Once hurt,twice hurtful: how perceived regard regulates daily marital interactions

A daily diary study examined how chronic perceptions of a partner's regard affect how intimates interpret and respond to daily relationship stresses. Spouses each completed a diary for 21 days. Multilevel analyses revealed that people who felt less positively regarded read more into stressful events than did people who felt highly regarded, feeling more hurt on days after acute threats, such as those posed by a moody or ill-behaved partner. Intimates who felt less valued responded to feeling hurt by behaving badly toward their partner on subsequent days. In contrast, intimates who felt more valued responded to feeling hurt by drawing closer to their partner. Ironically, chronically activated needs for belongingness might lead people who are trying to find acceptance to undermine their marriage.     

Comprehension of indirect requests by persons with fluent aphasia

This study examined the judgments and response latencies of 10 participants with aphasia and 10 participants without aphasia for responses to indirect requests. Modals such as can and should were drawn from 5 indirect request categories. There was a significant difference in judgment errors and response latency between participants with and without aphasia. There were no significant differences between aphasic participants' judgments for literal versus nonliteral contrasts. There was a significant effect among the modals and among the categories of indirect requests. Response latency reflected aphasic participants' understanding of these indirect requests.     

Relationship of depression and anxiety to cancer patients' medical decision-making

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of depression and anxiety to cancer patients' medical decision-making. Participants were 79 rural and urban cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. The four decisional styles of the Decisional Processing Model were the independent variables. Dependent variables were anxiety and depression, measured by Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety and the Center for Disease Control Depression Scale, respectively. Consistent with the Decisional Processing Model, analysis suggested that patients make medical decisions by information seeking, information processing, advice following, or ruminating. Decisional style did not vary according to type or stage of cancer, prognosis, time elapsed since initial diagnosis, or whether cancer was initial or recurrent. Decisional style did not systematically vary with depression and anxiety suggesting how a person makes decisions is a stable personality trait. Thus, decision-making may follow a cognitive schema. It is likely that patients' decisional styles help to manage anxiety and depression when confronted with life-threatening illness. Implications for informed consent and patients' involvement in decision-making are discussed.     

Values and behavior: strength and structure of relations

Three studies address unresolved issues in value-behavior relations. Does the full range of different values relate to common, recurrent behaviors? Which values relate more strongly to behavior than others? Do relations among different values and behaviors exhibit a meaningful overall structure? If so, how to explain this? We find that stimulation and tradition values relate strongly to the behaviors that express them; hedonism, power, universalism, and self-direction values relate moderately; and security, conformity, achievement, and benevolence values relate only marginally. Additional findings suggest that these differences in value-behavior relations may stem from normative pressures to perform certain behaviors. Such findings imply that values motivate behavior, but the relation between values and behaviors is partly obscured by norms. Relations among behaviors, among values, and jointly among values and behavior exhibit a similar structure. The motivational conflicts and congruities postulated by the theory of values can account for this shared structure.     

Developments in long-term explicit memory late in the first year of life: behavioral and electrophysiological indices

Coincident with developments in the temporal-cortical explicit memory network, long-term recall abilities are newly emergent late in the first year of human life. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 9-month-olds as an index of the integrity of the neural substrate underlying a task thought to reflect explicit memory, namely, deferred imitation. ERP measures of recognition memory 1 week after unique laboratory experiences predicted whether and how much infants recalled of the experiences 1 month later. The findings further imply that memory storage and consolidation processes are a major source of variability in long-term recall memory late in the first year of life.     

Constructing a short form of the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire with adolescents and young adults

The goal of the present studies was to construct and validate a short form of the 50-item Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T.H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), a measure of smoking outcome expectancies. In Study 1, a 21-item short form (S-SCQ) was derived from a sample of 107 young adults previously treated for substance abuse. In Study 2, the measure was cross-validated on 125 adolescents in treatment for substance abuse. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed good model fit and factorial invariance for the 4 S-SCQ subscales across both samples. Validation analyses on each sample found that subscale scores generally correlated significantly with smoking-related variables. The present studies provide initial evidence for the utility of the S-SCQ when used with young adults and adolescents.     

The difference engine: A model of diversity in speeded cognition

A theory of diversity in speeded cognition, the difference engine, is proposed, in which information processing is represented as a series of generic computational steps. Some individuals tend to perform all of these computations relatively quickly and other individuals tend to perform them all relatively slowly, reflecting the existence of a general cognitive speed factor, but the time required for response selection and execution is assumed to be independent of cognitive speed. The difference engine correctly predicts the positively accelerated form of the relation between diversity of performance, as measured by the standard deviation for the group, and task difficulty, as indexed by the mean response time (RT) for the group. In addition, the difference engine correctly predicts approximately linear relations between the RTs of any individual and average performance for the group, with the regression lines for fast individuals having slopes less than 1.0 (and positive intercepts) and the regression lines for slow individuals having slopes greater than 1.0 (and negative intercepts). Similar predictions are made for comparisons of slow, average, and fast subgroups, regardless of whether those subgroups are formed on the basis of differences in ability, age, or health status. These predictions are consistent with evidence from studies of healthy young and older adults as well as from studies of depressed and age-matched control groups.     

Physical imagery: kinematic versus dynamic models.

Physical imagery occurs when people imagine one object causing a change to a second object. To make inferences through physical imagery, people must represent information that coordinates the interactions among the imagined objects. The current research contrasts two proposals for how this coordinating information is realized in physical imagery. In the traditional kinematic formulation, imagery transformations are coordinated by geometric information in analog spatial representations. In the dynamic formulation, transformations may also be regulated by analog representations of force and resistance. Four experiments support the dynamic formulation. They show, for example, that without making changes to the spatial properties of a problem, dynamic perceptual information (e.g., torque) and beliefs about physical properties (e. g., viscosity) affect the inferences that people draw through imagery. The studies suggest that physical imagery is not so much an analog of visual perception as it is an analog of physical action. A simple model that represents force as a rate helps explain why inferences can emerge through imagined actions even though people may not know the answer explicitly. It also explains how and when perception, beliefs, and learning can influence physical imagery.