Physical Characteristics of the Menstrual Cycle and Premenstrual Depressive Symptoms

ABSTRACT— Little is known about the associations between premenstrual depressive symptoms and specific physical symptoms of the menstrual cycle. In a nonclinical sample of 183 female university students, six physical symptoms of the menstrual cycle (headaches, skin changes, gastrointestinal problems, breast changes, and coagulation and heaviness of menstrual bleeding) were tested for their associations with premenstrual depressive symptoms. The physical symptoms explained nearly 30% of the variance in depressive symptoms. Moreover, when the summed score for all six physical symptoms was used as a predictor of depressive symptoms, a strong linear effect and a moderate curvilinear effect were observed. These results could not be explained by response bias or by the presence of a small group of highly depressed individuals. This study emphasizes the need to consider physical symptoms of the menstrual cycle to better understand premenstrual depressive symptoms, and suggests that the contribution of the menstrual cycle to depressive symptoms in the general population is underrecognized.     

Predictors of Recent Mental Health Service Use in a Medical Population: Implications for Integrated Care

This study investigated the relationship between physical and mental health and psychosocial variables and recent (within the last 12 months) mental health service use among 240 medical patients recruited from general and specialty outpatient clinics at an academic medical center. Results indicated 43.3% of the participants had recently received mental health services in the form of psychotropic medication (75%), psychotherapy (2%), or a combination of these treatments (20.2%). Among patients with moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety or depression, approximately two-thirds were receiving mental health treatment. Moreover, four variables (healthcare provider referral for mental health services, perceived need for mental health services, prior use of mental health services, and frequency of medical appointments) were significant unique predictors of recent mental health service use. This suggests collaborative/integrated medical care may increase needed mental health service use.     

Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation: The Development and Initial Validation of the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R)

As interest grows in mindfulness training as a psychosocial intervention, it is increasingly important to quantify this construct to facilitate empirical investigation. The goal of the present studies was to develop a brief self-report measure of mindfulness with items that cover the breadth of the construct and that are written in everyday language. The resulting 12-item measure demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with concurrent measures of mindfulness, distress, well-being, emotion-regulation, and problem-solving approaches in three samples of university students. To address potential construct contamination in two items, data are also presented on an alternate 10-item version of the measure.

Normality evaluations and their relation to personality traits and well-being

Despite frequent discussions of what it means to be normal in clinical, social, and personality psychology theory, the characteristics of individuals who call themselves normal are little understood. In 5 studies, the authors investigated various hypotheses concerning the nature of normality evaluations. The authors add to recent evidence that normality evaluations represent a distinct dimension of evaluative judgments, showing self-judgments of being normal (versus strange) to be relatively independent from self-judgments of being average (versus unique). Normality evaluations showed positive relations with communal traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and were negatively related to openness to experience. Supporting a broader hypothesis that normality evaluations may be involved in directing or motivating personality development processes, normality evaluations were positively associated with well-being and a sense of fitting in with one's peers, and individuals who felt abnormal felt a heightened sense that they needed to improve their personality. Finally, the personality correlates of normality evaluations were found to change over the lifespan, largely in parallel with the actual mean-level development of personality traits with age.     

Applying the attractor field model to social cognition: Perceptual discrimination is facilitated, but memory is impaired for faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions

A new model of mental representation is applied to social cognition: the attractor field model. Using the model, the authors predicted and found a perceptual advantage but a memory disadvantage for faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions. In Experiment 1, participants completed a same/different perceptual discrimination task involving morphed pairs of angry-to-happy Black and White faces. Pairs of faces displaying evaluatively incongruent expressions (i.e., happy Black, angry White) were more likely to be labeled as similar and were less likely to be accurately discriminated from one another than faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions (i.e., angry Black, happy White). Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed that objective discriminability of stimuli moderated the impact of attractor field effects on perceptual discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 3, participants completed a recognition task for angry and happy Black and White faces. Consistent with the attractor field model, memory accuracy was better for faces displaying evaluatively incongruent expressions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Effects of response task and accessory stimuli on redundancy gain: tests of the hemispheric coactivation model

Two experiments tested predictions of the hemispheric coactivation model for redundancy gain (J. O. Miller, 2004). Simple reaction time was measured in divided attention tasks with visual stimuli presented to the left or right of fixation or redundantly to both sides. Experiment 1 tested the prediction that redundancy gain--the decrease in reaction time when 2 stimuli are presented rather than 1--should increase when the response requires a greater degree of bilateral control by both hemispheres. In different blocks, the response was made with the left hand, the right hand, or both hands simultaneously. In accordance with the model, redundancy gain was larger with bimanual than with unimanual responses. Experiment 2 tested and found support for the prediction that redundancy gain should decrease when both hemispheres are activated by an irrelevant auditory accessory stimulus. Thus, the results support the hemispheric coactivation model.     

Evaluation of a Video Prompting and Fading Procedure for Teaching Dish Washing Skills to Adults with Developmental Disabilities

We evaluated a video prompting and fading procedure for teaching three adults with developmental disabilities to wash dishes. Video prompting involved showing video clips depicting each step of the task. All three adults reached 90–100% correct when video prompting was implemented. Following acquisition, video prompting was withdrawn, but performance deteriorated. Subsequently, a 3-step fading procedure was implemented in which the separate video clips were merged to form larger, multi-step segments of video. Performance reached 80–100% correct as the video prompts were re-applied and then faded. Performance decreased at the 3-month follow-up when prompting was removed, but stabilized at 80–90% correct when the third step in the fading sequence was reinstated. These data suggest a promising approach for fading video prompts.     

Effects of redundant auditory stimuli on reaction time

Auditory redundancy gains were assessed in two experiments in which a simple reaction time task was used. In each trial, an auditory stimulus was presented to the left ear, to the right ear, or simultaneously to both ears. The physical difference between auditory stimuli presented to the two ears was systematically increased across experiments. No redundancy gains were observed when the stimuli were identical pure tones or pure tones of different frequencies (Experiment 1). A clear redundancy gain and evidence of coactivation were obtained, however, when one stimulus was a pure tone and the other was white noise (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 employed a two-alternative forced choice localization task and provided evidence that dichotically presented pure tones of different frequencies are apparently integrated into a single percept, whereas a pure tone and white noise are not fused. The results extend previous findings of redundancy gains and coactivation with visual and bimodal stimuli to the auditory modality. Furthermore, at least within this modality, the results indicate that redundancy gains do not emerge when redundant stimuli are integrated into a single percept.     

Pre-training to find a hidden platform in the Morris water maze can compensate for a deficit to find a cued platform in a rat model of Parkinson's disease

The bilateral intranigral infusion of 1 micromol 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) in adult male Wistar rats caused a specific and partial loss of substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) dopamine neurons, a partial depletion of striatal dopamine, and a deficit to learn the intra-maze cued version of the Morris water maze. Pre-training the SNc rats in the spatial version of the water maze or simply maintaining the animals on the water maze platform reversed this deficit. This improvement was even observed when the order of the extra-maze cues presented to the rats during pre-training of the spatial version was changed during training of the intra-maze cued version. However, this deficit was not reversed either by maintaining the animals on the platform if the spatial cues were surrounded and covered with a curtain or by swimming sessions in the maze without the escape platform and the curtain. These findings suggest that none of the following elements alone, learned during the spatial task pre-training, could help SNc rats learn the intra-maze cued task: improvement of swimming skills or knowledge of the existence of the escape platform; distance between the platform and the border of the pool; location of a particular extra-maze cue; relations among extra-maze cues. However, the simultaneous presence of the escape platform and extra-maze cues (irrespective of their relational configuration) during the pre-training sessions proved to be necessary for this improving effect to occur.     

What children do on the Internet: domains visited and their relationship to socio-demographic characteristics and academic performance.

HomeNetToo is a longitudinal field study designed to examine the antecedents and consequences of home Internet use in low-income families. Participants included 140 children, mostly 13-year-old African American (83%) boys (58%), living in single-parent households (75%) where the median annual income was $15,000 (USD). This report focuses on children's Internet activities, socio-demographic characteristics related to their Internet activities, and the relationship between academic performance and Internet activities. Overall, findings indicate that low-income children initially use the Internet primarily for entertainment. As home Internet use loses its novelty children become more focused in their Internet activities, reducing the number of websites they visit and visiting more websites targeted to their specific interests. Pornography websites are popular initially, especially among boys, but their popularity decreases dramatically after 3 months. Age, race, and sex have little influence on which websites are most popular. Academic performance predicts subsequent Internet activities, and Internet activities predict subsequent academic performance. Directions for future research to identify mechanisms that mediate the relationship between Internet activities and academic performance and implications for the digital divide are discussed.