A Healthy Lifestyle Program for the Treatment of Obesity in Minority Men

Historically, minority males have had limited success in programs designed to reduce weight. Twenty-five obese minority males participated in a healthy lifestyle program designed to treat essential hypertension, hyperlipidemia, type II diabetes, obesity, and hypothyroidism. Coined the LE ³ AN Lifestyle Program (emphasizing healthy lifestyles, realistic exercise, reasonable expectations and emotions, attitudes, and nutrition), the program offered a treatment model that involved reasonable low-intensity short exercise regimens, instruction, and extensive practice in making healthy food choices, behavior modification, and self-monitoring techniques coupled with guidance on realistic weight loss and exercise expectations. The participants were able to lose 13 Ib during the inpatient plus day treatment phases of the program and continued to maintain a 19-lb weight loss at 12 months. A program overview, case examples, and suggestions to improve outcome efficacy with difficult to manage obese, minority, male patients are provided.     

ARE PERSONS WITH NERVOUS HABITS NERVOUS? A PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION OF HABIT FUNCTION IN A NONREFERRED POPULATION

In this study, 44 individuals were exposed to three conditions (anxiety, bored, and neutral) while being covertly videotaped. The videotapes were then scored for the occurrence of five classes of habits including hair, face, and object manipulation; object mouthing; and repetitive movement of the limbs. Results showed that hair and face manipulation increased during the anxiety condition, whereas object manipulation increased in the bored condition. The implications of this research are discussed.     

A note on methods of indexing associative relatedness

A method of indexing response relations among stimulus words on a word association test is presented utilizing the concept of mathematical sets. Two coefficients of associative relatedness are proposed and some relationships between these and a number of other coefficients are given.     

Sentence comprehension by Broca's aphasics: Effects of some suprasegmental variables

Three subtests of comprehension (one of varying sentential stress, one of shifting juncture, and one of applying emphatic stress to functors) were administered to eight Broca's aphasics and eight controls to determine the effects of stress and juncture on disambiguation of these sentences. Data indicated that the aphasic group performed significantly worse than the normals on all three subtests of comprehension. In addition, there was a strong positive correlation between severity of aphasia and error scores for all three tests. Results are discussed in relation to intact-vs.-disordered comprehension.     

The time course of learned helplessness, inactivity, and nociceptive deficits in rats

Four experiments are reported which explore the nature of the effects of inescapable shock on subsequent shuttlebox escape learning. The first experiment demonstrated that shuttle escape deficits dissipate within 48 hr after treatment with inescapable shock. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to inescapable shock suppressed unlearned activity in the shuttlebox and that this activity deficit recovered within 48 hr. Experiment 2A demonstrated that this shuttlebox crossing decrement was at least partly attributable to the inescapability of the shocks. These results suggested that activity factors might partly mediate the shuttle escape learning deficit reported in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 explored the possibility that activity and shuttle escape learning deficits are subserved by the effects of inescapable shock on pain sensitivity. The results supported this notion. It was found that rats were less sensitive to painful stimulation 24 hr after inescapable shock and that this analgesic tendency also dissipated within 48 hr after pretreatment. The implications of these results were discussed.     

Motivated remembering efforts during tip-of-the-tongue states

Hart (1965) argues that the feeling of knowing in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states monitors memory content and motivates retreival efforts. Although a number of studies have examined the memory-monitoring accuracy of feelings of knowing and not-knowing, no studies have focused directly on the hypothesized motivational function of these feeling states. This second function of memory feeling states is investigated in this study by assessing the degree to which TOT and Don't Know (DK) states interfere with a subject's ability to perform well on a concurrent task. Subjects studied a list of arbitrary word pairs for 3, 5, or 7 seconds and then provided Recall, TOT, or DK reports in an immediate recall test. Performance on the simple number-probe task that followed each memory report was poorer on TOT trials than on DK trials. This effect did not vary as a function of encoding time. Since covert memory searches were possible on both TOT and DK trials, it is concluded that the performance decrement observed on TOT trials is due to the fact that covert TOT target searches command processing capacity that might otherwise go to the concurrent number-probe task. The absence of an encoding time effect suggests that TOT states do not monitor the associative strength of target traces as Hart (1967) has proposed. The findings in this study are interpreted as providing support for the proposition that the feeling of knowing in the TOT state influences the setting of capacity-allocation priorities in the memory system.