Air pollution, cognitive deficits and brain abnormalities: a pilot study with children and dogs

Exposure to air pollution is associated with neuroinflammation in healthy children and dogs in Mexico City. Comparative studies were carried out in healthy children and young dogs similarly exposed to ambient pollution in Mexico City. Children from Mexico City (n: 55) and a low polluted city (n:18) underwent psychometric testing and brain magnetic resonance imaging MRI. Seven healthy young dogs with similar exposure to Mexico City air pollution had brain MRI, measurement of mRNA abundance of two inflammatory genes cyclooxygenase-2, and interleukin 1 beta in target brain areas, and histopathological evaluation of brain tissue. Children with no known risk factors for neurological or cognitive disorders residing in a polluted urban environment exhibited significant deficits in a combination of fluid and crystallized cognition tasks. Fifty-six percent of Mexico City children tested showed prefrontal white matter hyperintense lesions and similar lesions were observed in dogs (57%). Exposed dogs had frontal lesions with vascular subcortical pathology associated with neuroinflammation, enlarged Virchow-Robin spaces, gliosis, and ultrafine particulate matter deposition. Based on the MRI findings, the prefrontal cortex was a target anatomical region in Mexico City children and its damage could have contributed to their cognitive dysfunction. The present work presents a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary methodology for addressing relationships between environmental pollution, structural brain alterations by MRI, and cognitive deficits/delays in healthy children.     

Collaborative coping and daily mood in couples dealing with prostate cancer

Collaborative coping (i.e., spouses pooling resources and problem solving jointly) may be associated with better daily mood because of heightened perceptions of efficacy in coping with stressful events. The study examined the daily processes of collaborative coping (individuals' perceptions that the spouse collaborated), perceived coping effectiveness (ratings of how well they dealt with the event), and mood (i.e., Positive and Negative Affect Scale) across 14 days in 57 older couples coping with stressors involving the husband's prostate cancer and daily life in general. In hierarchical multivariate linear models, collaborative coping was associated with more positive same-day mood for both husbands and wives and less negative mood for wives only. These associations were partially mediated by heightened perceptions of coping effectiveness. Exploratory analyses revealed that collaborative coping was more frequent among wives who performed more poorly on cognitive tests and couples who reported greater marital satisfaction and more frequently using collaboration to make decisions. The results suggest that older couples may benefit from collaborative coping in dealing with problems surrounding illness.     

Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people - but not others - a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC - but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.     

Childhood Healthcare Experience,Healthcare Attitudes,and Optimism as Predictors of Adolescents’ Healthcare Behavior

Late adolescence and early adulthood is a time when people establish many of their life-style behaviors. Thus, in order to promote optimal health, it is important to identify factors predictive of young adults’ healthcare behavior. This study evaluated the relationship between measures of childhood healthcare experience, healthcare attitudes, and optimism with young adults’ healthcare behavior in a sample of college students (n = 100). Results suggested that prior healthcare experience, attitudes about healthcare, and optimism are associated with current healthcare behavior. In addition, the relation between childhood healthcare experience and current healthcare behavior was moderated by optimism, such that those who reported both more negative childhood healthcare experiences and low levels of optimism reported the least adaptive healthcare behaviors and those who reported the most positive childhood healthcare experience and the highest levels of optimism reported the most adaptive healthcare behavior.     

The measurement of body-image dissatisfaction–satisfaction: Is rating importance important?

Some researchers have argued that evaluative body image may be better assessed by measures that weight dissatisfaction–satisfaction ratings by their subjective importance to individuals. The Body Areas Satisfaction Scale (BASS) is a frequently used, standardized assessment of evaluative body image, albeit one that does not use differential item weights. This investigation, with 410 female and male college students, examined whether an importance-weighted revision of the BASS would have incremental validity relative to the original version in the prediction of multiple criterion variables. Results confirmed the reliability and validity of unweighted and weighted versions. However, the validity of weighted versions did not surpass that of the original BASS. The extremity of individuals’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction ratings appears inherently to reflect the importance placed on physical attributes for self-evaluation. Moderated regression analyses offered only weak support for the interaction of average satisfaction and average importance ratings beyond their main effects. The simpler, unweighted BASS is an acceptable assessment of evaluative body image.     

A controlled-attention view of working-memory capacity.

In 2 experiments the authors examined whether individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity are related to attentional control. Experiment 1 tested high- and low-WM-span (high-span and low-span) participants in a prosaccade task, in which a visual cue appeared in the same location as a subsequent to-be-identified target letter, and in an antisaccade task, in which a target appeared opposite the cued location. Span groups identified targets equally well in the prosaccade task, reflecting equivalence in automatic orienting. However, low-span participants were slower and less accurate than high-span participants in the antisaccade task, reflecting differences in attentional control. Experiment 2 measured eye movements across a long antisaccade session. Low-span participants made slower and more erroneous saccades than did high-span participants. In both experiments, low-span participants performed poorly when task switching from antisaccade to prosaccade blocks. The findings support a controlled-attention view of WM capacity.     

School Violence and the Culture of Honor

ABSTRACT— We investigated the hypothesis that a sociocultural variable known as the culture of honor would be uniquely predictive of school-violence indicators. Controlling for demographic characteristics associated in previous studies with violent crime among adults, we found that high-school students in culture-of-honor states were significantly more likely than high-school students in non-culture-of-honor states to report having brought a weapon to school in the past month. Using data aggregated over a 20-year period, we also found that culture-of-honor states had more than twice as many school shootings per capita as non-culture-of-honor states. The data revealed important differences between school violence and general patterns of homicide and are consistent with the view that many acts of school violence reflect retaliatory aggression springing from intensely experienced social-identity threats.     

A film set for the elicitation of emotion in research: A comprehensive catalog derived from four decades of investigation

Emotions are highly influential to many psychological processes. Indeed, research employing emotional stimuli is rapidly escalating across the field of psychology. However, challenges remain regarding discrete evocation of frequently co-elicited emotions such as amusement and happiness, or anger and disgust. Further, as much contemporary work in emotion employs college students, we sought to additionally evaluate the efficacy of film clips to discretely elicit these more challenging emotions in a young adult population using an online medium. The internet is an important tool for investigating responses to emotional stimuli, but validations of emotionally evocative film clips across laboratory and web-based settings are limited in the literature. An additional obstacle is identifying stimuli amidst the numerous film clip validation studies. During our investigation, we recognized the lack of a categorical database to facilitate rapid identification of useful film clips for individual researchers’ unique investigations. Consequently, here we also sought to produce the first compilation of such stimuli into an accessible and comprehensive catalog. We based our catalog upon prior work as well as our own, and identified 24 articles and 295 film clips from four decades of research. We present information on the validation of these clips in addition to our own research validating six clips using online administration settings. The results of our search in the literature and our own study are presented in tables designed to facilitate and improve a selection of highly valid film stimuli for future research.     

The nature of individual differences in working memory capacity: active maintenance in primary memory and controlled search from secondary memory

Studies examining individual differences in working memory capacity have suggested that individuals with low working memory capacities demonstrate impaired performance on a variety of attention and memory tasks compared with individuals with high working memory capacities. This working memory limitation can be conceived of as arising from 2 components: a dynamic attention component (primary memory) and a probabilistic cue-dependent search component (secondary memory). This framework is used to examine previous individual differences studies of working memory capacity, and new evidence is examined on the basis of predictions of the framework to performance on immediate free recall. It is suggested that individual differences in working memory capacity are partially due to the ability to maintain information accessible in primary memory and the ability to search for information from secondary memory.     

Construct validity of the helplessness/hopelessness/haplessness scale: correlations with perfectionism and depression

In a sample of 117 undergraduates, helplessness scores and the discrepancy scores on a measure of perfectionism predicted depression scores, providing evidence for construct validity for the hopelessness, helplessness, and haplessness scales.