRCA mutations, and number of prophylactic mastectomies. The majority of participants indicated overall satisfaction with their final decision. However, many described the information gathering process as frustrating and anxiety provoking. Participants in both groups expressed a need to process medical information within the context of individual psychosocial needs and personal perceptions and experiences. There were recurrent themes with regard to informational and psychosocial needs and personal perceptions and experiences that impacted decision-making process for these women. The present paper is a companion paper to Swisher et al. (J Repr Med 2001, 46:87–94) with the focus of this paper to illustrate the medical informational processing needs identified by this group of women.     

Octogenarian Reports of Lifetime Spiritual Experiences: Types of Experience and Early Life Predictors

This study assessed lifetime histories of discrete spiritual experiences recalled by 144 octogenarian men studied since adolescence and 80 spouses. Women were more likely to report discrete spiritual experiences, as were those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and those judged more open to experience as young adults. Factor analysis revealed four types of experiences related to beauty/nature, negative life events, protection by a sacred other, and traditional religious settings. Men from better childhood environments more commonly reported spiritual experiences concerning negative life events. Those with serious childhood illnesses were less likely to report experiences of feeling protected by a sacred other.     

Scopes of perception: The experimental manipulation of space and time

Discussions of space and time have been grist to the philosophers' mill for centuries. We argue that the evolution of psychology as an independent discipline was in part a consequence of addressing philosophical questions concerning the perception of space and time by recourse to experiment rather than exposition. Two initially separate factors assisted in establishing this independence. On the one hand, it was driven by the invention of instruments for stimulus control so that the methods of physics could be applied to the study of perceptual phenomena. On the other hand and somewhat later, it was followed by the development of psychophysical methods, which opened the possibility of quantifying the responses to such controlled stimulation. The principal instruments were invented in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they consisted of simple contrivances that manipulated time and space in ways that had not previously been appreciated. This article examines the devices that were invented, like stroboscopes, anorthoscopes, stereoscopes, tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, and more recently oscilloscopes, and the ways in which they influenced the scope of perceptual psychology in the past as well as in the present. In contemporary experimental psychology all these instruments have been replaced by the computer. While it has extended the scope of experiments even further it has introduced a new set of limitations.