Effects of Control on the Stress Reactions of Commuters1

The effects of morning, rush hour commuting were examined in a quasi-experimental field study involving government-employed commuters (single and carpool drivers). Commuting stress was measured as a response to variations in how difficult it was for commuters to move from home to work. The mediation of these effects by two sources of control in the commuting situation also were assessed. Control was operationalized as control over the internal environment of the car (single versus carpool driver) and choice over routes taken to get to work. Among commuters with a high impedance route, driving to work was associated with significant increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure and decreases in behavioral performance. The stress of commuting under high impedance conditions was reduced for single drivers relative to carpoolers. Under similar conditions of high impedance, however, having the option to select more than one route to get to work seemed to be more stressful than having only one route. The practical implications of these results are discussed.     

The consequences of being overweight: A controlled study of gender differences

The consequences of body weight were explored in a sample of 44 women and 40 men who were matched for body size on the basis of judges' ratings and height-weight proportions. Results indicated that the condition of being overweight had a more negative effect on women than on men: Average-weight subjects showed a preference for thin women but not for thin men; the condition of being overweight negatively affected the quantity and quality of women's relationships with men, but had little effect on men's relationships with women; overweight negatively affected the self-attitudes of all subjects, but particularly those of women. Furthermore, average-weight and, particularly, overweight women showed more concern regarding their body size than either average or overweight men. These findings were interpreted in terms of prevailing sex role pressures and expectations.We gratefully acknowledge the help of Alice Carpenter in planning this study and the help of Peggy Nevils during the data-gathering phase of the study.     

Motives and Values to Achieve: Different Constructs With Different Effects

ABSTRACT Motives to achieve and values associated with achievement were conceptualized as distinct and independent personality constructs, one nonconscious, the other conscious, each predictive of a different type of achievement-related behavior It was hypothesized that (a) motive and value measures would be uncorrelated, (b) motives would predict “operant” or spontaneous behaviors while values would predict “respondent” or stimulus-driven behaviors, and (c) motives and values would interact such that subjects with high values relating to achievement would perform better than those with low values, but only when their motives were also high Hypotheses (a) and (b) were strongly supported m two studies, and Hypothesis (c) was supported in Study 2 In that study, the motive for achievement was a particularly strong predictor of operant math performance among those subjects who valued achievement as opposed to affiliation The findings suggest that nonconscious (motive) and conscious (value) measures are both useful in different cases–the former for predicting “real” (doing) activity, the latter for predicting self-report (thinking) responses Questions concerning how motives and values might combine to predict different kinds of behavior are addressed     

VERBAL CONDITIONING AS A FUNCTION OF AWARENESS AND MANIFEST ANXIETY1

Les AA. examinent la relation entre anxiété et conditionnement verbal d'une part, anxiété et conscience du renforcement d'autre part, dans une épreuve de construction de phrases. L'analyse des résultats non concordants apparus dans les études antérieures et qui concernent la relation entre anxiété et conditionnement verbal suggère L'hypothèse que la direction de cette relation dépend de la conscience des sujets au cours du conditionnement. Les résultats présents montrent que les sujets conscients à forte anxiété se conditionnent mieux que les sujets conscients à faible anxiété. Mais les sujets non conscients à faible anxiété donnent significativement plus de réponses “Je-Nous” que les sujets non conscients à forte anxiété. La non-concordance avec les résultats antérieurs est sans doute due à des différences de population (sujets malades ou normaux).     

THE STRUCTURE OF ABILITIES IN THE RETARDED

The ability structure in retarded women was studied on the same lines as with men (Kebbon, 1965). The women, 89 in number, were between 17 and 54, their IQ's between 40 and 90. Factor analysis was done of their scores on 16 tests measuring four factors—verbal, spatial-inductive, numerical and psychomotor. Comparison with the corresponding scores from 89 matched men and 92 normal men indicated that, in terms of these factors, retarded women have the same ability structure as retarded men, and that both have a similar structure to that of persons of average and superior intelligence.     

Cross-Sectional Analysis of Longitudinal Mediation Processes

Statistical mediation analysis can help to identify and explain the mechanisms behind psychological processes. Examining a set of variables for mediation effects is a ubiquitous process in the social sciences literature; however, despite evidence suggesting that cross-sectional data can misrepresent the mediation of longitudinal processes, cross-sectional analyses continue to be used in this manner. Alternative longitudinal mediation models, including those rooted in a structural equation modeling framework (cross-lagged panel, latent growth curve, and latent difference score models) are currently available and may provide a better representation of mediation processes for longitudinal data. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, we provide a comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation models; second, we advocate using models to evaluate mediation effects that capture the temporal sequence of the process under study. Two separate empirical examples are presented to illustrate differences in the conclusions drawn from cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation analyses. Findings from these examples yielded substantial differences in interpretations between the cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation models considered here. Based on these observations, researchers should use caution when attempting to use cross-sectional data in place of longitudinal data for mediation analyses.     

Double Voicing and Personhood in Collaborative Life Writing about Autism: the Transformative Narrative of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Carly’s Voice</Emphasis>

Collaborative memoirs by co-writers with and without autism can enable the productive interaction of the voices of the writers in ways that can empower rather than exploit the disabled subject. Carly's Voice, co-written by Arthur Fleischmann and his autistic daughter Carly, demonstrates the capacity for such life narratives to facilitate the relational interaction between writers in the negotiation of understandings of disability. Though the text begins by focusing on the limitations of life with autism, it develops into a collaboration which helps both writers move toward new ways of understanding disability and their own and one another's life stories.     

Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor’s attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one’s own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00–10:00) and early afternoon (13:00–14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.     

“I see what you mean”: Oral deaf individuals benefit from speaker's gesturing

Recent studies in the psychological literature reveal that cospeech gestures facilitate the construction of an articulated mental model of an oral discourse by hearing individuals. In particular, they facilitate correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at the expense of memory for discourse verbatim. Do gestures accompanying an oral discourse facilitate the construction of a discourse model also by oral deaf individuals trained to lip-read? The atypical cognitive functioning of oral deaf individuals leads to this prediction. Experiments 1 and 2, each conducted on 16 oral deaf individuals, used a recollection task and confirmed the prediction. Experiment 3, conducted on 36 oral deaf individuals, confirmed the prediction using a recognition task.