Selective attention as a protagonist in contemporary workplace stress: implications for the interruption age

Background and Objectives: The ubiquity of instant messages and email notifications in contemporary work environments has opened a Pandora's Box. This box is filled with countless interruptions coming from laptops, smartphones, and other devices, all of which constantly call for employees’ attention. In this interruption era, workplace stress is a pervasive problem. To examine this problem, the present study hypothesizes that the three-way interaction among the frequency with which interrupting stimuli appear, their salience, and employees’ deficits in inhibiting attentional responses to them impacts mental workload perceptions, ultimately leading to stress. The study, further, probes a related form of self-efficacy as a potential suppressor of interruption-based stress. Design: The study used a 2 (low vs. high frequency) × 2 (low vs. high salience) mixed model design. Methods: The 128 subjects completed a test of their inhibitory deficits and rated their mental workload perceptions and experiences of stress following a computer-based task. Results: Inhibitory deficits and increased interruption salience can alter the perception of mental workload in contemporary work environments for the worse, but interruption self-efficacy can help offset any resulting interruption-based stress. Conclusions: This study extends the literatures on work interruptions as well as on stress and coping in the workplace.     

Coping and anxiety in college students after the September 11th terrorist attacks

This study investigated the presence of a stress response after the September 11^th terrorist attacks in a sample of indirectly affected college students living in Boston, Massachusetts. Anxiety was examined at two time intervals, approximately 2 and 4 months after the attacks. Methods of coping with the stress of the attacks (assessed using the COPE Inventory) and their impact on initial and longer-term anxiety were also examined. Results demonstrated that the majority of college students in the study were severely psychologically impacted initially by the terrorist attacks. However, this initial impact appears to decay over time for most people. Several potentially maladaptive coping strategies were found to be predictive of initial anxiety, including denial, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement, and focus on and venting of emotions. However, only focus on and venting of emotions was found to be uniquely predictive of longer-term anxiety.     

Faces capture attention: Evidence from inhibition of return

The human face is a visual pattern of great social and biological importance. While previous studies have shown that attention may be preferentially directed and engaged longer by faces, the current study presents a new methodology to test the notion that faces can capture attention. The present study uses the occurrence of inhibition of return (IOR) as a diagnostic tool to determine the allocation of attention in visual space. Because previous research suggested that IOR at a location in space only occurs after attention has been reflexively moved to that location, the current finding of IOR at the location of the face provides converging support for the claim that faces do have the ability to summon attention.     

Response force in RT tasks: Isolating effects of stimulus probability and response probability

Mattes, UIrich, and Miller (1997) found that as response probability decreases in a simple reaction time (RT) task, participants produce more forceful responses as well as longer RTs, suggesting a direct influence of preparatory processes on the motor system. In this previous study, however, response probability was confounded with stimulus probability, leaving open the possibility that response force was sensitive to stimulus- rather than response-related preparation. The present study was conducted to unravel the effects of stimulus and response probability. Experiment 1 manipulated stimulus probability and revealed that responses to a more probable stimulus are less forceful than responses to a less probable stimulus even when both stimuli require the same response. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this stimulus probability effect does not depend on the overall level of response probability. Experiment 3 showed an analogous effect for response probability when stimulus probability is kept constant. The complete pattern of results suggests that both stimulus probability and response probability affect the forcefulness of a response. It is argued that response probability exerts adirect influence on the motor system, whereas stimulus probability influences the motor system indirectly via premotoric adjustments.     

The association of religiosity,spirituality, and ethnic background with ego-pathology in acute schizophrenia

Studies have highlighted the impact of ego-consciousness, religiosity and spirituality on psychotic symptoms, although so far no study has investigated if and how these factors may be interrelated. In this exploratory cross-sectional study, involving 42 patients with a diagnosis of acute paranoid schizophrenia (DSM-IV), we assessed religiosity (Religious Orientation Test) spirituality (Spiritual Transcendence Scale) and ego-pathology (Ego Pathology Inventory) and analysed any relationship with these and psychopathological symptoms (Positive and Negative Symptom Scale). The subjects were divided into four ethnic groups (Caucasian, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Asian) and a structured, qualitative interview on religious needs and self-concepts was also conducted. Using a multivariate analysis, we found statistically significant negative associations between the scores on ego and common pathology and religiosity and spirituality as covariates. This was seen across all ethnic groups. The findings are discussed in respect of the potential clinical importance of ethnic, religious and spiritual factors for assessment and management of patients with schizophrenia.     

Hope and athlete burnout: Stress and affect as mediators

ObjectiveIn this study we examined the relationship between trait hope and burnout in elite junior soccer players and whether stress and positive and negative affect mediated this relationship.MethodsParticipants were 238 Swedish soccer players (166 males, 71 females; one did not indicate gender) aged 15–19 years who completed questionnaires measuring trait hope, perceived stress, positive and negative affect, and athlete burnout (i.e., emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation).ResultsBivariate correlations were consistent with hope theory contentions indicating significant negative relationships between hope and all three burnout dimensions. The relationship between hope and emotional/physical exhaustion was fully mediated by stress and positive affect. For sport devaluation and reduced sense of accomplishment, stress and positive affect partially mediated the relationship with hope. In contrast, negative affect did not mediate the relationship between hope and any of the burnout dimensions.ConclusionThe results support earlier findings that hope is negatively related to athlete burnout. Support was also found for the hypothesis that high hope individuals would experience less stress and therefore less burnout. Promoting hope may be relevant in reducing the likelihood of this detrimental syndrome.     

Insulin receptor substrate 2 is a negative regulator of memory formation

Insulin has been shown to impact on learning and memory in both humans and animals, but the downstream signaling mechanisms involved are poorly characterized. Insulin receptor substrate-2 (Irs2) is an adaptor protein that couples activation of insulin- and insulin-like growth factor-1 receptors to downstream signaling pathways. Here, we have deleted Irs2, either in the whole brain or selectively in the forebrain, using the nestin Cre- or D6 Cre-deleter mouse lines, respectively. We show that brain- and forebrain-specific Irs2 knockout mice have enhanced hippocampal spatial reference memory. Furthermore, NesCreIrs2KO mice have enhanced spatial working memory and contextual- and cued-fear memory. Deletion of Irs2 in the brain also increases PSD-95 expression and the density of dendritic spines in hippocampal area CA1, possibly reflecting an increase in the number of excitatory synapses per neuron in the hippocampus that can become activated during memory formation. This increase in activated excitatory synapses might underlie the improved hippocampal memory formation observed in NesCreIrs2KO mice. Overall, these results suggest that Irs2 acts as a negative regulator on memory formation by restricting dendritic spine generation.     

The anaphase promoting complex is required for memory function in mice

Learning and memory processes critically involve the orchestrated regulation of de novo protein synthesis. On the other hand it has become clear that regulated protein degradation also plays a major role in neuronal plasticity and learning behavior. One of the key pathways mediating protein degradation is proteosomal protein destruction. The anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C) is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that targets proteins for proteosomal degradation by the 26S proteasome. While the APC/C is essential for cell cycle progression it is also expressed in postmitotic neurons where it has been implicated with axonal outgrowth and neuronal survival. In this study we addressed the role of APC/C in learning and memory function by generating mice that lack the essential subunit APC2 from excitatory neurons of the adult forebrain. Those animals are viable but exhibit a severe impairment in the ability to extinct fear memories, a process critical for the treatment of anxiety diseases such as phobia or post-traumatic stress disorder. Since deregulated protein degradation and APC/C activity has been implicated with neurodegeneration we also analyzed the effect of Apc2 deletion in a mouse model for Alzheimer's disease. In our experimental setting loss of APC2 form principle forebrain neurons did not affect the course of pathology in an Alzheimer's disease mouse model. In conclusion, our data provides genetic evidence that APC/C activity in the adult forebrain is required for cognitive function.     

Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder

This study examined the affective dysregulation component of borderline personality disorder (BPD) from an emotional granularity perspective, which refers to the specificity in which one represents emotions. Forty-six female participants meeting criteria for BPD and 51 female control participants without BPD and Axis I pathology completed tasks that assessed the degree to which participants incorporated information about valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (calm-activated) in their semantic/conceptual representations of emotions and in using labels to represent emotional reactions. As hypothesized, participants with BPD emphasized valence more and arousal less than control participants did when using emotion terms to label their emotional reactions. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Mental representations of familiar faces

The Bruce and Young (1986) framework makes a number of important distinctions between the types of representation needed to recognize a familiar face. Here, we return to these, focussing particularly on face recognition units. We argue that such representations need to incorporate idiosyncratic within-person variability, asking questions such as 'What counts as a picture of Harrison Ford?'. We describe a mechanism for achieving this, and discuss the relation between image variability and episodic face memories, in the context of behavioural and neurophysiological data.