Understanding physical activity in individuals with prediabetes: an application of social cognitive theory

Despite well-documented evidence implicating physical activity (PA) in the prevention of type 2 diabetes, the overwhelming majority of individuals with prediabetes are not physically active enough. The purpose of this study was to investigate the applicability of the social cognitive theory (SCT) in understanding PA behaviour in individuals with prediabetes. Individuals with prediabetes (N = 232) completed a mailed questionnaire assessing demographics, self-reported PA (MET.min/wk) and SCT constructs for PA MET.min/wk. For PA MET.min/wk, scheduling and task efficacy both had significant effects on PA (β = .30 and .22, respectively). Goal formation also had a direct effect on PA for scheduling, coping and task efficacy (β = .20, .34 and .30, respectively). Task, coping and scheduling efficacy explained a significant portion of the variance in PA behaviour. Overall, SCT appears to have merit as a model for understanding PA in individuals with prediabetes. Further evaluative inquiry is needed to establish support for the use of the SCT as a framework for developing, implementing and evaluating PA behaviour change interventions in this population.     

Olfactory-tactile compatibility effects demonstrated using a variation of the Implicit Association Test

We investigated whether the crossmodal associations between olfaction and touch reported previously in studies involving subjective report measures could also be demonstrated using an indirect measure of crossmodal association. To this end, we used a modified version of the Implicit Association Test. The participants had to make speeded discrimination responses to a series of unimodally presented olfactory (lemon vs. animal odour) or tactile stimuli (soft vs. rough fabric) using two response keys. In compatible blocks of trials, the olfactory and tactile stimuli that were mapped onto the same response key were considered to share a stronger association (e.g., the lemon odour and the soft fabric) than those that were combined onto the same response key in the incompatible blocks of trials (e.g., the animal odour and the soft fabric). The results showed that the participants responded significantly more rapidly in the compatible response mapping blocks than in the incompatible blocks, thus confirming the existence of associations between the stimuli that were considered to be compatible. These results provide the first empirical evidence that olfactory-tactile crossmodal associations are stable enough to influence performance even when not directly relevant to a participant’s task.     

Crossmodal change blindness between vision and touch

Change blindness is the name given to people's inability to detect changes introduced between two consecutively-presented scenes when they are separated by a distractor that masks the transients that are typically associated with change. Change blindness has been reported within vision, audition, and touch, but has never before been investigated when successive patterns are presented to different sensory modalities. In the study reported here, we investigated change detection performance when the two to-be-compared stimulus patterns were presented in the same sensory modality (i.e., both visual or both tactile) and when one stimulus pattern was tactile while the other was presented visually or vice versa. The two to-be-compared patterns were presented consecutively, separated by an empty interval, or else separated by a masked interval. In the latter case, the masked interval could either be tactile or visual. The first experiment investigated visual-tactile and tactile-visual change detection performance. The results showed that in the absence of masking, participants detected changes in position accurately, despite the fact that the two to-be-compared displays were presented in different sensory modalities. Furthermore, when a mask was presented between the two to-be-compared displays, crossmodal change blindness was elicited no matter whether the mask was visual or tactile. The results of two further experiments showed that performance was better overall in the unimodal (visual or tactile) conditions than in the crossmodal conditions. These results suggest that certain of the processes underlying change blindness are multisensory in nature. We discuss these findings in relation to recent claims regarding the crossmodal nature of spatial attention.     

Do "mudsplashes" induce tactile change blindness?

The phenomenon of change blindness (the surprising inability of people to correctly perceive changes between consecutively presented displays), primarily reported in vision, has recently been shown to occur for positional changes presented in tactile displays as well. Here, we studied people's ability to detect changes in the number of tactile stimuli in successively presented displays composed of one to three stimuli distributed over the body surface. In Experiment 1, a tactile mask consisting of the simultaneous activation of all seven possible tactile stimulators was sometimes presented between the two to-be-discriminated tactile displays. In Experiment 2, a "mudsplash" paradigm was used, with a brief irrelevant tactile distractor presented at the moment of change of the tactile display. Change blindness was demonstrated in both experiments, thus showing that the failure to detect tactile change is not necessarily related to (1) the physical disruption between consecutive events, (2) the effect of masking covering the location of the change, or (3) the erasure or resetting of the information contained within an internal representation of the tactile display. These results are interpreted in terms of a limitation in the number of spatial locations/events that can be consciously accessed at any one time. This limitation appears to constrain change-detection performance, no matter the sensory modality in which the stimuli are presented.     

Individual and dyadic associations among relational self‐expansion potential,affect, and perceived health

A growing body of literature suggests that specific markers of relationship quality are meaningfully linked to health outcomes. We tested whether relational self‐expansion potential might be one of these markers in cross‐sectional samples of individuals and romantic couples. Study 1 found that greater self‐expansion potential was linked to better perceived physical health via both higher positive affect (PA) and lower negative affect (NA). Study 2 replicated these findings for PA (but not NA) and revealed both actor and partner effects of self‐expansion potential. Results remained robust when statistically accounting for gender, age, body mass index, agreeableness, neuroticism, and perceived partner responsiveness. These findings identify a new relationship‐level “active ingredient” associated with health and have implications for future physical health studies.     

INSTRUMENTAL AND EXPRESSIVE TRAITS, TRAIT STEREOTYPES, AND SEXIST ATTITUDES What Do They Signify?

College students rated die typical male and female student and themselves on 22 instrumental (I) and 16 expressive (E) items from the PAQ (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) and the BSRI (Bern, 1974), as well as on the BSRI items "masculine" and "feminine." They also completed measures of gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes. Significant gender stereotypes were found on all but two I and E items in both genders. Significant gender differences in self-report were found on all the E items but on only 41% of the I items, confirming our hypotheses that societal changes have led women to develop more agentic self-conceptions. The pattern of relationships found between the self-report, stereotype, and attitude measures supports the utility of a multidimensional approach to gender. Responses to the items "masculine" and "feminine" confirm the implications of our hypothesis that these items primarily assess men's and women's basic sense of gender identity.     

The flexibility of source‐monitoring training: Reducing young children's source confusions

The effect of source‐monitoring training on the ability of 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children to discriminate between events seen live and those described in a story was examined. All children saw a live presentation of a target event and heard about a similar target event from a storybook. Three to 4 days later, the children received either source‐monitoring or control training involving a different set of events. Within each training condition, the children were taught to discriminate events (source training) or identify features of events (control training) acquired from sources that were either analogous (live–story events) or partially analogous (live—video events) to the target‐event sources. Immediately after training, all children were asked to monitor the source of the target events seen a few days earlier. The children in both the analogous and partially analogous source‐monitoring training groups more accurately distinguished between the target live and story events than did children in the control training groups. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lost in the move? Secondary task performance impairs tactile change detection on the body

Change blindness, the surprising inability of people to detect significant changes between consecutively-presented visual displays, has recently been shown to affect tactile perception as well. Visual change blindness has been observed during saccades and eye blinks, conditions under which people’s awareness of visual information is temporarily suppressed. In the present study, we demonstrate change blindness for suprathreshold tactile stimuli resulting from the execution of a secondary task requiring bodily movement. In Experiment 1, the ability of participants to detect changes between two sequentially-presented vibrotactile patterns delivered on their arms and legs was compared while they performed a secondary task consisting of either the execution of a movement with the right arm toward a visual target or the verbal identification of the target side. The results demonstrated that a motor response gave rise to the largest drop in perceptual sensitivity (as measured by changes in d′) in detecting changes to the tactile display. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results under conditions in which the participants had to detect tactile changes while turning a steering wheel instead. These findings are discussed in terms of the role played by bodily movements, sensory suppression, and higher order information processing in modulating people’s awareness of tactile information across the body surface.     

Auditory, tactile, and multisensory cues facilitate search for dynamic visual stimuli

Presenting an auditory or tactile cue in temporal synchrony with a change in the color of a visual target can facilitate participants’ visual search performance. In the present study, we compared the magnitude of unimodal auditory, vibrotactile, and bimodal (i.e., multisensory) cuing benefits when the nonvisual cues were presented in temporal synchrony with the changing of the target’s color (Experiments 1 and 2). The target (a horizontal or vertical line segment) was presented among a number of distractors (tilted line segments) that also changed color at various times. In Experiments 3 and 4, the cues were also made spatially informative with regard to the location of the visual target. The unimodal and bimodal cues gave rise to an equivalent (significant) facilitation of participants’ visual search performance relative to a no-cue baseline condition. Making the unimodal auditory and vibrotactile cues spatially informative produced further performance improvements (on validly cued trials), as compared with cues that were spatially uninformative or otherwise spatially invalid. A final experiment was conducted in order to determine whether cue location (close to versus far from the visual display) would influence participants’ visual search performance. Auditory cues presented close to the visual search display were found to produce significantly better performance than cues presented over headphones. Taken together, these results have implications for the design of nonvisual and multisensory warning signals used in complex visual displays.