Cortisol reactivity in the laboratory predicts ineffectual attentional control in daily life

Objective: The objective was to examine an executive control difficulty perspective on individual differences in cortisol reactivity using a daily protocol.

Design: Fifty participants competed a laboratory stressor task and individualdifferences in cortisol reactivity were quantified.

Main outcome measures: Daily attentional control, conflicting thoughts, error reactivity, worry and mindfulness were assessed.

Results: The findings support the idea that as cortisol responses to stress get larger (as an individual difference), attentional control ceases to function as it should in terms of variables that should predict (mindfulness) and follow from (e.g. worry) it.

Conclusion: The findings support the idea that individual differences in cortisol reactivity can be conceptualised in terms of ineffectual attentional control.     

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation as transdiagnostic processes in a comorbid sample

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation have been identified as etiologic and maintaining factors for a range of psychopathology and separate literatures support their relationships to anxiety, depression, PTSD, and alcohol dependence (AD) symptom severity. Previous studies have examined these relationships in isolation, failing to account for the high rates of comorbidity among disorders. It is not yet known whether these processes uniquely predict symptom severity in each of these domains. Participants were 220 patients in residential substance abuse treatment, who had experienced a potentially traumatic event and exceeded screening cutoffs for probable PTSD and problematic alcohol use. Controlling for emotion dysregulation and the interrelationships among the outcome variables, insomnia was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .27, p < .001), depression (B = .25, p < .001), PTSD (B = .22, p < .001), and AD (B = .17, p = .01) symptom severity. Similarly, controlling for insomnia, emotion dysregulation was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .40, p < .001), depression (B = .47, p < .001), PTSD (B = .38, p < .001), and AD (B = .26, p < .001) symptom severity. Insomnia and emotion dysregulation appear to be transdiagnostic processes uniquely associated with symptom severity across a number of different domains and might be important treatment targets for individuals with PTSD and AD.     

JEWISH FOREIGN POLICY: ISRAEL,WORLD JEWRY AND THE DEFENCE OF “JEWISH INTERESTS”

Is there such a thing as a “Jewish foreign policy”? This article argues that Jewish foreign policy does in fact exist. It is not Israeli foreign policy, nor is it an aggregation of American Jewish political power and interests. Jewish foreign policy is not controlled by the Israeli Prime Minister, nor is it led by the myriad of Jewish communal organizations in the United States or elsewhere. It defies the traditional ‘Israel-diaspora’ dichotomy that all too often defines Jewish political discourse. Jewish foreign policy, like other systems of foreign policy, has its own distinctive set of interests and actors. It is a complex, informal, and de-centralized system of ethno-nationalist foreign policy. This article maps out the Jewish foreign policy system. In doing so, the following questions are addressed: Who are the actors involved? What are its interests? What are the challenges and problems facing the system?     

When do spatial abilities support student comprehension of STEM visualizations?

Spatial visualization abilities are positively related to performance on science, technology, engineering, and math tasks, but this relationship is influenced by task demands and learner strategies. In two studies, we illustrate these interactions by demonstrating situations in which greater spatial ability leads to problematic performance. In Study 1, chemistry students observed and explained sets of simultaneously presented displays depicting chemical phenomena at macroscopic and particulate levels of representation. Prior to viewing, the students were asked to make predictions at the macroscopic level. Eye movement analyses revealed that greater spatial ability was associated with greater focus on the prediction-relevant macroscopic level. Unfortunately, that restricted focus was also associated with lower-quality explanations of the phenomena. In Study 2, we presented the same displays but manipulated whether participants were asked to make predictions prior to viewing. Spatial ability was again associated with restricted focus, but only for students who completed the prediction task. Eliminating the prediction task encouraged attempts to integrate the displays that related positively to performance, especially for participants with high spatial ability. Spatial abilities can be recruited in effective or ineffective ways depending on alignments between the demands of a task and the approaches individuals adopt for completing that task.     

Daily suppression of discrete emotions during the work of police service workers and criminal investigation officers

Abstract

This study provided an initial test of a theoretical model which emphasizes patterns of actual and perceived control. The model suggests that profiles of actual and perceived control are differentially related to emotional and behavioral problems. We examined whether anxiety and depression symptoms and aggressive behavior would differ among diverse patterns of actual (caregiver reported competencies) and perceived control (anxiety-related control beliefs) in youth (n=203). Results were consistent with the theoretical predictions in that reported levels of anxiety and depression symptoms and aggressive behavior varied depending upon youth's control profiles. For example, youth with high actual and low perceived control exhibited relatively more anxiety/depression symptoms than aggressive behavior, while those youth with low actual and high perceived control exhibited relatively more aggressive behavior. Furthermore, youth with both high actual and perceived control reported and were reported by caregivers as having the least anxiety/depression symptoms and aggressive behavior, respectively. The findings provide empirical support for the model and suggest the importance of considering the role of actual and perceived control in emotional and behavioral problems. Implications for future tests of the model are also discussed.     

A Profile of Double Victims: Sexual Coercion by a Dating Partner and a Stranger

Victim profiles of sexual coercion might differ based on the type of perpetrator that initiates the coercion—namely, a stranger versus a dating partner. Some victims experience coercion from both types of perpetrators—referred to here as “double victims.” Survey data from 2,322 undergraduates at two relatively large U.S. universities in the Midwest and Southeast revealed in a multinomial logistic regression analysis that victims of distinct types of perpetrators had unique predictors as part of their overall profiles. Background characteristics associated with each type were identified. In comparison to nonvictims, a profile of double victims emerged—a White female who had been abused as a child, who had cohabited with a partner, used alcohol or drugs, had been emotionally abused by a partner, had lied to a partner, used the Internet to find a partner, had dated interracially, and had engaged in sex in a noncommitted relationship. Implications and limitations of these findings are included in the discussion.     

Visual development in human infants: Binding features,surfaces, and objects

The development of visual binding in humans has been investigated with psychophysical tasks assessing the extent to which young infants achieve perceptual completion of partly occluded objects. These experiments lead to two conclusions. First, neonates are capable of figure-ground segregation, but do not perceive the unity of a centre-occluded object; the ability to perceive object unity emerges over the first several postnatal months. Second, by 4 months, infants rely on a range of Gestalt visual information in perceiving unity, including common motion, alignment, and good form. This developmental pattern is thought to be built on the ability to detect, and then utilize, appropriate visual information in support of the binding of features into surfaces and objects. Evidence from changes in infant attention, computational modelling, and developmental neurophysiology is cited that is consistent with this view.     

Effects of number-of-letters on eye movements during reading are independent from effects of spatial word length

Word length is an important determinant of eye movement behaviour in reading. The current study is the first attempt to disconfound a word's number of letters from its spatial extent. In a sentence-reading experiment using closely matched stimuli, clear differences were observed between target words that subtended the same visual angle but differed in number of letters: the more letters in the word, the more fixations made on the word, and the longer the duration of these fixations. Analyses of the full set of sentence words confirmed these results for a wider range of word lengths, and are consistent with a role for number-of-letters distinct from spatial extent. The most plausible explanation for these findings is that long words are subject to a reater degree of visual crowding, which is costly for both temporal and spatial eye movement systems.