Assessment of Affect Integration: Validation of the Affect Consciousness Construct

Affect integration, or the capacity to utilize the motivational and signal properties of affect for personal adjustment, is assumed to be an important aspect of psychological health and functioning. Affect integration has been operationalized through the affect consciousness (AC) construct as degrees of awareness, tolerance, nonverbal expression, and conceptual expression of nine discrete affects. A semistructured Affect Consciousness Interview (ACI) and separate Affect Consciousness Scales (ACSs) have been developed to specifically assess these aspects of affect integration. This study explored the construct validity of AC in a Norwegian clinical sample including estimates of reliability and assessment of structure by factor analyses. External validity issues were addressed by examining the relationships between scores on the ACSs and self-rated symptom- and interpersonal problem measures as well as independent, observer-based ratings of personality disorder criteria and the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed. [DSM–IV]; American Psychiatric Association, 1994).     

The Effect of Prolonged Implementation of Cooperative Learning on Social Support Within the Classroom

This study was conducted to determine whether cooperative learning experiences are related to social support in the classroom. The relationship between cooperative learning and social support, the impact of prolonged implementation of cooperative learning on social support, and the effect of different frequency of cooperative learning experiences on social support in the classroom were investigated. An instrument measuring social support was administered in November and in January to 91 eighth-grade students from a suburban school district in the Midwest. The results indicate that cooperative learning was highly related to social support within the classroom and that the longer and more frequently students engaged in cooperative learning, the greater the social support within the classroom.     

The Experimental Delimitation of Neural Structures Essential for Learning: The Attempt to Condition Striped Muscle Responses with Faradization of the Sigmoid Gyri

In looking at motivation as a multifactored trait rather than as a singular trait, a larger portion of the variance in academic achievement is explained. Sixty college students were administered five motivation instruments, each having two components. When the total instruments were used, they explained 23% of the variance, but when they were broken into their component parts, they explained 36%; thus, a schema for approaching motivation as a multifactor trait is presented.     

The Relation Between Social Interdependence and Psychological Health on the 1980 U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey Team

The relation between cooperative, competitive, and individualistic attitudes and psychological adjustment and health was examined in dedicated athletes. The respondents were 57 collegiate and semiprofessional ice hockey players who were trying out for the 1980 Olympic ice hockey team. The results indicated that the more cooperatively oriented the athletes, the greater their psychological adjustment and health; competitiveness was unrelated to indexes of psychological adjustment and health; and positive attitudes toward individualistic participation in athletics was correlated with psychological pathology and maladjustment.     

Using the Bollen-Stine Bootstrapping Method for Evaluating Approximate Fit Indices

Accepting that a model will not exactly fit any empirical data, global approximate fit indices quantify the degree of misfit. Recent research (Chen, Curran, Bollen, Kirby, & Paxton, 2008) has shown that using fixed conventional cut-points for approximate fit indices can lead to decision errors. Instead of using fixed cut points for evaluating approximate fit indices, this study focuses on the meaning of approximate fit and introduces a new method to evaluate approximate fit indices. Millsap (2012) introduced a simulation-based method to evaluate approximate fit indices. A limitation of Millsap's (2012) work was that a rather strong assumption of multivariate normality was implied in generating simulation data. In this study, the Bollen-Stine bootstrapping procedure (Bollen & Stine, 1993) is proposed to supplement the former study. When data are nonnormal, the conclusions derived from Millsap's (2012) simulation method and the Bollen-Stine method can differ. Examples are given to illustrate the use of the Bollen-Stine bootstrapping procedure for evaluating the Root Mean Squared Error of Approximation (RMSEA). Comparisons are made with the simulation method. The results are discussed, and suggestions are given for the use of proposed method.     

Processing Illness Information: The Role of Disease Prototypes

Recently Bishop and Converse (1986) proposed that information about physical symptoms is interpreted by relating those symptoms to preexisting disease prototypes. The two present studies further examined this formulation by testing hypotheses concerning the speed of processing symptom information as well as associations made to sets of physical symptoms as a function of prototypicality. As predicted, Experiment 1 showed that response time to highly prototypical symptom sets was significantly shorter than that for symptom sets containing irrelevant symptoms. Also as predicted, the results of Experiment 2 showed significant differences in the associations made by experiment participants to symptom sets as a function of the prototypicality of the symptoms in those sets. Participants made more category-based associations to highly prototypical symptom sets than to those lower in prototypicality but made more associations to individual symptoms for symptom sets low in prototypicality. Implications for the prototype hypothesis and for understanding the processing of illness information are discussed.     

The spider does not always win the fight for attention: Disengagement from threat is modulated by goal set

Stimulus-driven preferential attention to threat can be modulated by goal-driven attention. However, it remains unclear how this goal-driven modulation affects specific attentional components implied in threat interference. We hypothesise that goal-driven modulation most strongly impacts delayed disengagement from threat. A spatial cueing task was used that disentangles delayed disengagement from attentional capture by tightly manipulating the locus of attention at the time of target onset. Different top-down goals were induced by instructing participants to identify bird/fish targets (Experiment 1) or spider/cat targets (Experiment 2) among animal non-targets. Delayed disengagement from a non-target spider was observed only when the spider was part of the target set, not when it was task-irrelevant. This corroborates evidence that threat stimuli do not necessarily override goal-driven attentional control and that extended processing of threatening distractors is not obligatory.