The effect of postevent information on adults' eyewitness reports

The present experiment examined the conditions under which adults' reports of an event are influenced by information encountered after the event occurred. Adults were exposed to neutral, leading, and misleading postevent information about a target event 24 hours after that event. Twenty‐four hours after exposure to postevent information, participants were first asked a general, open‐ended question (free recall test procedure) and were then asked a series of specific questions. Some participants were asked to select their response from two possible alternatives (recognition test procedure) and some participants were required to generate their own answers to the same questions (directed recall test procedure). The nature of the original information, the nature of the postevent information, and the specificity of the questioning procedure influenced the number of correct responses and the number of misleading errors that participants made. These findings have important implications for interviewing adult witnesses. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating the Etiology of Anxiety Sensitivity: Relation to Cardiovascular Perception and Reactivity

A large body of research has suggested that anxiety sensitivity (AS) acts as a specific vulnerability factor in the development of anxiety pathology. More recently, attention has turned to the etiology of AS per se. The present study tested several related etiological hypotheses derived from Expectancy theory. S. Reiss and R. J. McNally (1985) originally proposed that greater physiological reactivity would increase risk for developing heightened AS. Reactive individuals are believed to have greater opportunity to perceive unpleasant bodily perturbations, thereby increasing the likelihood that concerns and fears could be attached to the sensations. Nonclinical participants (N = 86) completed physical (e.g., orthostatic) and biological (e.g., 35% CO₂) challenges and a heart beat perception task. AS was not related to heart beat perception but was related to greater tonic heart rate and greater diastolic blood pressure (DBP) reactivity to both the challenges. Higher DBP and higher heart beat accuracy interacted to predict higher AS.     

An exploration of the tripartite influence model of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating among Australian and French college women

The aim of the study was to compare levels of body dissatisfaction, disordered eating and risk factors, and to examine the tripartite influence model of body image and eating disturbance among French and Australian young adult females. Participants were 188 Australian (mean age=19.6 years, SD=1.0) and 190 French (mean age=20.7 years, SD=2.6) students. Media, peer and family influences, internalisation of media ideals, appearance comparison, body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, bulimia and self-esteem were assessed. Australian participants reported perceiving more peer and media influence, and higher levels of appearance comparison, internalisation of media ideals and bulimic symptoms than French participants (p<.001). Path analyses revealed that the tripartite model was a good fit in both samples, with similarities and differences. Findings suggest the importance of identifying cultural specificities, and developing a global framework of body image and eating disturbance with a view to prevention.     

Group‐Based Shame and Guilt: Emerging Directions in Research

Research on the role of emotion in social identity, group processes, and intergroup conflict is burgeoning. This paper examines recent research on group‐based shame and guilt and describes important themes in this research. Guilt and shame are distinguished by different appraisals and motivations in intergroup contexts. Group‐based shame is associated with threats to group‐image and motivations to protect and repair that image. In contrast, group‐based guilt is associated with efforts to repair and apologize for ingroup wrongdoing. Current research is expanding in several important directions. First, the scope of emotions is expanding beyond that of shame and guilt to consider the roles of emotions such as ingroup‐directed anger in situations that may also provoke group‐based shame and guilt. Second, people’s motivations to avoid feeling group‐based shame and guilt are becoming better understood, particularly in relation to different aspects of social identification. Finally, we argue that dynamic processes in emotion expression and experience, particularly due to the relation between perpetrator and victim groups, are an important future direction in research on group‐based shame and guilt.     

Age of acquisition effects on the functional organization of language in the adult brain

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants’ age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and did not vary in relation to age of acquisition. For both tasks, a more left lateralized pattern of activation was observed, with activity for grammatical judgment being more anterior than that observed for phonemic-hand judgment, which was more posterior by comparison. Age of acquisition was linearly and negatively related to activation levels in anterior language regions and positively related to activation levels in posterior visual regions for both tasks.     

Alone and happy: Personality moderates the effect of happy mood on social approach

Happy moods are believed to evoke an approach orientation and to broaden one’s potential courses of action. Although positivity is strongly associated with approach, social approach is a more complex behavior because interacting with other individuals can offer either positive or negative consequences. We provide novel experimental evidence that happiness actually reduces social approach among individuals whose happiness might be threatened by social interaction. Specifically, experimentally induced mood interacted with participants’ personality, such that participants who were high in social inhibition (e.g., shyness, rejection sensitivity) sat further away from another individual when in a happy mood. We suggest that happiness may produce a general orientation to approach other individuals except when such approach threatens mood.     

The recovery approach to the care of mentally disordered patients. Does it predict treatment engagement and positive social behaviour beyond quality of life?

The main aim of this study was to investigate whether the ‘recovery approach’ to the care of mentally disordered patients is associated with treatment motivation/engagement and positive social interactions on the ward beyond that of perceived quality of life. The participants were 75 service users in a medium secure unit in south-east England, who completed the Recovery Journey Questionnaire (RJQ), The Manchester Short Assessment of Quality of Life (MANSA), The Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), and the Patient Motivation and Perception Questionnaires (PMI and PPQ). The patients’ primary nurse independently completed the Disruptive Behaviour and Social Problem Scale (DBSP) for 33 service users. Multiple regressions showed that after controlling for age, ethnicity and diagnosis (severe mental illness vs personality disorder), the RJQ contributed to the variance in treatment motivation, treatment engagement, and positive social interactions on the ward above quality of life with medium to large effect sizes. The strongest effect size was with regard to treatment engagement where the amount of variance explained increased from 22% to 51% after the RJQ was entered into the regression. The results indicate that the recovery approach explains treatment motivation/engagement and positive social interactions above and beyond quality of life.