Environment and Physical Activity Dynamics: The Role of Residential Self-selection

OBJECTIVES: Within the socio-ecologic framework, diet and physical activity are influenced by individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and public policy factors. A basic principle underlying this framework is that environments can influence an individual's behavior. However, in the vast majority of cross-sectional and even the few longitudinal studies of this relationship, the question of whether individuals select their area of residence based on physical activity-related amenities is ignored. In this paper, we address a critical methodological issue: self-selection of residential location, which is generally not accounted for, and can significantly compromise research on the relationship between environmental factors and physical activity behaviors. METHOD: We define and discuss the problem of residential self-selection in the study of neighborhood influences on health and health behavior, review methods used to control for residential self-selection in the literature, and present our strategy for addressing this potentially important source of bias. CONCLUSION: Existing research has built our understanding of residential self-selection bias, but important gaps remain. Our strategy uses data from a longitudinal cohort study linked to contemporaneous environmental measures to create a multi-equation model system to simultaneously estimate residential choice, environmental influences on physical activity, and downstream health outcomes such as obesity and clinical cardiovascular disease risk factor measures.     

Why are women more religious than men? Testing the explanatory power of personality theory among undergraduate students in Wales

This study tests the explanatory power of personality-based psychologically grounded theories to account for the well-established finding within the psychology of religion that within Christian and post-Christian contexts women are more religious than men. A sample of 1682 undergraduate students in Wales completed the short form of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised together with the adult form of the Francis Scale of Attitude towards Christianity and measures of frequency of church attendance, and frequency of personal prayer. These data confirm that women record higher levels of religiosity and lower levels of psychoticism, and demonstrate that psychoticism is the strongest predictor of individual differences in religiosity. Multiple-regression analyses show that, when individual differences in personality are taken into account, biological sex adds no further impact on religiosity. This finding suggests that higher levels of religiosity among women may be interpreted as a function of basic psychological differences in levels of psychoticism rather than as a sociological function of being female.     

Using latent trait modeling to conceptualize an alcohol problems continuum

Recent research points toward the viability of conceptualizing alcohol problems as arrayed along a continuum. Nevertheless, modern statistical techniques designed to scale multiple problems along a continuum (latent trait modeling; LTM) have rarely been applied to alcohol problems. This study applies LTM methods to data on 110 problems reported during in-person interviews of 1,348 middle-aged men (mean age=43) from the general population. The results revealed a continuum of severity linking the 110 problems, ranging from heavy and abusive drinking, through tolerance and withdrawal, to serious complications of alcoholism. These results indicate that alcohol problems can be arrayed along a dimension of severity and emphasize the relevance of LTM to informing the conceptualization and assessment of alcohol problems.     

Pattern of Neuropsychological Deficit at Age Five Years Following Neonatal Unilateral Brain Injury

The pattern of language deficit following left-hemisphere brain injury and visual/spatial deficit following right-hemisphere injury in an adult or older child is well recognized, but has been inconsistently reported following presumed neonatal brain injury. Our prospective study of 24 children at age 5 with documented neonatal unilateral brain injury lends support to the theory of hemisphere specialization at the time of birth. Twelve children who had unilateral left-hemisphere lesion were compared to 12 children with unilateral right-hemisphere lesion of similar timing and severity. Relative visual/spatial deficit following right-hemisphere lesion and receptive language deficit following left-hemisphere lesion were identified. Lateralized measures of grip strength, fine motor speed, and fine motor dexterity were not significantly different between the groups for either hand in this nonhemiparetic study sample. Only one child with a left-hemisphere lesion was left-handed, and only one child (right-lesion) had a hemiparesis.     

Valence and Arousal Ratings for Velten Mood Induction Statements

Participants rated 84 statements adapted from Velten's original mood induction statements—designed to induce positive and negative mood—on two dimensions of emotion (valence and arousal), using the Self Assessment Manikin (SAM) (P. J. Lang, M. M. Bradley, & B. N. Cuthbert, 1999). Fifty-two of these Velten positive, negative, and neutral statements yielded SAM valence ratings that were consistent with Velten's previous valence designation (E. Velten, 1968). Reliability analyses for the positive, negative, and neutral statements indicated a high level of internal consistency in the three statement groups. Arousal and valence ratings of the statements were positively correlated. Related issues concerning differences in rating verbal versus visual emotional stimuli and recommendations for future work to improve the validity of Velten's mood induction statements are addressed.     

Basic objects in natural categories

Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language.     

Homophone effects in visual word recognition depend on homophone type and task demands.

This experiment examined how the characteristics of homophones and their mates influence homophone effects, as a function of task demands. Two types of homophones were presented: 1) low-frequency homophones with higher-frequency mates that are not animal names (e.g., maid--made), and 2) low-frequency homophones with mates that are, on average, of equivalent frequency and are animal names (e.g., foul--fowl). We observed a double dissociation: In the lexical decision task (LDT), there was a homophone effect for the first type of homophones but not for the second, whereas in the semantic categorization task (SCT) the opposite was true. These results suggest that in these tasks the effects of homophony arise when the homophone's mate creates competition in terms of the type of processing emphasized in the task, namely, orthographic processing in the LDT and semantic processing in the SCT.