Self-regulation and protective health behaviour: How regulatory focus and anticipated regret are related to vaccination decisions

Objective: We examined how individual motivational orientations and anticipated regret are related to the protective health decision of vaccination behaviour.

Design: The proposed relations were examined in a large-scale sample (N = 3168) and three medium-sized samples (N = 151, N = 194, N = 208). Questionnaires were applied to assess regulatory focus, anticipated regret and vaccination behaviour.

Results: Increased prevention-focused self-regulation – which is represented by concerns about security-related goals, responsibilities and obligations – was related to a greater likelihood of vaccination. Prevention-focused individuals’ higher likelihood of getting vaccinated seems at least in part to be a consequence of anticipated regret for not vaccinating. Study 3 suggests that regulatory focus is less related to vaccination decisions when regret is increased by the decision-making context; that is, when information highlighting vaccination effectiveness and a low likelihood of adverse responses is provided.

Conclusion: Prevention-focused self-regulation is related to a greater likelihood of engaging in health-protective behaviour. This can be explained by prevention-focused individuals’ greater tendency to anticipate regret about getting ill as a consequence of not adopting protective measures. If people perceive a protective measure such as a vaccination as highly effective, anticipated regret for not adopting it is generally increased, and individual differences in regulatory focus no longer predict the decision.     

Optimism buffers the detrimental effect of negative self-perceptions of ageing on physical and mental health

Objectives: First, to replicate previous findings on the detrimental effect of negative self-perceptions of ageing (SPA) on physical health outcomes and to expand them to the prediction of mental health; second, to test whether an optimistic outlook to the future can buffer the effect of negative SPA on physical and mental health outcomes.

Design: Data for this study comes from the 2008 and 2011 waves of the German Ageing Survey (DEAS; n?=?6205), a population-based representative survey of adults aged 40–85?years. Mean age of the participants was 61.50 (±12.1), 49.5% were women.

Main Outcome Measures: Self-rated health, physical functioning and depressive symptoms.

Results: Multiple regression analyses indicated that negative SPA predicted deterioration in the three health outcomes over a three-year period, controlling for demographics and illnesses. The most remarkable finding is the interaction with optimism: People who were prepared for physical losses (negative SPA), and who were nevertheless optimistic, were better able to maintain better physical functioning, and lower depressive symptoms.

Conclusion: A multidimensional perspective on ageing, considering both gains and losses at the same time, seems to be best for the maintenance of good health. Individual and societal positive views of ageing should be encouraged.     

Age differences in affective forecasting and experienced emotion surrounding the 2008 US presidential election

In everyday life, people frequently make decisions based on tacit or explicit forecasts about the emotional consequences associated with the possible choices. We investigated age differences in such forecasts and their accuracy by surveying voters about their expected and, subsequently, their actual emotional responses to the 2008 US presidential election. A sample of 762 Democratic and Republican voters aged 20 to 80 years participated in a web-based study; 346 could be re-contacted two days after the election. Older adults forecasted lower increases in high-arousal emotions (e.g., excitement after winning; anger after losing) and larger increases in low-arousal emotions (e.g., sluggishness after losing) than younger adults. Age differences in actual responses to the election were consistent with forecasts, albeit less pervasive. Additionally, among supporters of the winning candidate, but not among supporters of the losing candidate, forecasting accuracy was enhanced with age, suggesting a positivity effect in affective forecasting. These results add to emerging findings about the role of valence and arousal in emotional ageing and demonstrate age differences in affective forecasting about a real-world event with an emotionally charged outcome.     

The Academic Experience of Male High School Students with ADHD

This study compared the high school academic experience of adolescents with and without childhood ADHD using data from the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study (PALS). Participants were 326 males with childhood ADHD and 213 demographically similar males without ADHD who were recruited at the start of the follow-up study. Data were collected yearly from parents, teachers and schools. The current study used assessment points at which the participants were currently in or had recently completed grades 9, 10, 11, and 12. Results indicated that adolescents with ADHD experienced significant academic impairment in high school relative to comparison adolescents, including lower overall and main academic subject grade point averages (GPA), lower levels of class placement (e.g. remedial vs. honors), and higher rates of course failure. In addition, teacher reports indicated that adolescents with ADHD completed and turned in a significantly lower percentage of assignments and were significantly less likely to be working up to their potential. Adolescents with ADHD were also significantly more likely to be absent or tardy during the academic year, and they were over eight times more likely than adolescents without ADHD to drop out of high school. These findings demonstrate that children with ADHD continue to experience severe academic impairment into high school.     

Why People Try to Actively Change Unchangeable Situations: The Role of Anticipated Affect

Past research revealed that people were prone to persist with losing courses of action. However, in these studies, it was unclear in advance whether discontinuation of the course of action was not too early. The present research showed that participants tried to actively change a troubling situation (primary control) even if they were aware that the situation was not amenable to change. It was further examined why people use primary control in unchangeable situations. It was hypothesized and found that unchangeable (relative to changeable) situations give rise to extreme anticipated affect, which in turn is associated with the use of primary control strategies. Thus, it appears that anticipated affects (partly) underlie people’s tendency to cling to losing courses of action.     

Same-gender stalking in Sweden and Australia

This study examined the phenomenon of same-gender stalking and sought to identify differences between same- and opposite-gender stalking cases. Ninety-four same-gender and 160 opposite-gender stalking cases from Sweden and Australia were compared on demographic, offense, clinical, and behavioral characteristics. The groups were largely similar, differing mainly in the nature of the prior relationship between stalker and victim and the stalker's motivation. The most notable distinction was the significantly greater prevalence of ex-intimate partner stalkers in the opposite-gender group (65%) versus the same-gender group (32%), leading to the exclusion of ex-intimates from the subsequent analysis to remove this potentially confounding variable. Amongst non-ex-intimates, same-gender stalkers were significantly more likely to be female and to stalk out of a sense of resentment and grievance. The results showed that the gender of the victim and perpetrator was less important to the course and conduct of a stalking episode than were the stalker's motivation and the nature of the prior relationship to the victim.     

哲学中的生物技术科学：哲学中的性别研究所面临的挑战与前景

白20世纪60年代以来,生物技术科学一直是哲学反思的中心议题。随着分子生物学、遗传学、计算机科学、人工智能研究以及基因与繁殖技术的发展,这些技术科学的各个不同方面开始进入哲学讨论的范围。这些讨论当今还在进行着,特别是在生物伦理学领域。     

Is longing only for Germans? A cross-cultural comparison of Sehnsucht in Germany and the United States

Sehnsucht, the longing or yearning for ideal yet seemingly unreachable states of life, is a salient topic in German culture and has proven useful for understanding self-regulation across adulthood in a German sample (e.g., Scheibe, Freund, & Baltes, 2007). The current study tested whether findings for German samples could be generalized to the more individualistic and agentic U.S. American culture. Four samples of U.S. American and German participants (total N = 1,276) age 18 to 81 years reported and rated their 2 most important life longings and completed measures of subjective well-being and health. Measurement equivalence was established at the level of factor loadings for central life longing characteristics. German and U.S. American participants did not differ in self-reported ease of identifying personal life longings or their intensity. In comparison to Germans, however, U.S. Americans associated life longings less with utopian, unattainable states and reported less salience of the concept in everyday life. Associations with measures of adaptation suggest that life longings can be both functional and dysfunctional for development in both cultures.     

Acute psycho-social stress does not disrupt item-method directed forgetting, emotional stimulus content does

It has been shown that stress affects episodic memory in general, but knowledge about stress effects on memory control processes such as directed forgetting is sparse. Whereas in previous studies item-method directed forgetting was found to be altered in post-traumatic stress disorder patients and abolished for highly arousing negative pictorial stimuli in students, no study so far has investigated the effects of experimentally induced psycho-social stress on this task or examined the role of positive picture stimuli. In the present study, 41 participants performed an item-method directed forgetting experiment while being exposed either to a psychosocial laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), or a cognitively challenging but non-stressful control condition. Neutral and positive pictures were presented as stimuli. As predicted, salivary cortisol level as a biological marker of the human stress response increased only in the TSST group. Still, both groups showed directed forgetting. However, emotional content of the employed stimuli affected memory control: Directed forgetting was intact for neutral pictures whereas it was attenuated for positive ones. This attenuation was primarily due to selective rehearsal improving discrimination accuracy for neutral, but not positive, to-be-remembered items. Results suggest that acute experimentally induced stress does not alter item-method directed forgetting while emotional stimulus content does.