Modeling late-life adaptation in affective well-being under a severe chronic health condition: the case of age-related macular degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was used as a case model to longitudinally study adaptation in affective well-being under a prevalent chronic health condition. Measures of positive and negative affect, obtained at 5 subsequent measurement occasions with 3-month intervals in between, were analyzed in 90 older adults diagnosed with AMD. The authors proposed a pattern of adaptation that shows initial decline in affective well-being after disease outbreak, followed by a turnaround into a restorative phase of increase, implying nonlinear intraindividual trajectories, with changes substantially related to disease duration. Analysis was conducted by means of a nonlinear mixed models approach. Results confirmed the hypothesized adaptation pattern for positive affect but not for negative affect, which was found more stable across measurement occasions.     

Personality and the Problems of Everyday Life: The Role of Neuroticism In Exposure and Reactivity to Daily Stressors

This article investigates mechanisms through which neuroticism leads to distress in daily life. Neuroticism may lead to distress through exposing people to a greater number of stressful events, through increasing their reactivity to those events, or through a mechanism unrelated to environmental events. This article evaluates the relative importance of these three explanations. Subjects were 339 persons who provided daily reports of minor stressful events and mood for 6 weeks. Exposure and reactivity to these minor stressors explained over 40% of the distress difference between high- and low-neuroticism subjects. Reactivity to stressors accounted for twice as much of the distress difference as exposure to stressors. These results suggest that reactions within stressful situations are more important than situation selection in explaining how neuroticism leads to distress in daily life.     

Is it enough to be willing to win or do you have to be smart? The relationship between competitive worldviews,cognitive abilities,and applicant faking in personality tests

Recent research has highlighted competitive worldviews as a key predictor of faking—the intentional distortion of answers by candidates in the selection context. According to theoretical assumptions, applicants’ abilities, and especially their cognitive abilities, should influence whether faking motivation, triggered by competitive worldviews, can be turned into successful faking behavior. Therefore, we examined the influence of competitive worldviews on faking in personality tests and investigated a possible moderation of this relationship by cognitive abilities in three independent high school and university student samples (N₁ = 133, N₂ = 137, N₃ = 268). Our data showed neither an influence of the two variables nor of their interaction on faking behavior. We discuss possible reasons for these findings and give suggestions for further research.     

Overview: Expanding an animal's self-world to include conspecifics

To further the thinking about animal communication, the authors have returned to J. von Uexküll's (1934/1957) original writings on the Umwelt. Applying J. von Uexküll's self-world concept to studies of communication helps to highlight some of the unanswered questions in behavior. The authors illustrate that some researchers have adopted views that complement and expand the ideas outlined in J. von Uexküll's classic concept of an Umwelt by exploring the influence of individual, social, and ontogenetic contexts on communication. The authors maintain that further application of these concepts expands the understanding of animal communication and, more generally, of animal behavior.     

The Ecumenical Movement and 1968

The year 1968 is remembered as a turning point in ecumenical history: the 4th Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Uppsala appeared to mark the end of the era of early ecumenism and the beginning of a new era. This article questions this understanding of “Uppsala” and examines the reasons for such a mythologization of the assembly through analyzing its themes and conflicts in a twofold way. First, the analysis shows the connection between the students' revolts of 1968 and the assembly. Second, the article draws on the assembly's main theme, “Behold, I make all things new,” and the key aspects of ecumenical renewal discussed at the assembly: the new relationship between the WCC and the Roman Catholic Church, the WCC's commitment to development issues, liberation from racism, and the churches' role in political conflicts. While these themes became a symbol for identifying the assembly with a groundbreaking ecumenical change, the article argues that this change had already begun in the early 1960s, and that the assembly at Uppsala was more the medial and visible expression of this continuing ecumenical turbulence than its source.     

Looking after Iris: John Bayley’s Elegy for the Living

John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, his memoir about living with Iris Murdoch after the onset of dementia, unsettles models of mind and agency that ignore human relationship, dependency, and the vulnerabilities of the cared for and the carer. Experiencing Iris as ambiguously absent and present while he attentively cares for her, Bayley frames his memoir as an elegy, a reflection on love and loss that conventionally represents two subjects—the author and the one he lost. Bayley’s acts of care and his stories about his wife, both as she was and as she has become, sustain her moral worth as a person. Writing as an elegist, a survivor entitled to be heard, Bayley moves his experience of caring and loss from personal to social realms, from speaker to listener, opening ethical space for consolation and for social responsibility for the vulnerable.     

The perception of identity by 6 1/2-month-old infants.

In Study 1, sixteen 6 1/2-month-olds were habituated to a Reversible stimulus (an upright face that could be perceived as an entirely different upright face when it was rotated 180 degrees) and to a Nonreversible stimulus (a face that could be perceived as upright in only one orientation). Following habituation for each type of stimulus, test trials paired the habituated face with a novel stimulus (an inversion of the same face). For both Reversible and Nonreversible stimuli, the physical difference between the old and new test stimuli was the same (a 180 degrees rotation); however, infants devoted more visual attention to the 180 degrees rotation only when it was a Reversible face, suggesting that the identity change was detected. Experiment 2 ruled out the explanation that infants might have failed to dishabituate to the inversion of the Nonreversible stimulus because they could not remember it. Results are interpreted as evidence that 6 1/2-month-old infants are not limited to face recognition based on similarity in pattern arrangement alone, but are capable of processing faces at a representational level.     

Comparing naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times: Word frequency effects and individual differences

Performance on three different tasks was compared: naming, lexical decision, and reading (with eye fixation times on a target word measured). We examined the word frequency effect for a common set of words for each task and each subject. Naming and reading (particularly gaze duration) yielded similar frequency effects for the target words. The frequency effect found in lexical decision was greater than that found in naming and in eye fixation times. In all tasks, there was a correlation between the frequency effect and average response time. In general, the results suggest that both the naming and the lexical decision tasks yield data about word recognition processes that are consistent with effects found in eye fixations during silent reading.