The Partners for Life Program: A Couples Approach to Cardiac Risk Reduction

Morbidity and mortality are reliably lower for the married compared with the unmarried across a variety of illnesses. What is less well understood is how a couple uses their relationship for recommended lifestyle changes associated with decreased risk for illness. Partners for Life compared a patient and partner approach to behavior change with a patient only approach on such factors as exercise, nutrition, and medication adherence. Ninety‐three patients and their spouses/partners consented to participate (26% of those eligible) and were randomized into either the individual or couples condition. However, only 80 couples, distributed across conditions, contributed data to the analyses, due to missing data and missing data points. For exercise, there was a significant effect of couples treatment on the increase in activity and a significant effect of couples treatment on the acceleration of treatment over time. In addition, there was an interaction between marital satisfaction and treatment condition such that patients who reported higher levels of marital distress in the individuals condition did not maintain their physical activity gains by the end of treatment, while both distressed and nondistressed patients in the couples treatment exhibited accelerating gains throughout treatment. In terms of medication adherence, patients in the couples treatment exhibited virtually no change in medication adherence over time, while patients in the individuals treatment showed a 9% relative decrease across time. There were no condition or time effects for nutritional outcomes. Finally, there was an interaction between baseline marital satisfaction and treatment condition such that patients in the individuals condition who reported lower levels of initial marital satisfaction showed deterioration in marital satisfaction, while non satisfied patients in the couples treatment showed improvement over time.     

Egocentric and allocentric search: effects of platform distance and environmental cues

Three water maze experiments with rats examined egocentric vs. allocentric search as a function of platform distance and the predictiveness of the start trajectory and environmental cues. In Experiment 1, rats trained to a Near platform predicted both by landmarks and a fixed start trajectory showed approximately equal egocentric and allocentric search when tested from a novel start location. Rats trained to a Far platform and tested the same way predominantly showed allocentric search. In Experiment 2, rats trained to a Near platform predicted only by landmarks or background cues showed predominant egocentric search. In Experiment 3, rats trained to a Near or a Far platform with a fixed trajectory and no landmarks, showed predominant egocentric. Non-predictive landmarks reduced egocentric search in rats trained with a Far, but not with a Near platform. Overall, with increased goal distance, rats decrease dependence on an egocentric trajectory and increase attention to surrounding landmarks. These results add to the developing notion that animals use both egocentric and allocentric search balanced by environmental conditions, such as distance to the goal and the number of landmarks.     

Asian and female in the white God's world: a qualitative exploration of discrimination in Christian academia

This study is a phenomenological exploration of discrimination experiences among 11 Asian/Asian-American female faculty at various Christian universities, with a specific focus on the characteristics of the Christian academic environment which contribute to those experiences. Participants completed a 90-minute semi-structured interview. Ten of the 11 women described experiences where they perceived being treated differently due to race and/or gender. Qualitative analyses of interview data resulted in the emergence of three themes related to the discrimination context (lack of diversity, naiveté and denial and “missionary mentality”). Resulting themes are discussed in light of existing research. Future research implications include the continued need for research on factors that contribute to discrimination in religious contexts.     

When we feel good and bad about ourselves: Self-esteem memories across cultures

Young adults in the United States, Croatia, and China described personal episodes of times when they felt especially good or bad about themselves. These self-esteem memories were either recent (episodes that occurred during the previous 4 weeks) or remote (episodes that occurred between the ages of 10 and 15). Systematic content differences between memories of positive and negative self-worth were apparent primarily for remote rather than for recent memories. Across cultures, long-lasting positive memories frequently represented achievement themes, whereas negative memories frequently represented social themes. Links between achievement success and positive self-regard, and between social distress and negative self-regard, are explained using theories of self-esteem and autobiographical memory.     

Motivational systems in adolescence: Possible implications for age differences in substance abuse and other risk-taking behaviors

Adolescence is an evolutionarily conserved developmental phase characterized by hormonal, physiological, neural and behavioral alterations evident widely across mammalian species. For instance, adolescent rats, like their human counterparts, exhibit elevations in peer-directed social interactions, risk-taking/novelty seeking and drug and alcohol use relative to adults, along with notable changes in motivational and reward-related brain regions. After reviewing these topics, the present paper discusses conditioned preference and aversion data showing adolescents to be more sensitive than adults to positive rewarding properties of various drugs and natural stimuli, while less sensitive to the aversive properties of these stimuli. Additional experiments designed to parse specific components of reward-related processing using natural rewards have yielded more mixed findings, with reports of accentuated positive hedonic sensitivity during adolescence contrasting with studies showing less positive hedonic affect and reduced incentive salience at this age. Implications of these findings for adolescent substance abuse will be discussed.     

Religion and Sexism: The Moderating Role of Participant Gender

The present study examined the relationship between gender, religious belief and ambivalent sexism. Specifically, this study tested the hypothesis that participant gender moderates the relationship between religious belief and ambivalent sexism. Three-hundred thirty seven Evangelical Christian undergraduate students from the Southwestern United States were administered the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory and the Christian Orthodoxy Scale. Results showed that gender moderated the relationship between Christian orthodoxy and Protective Paternalism. This finding suggests the importance of intervening variables, such as gender, in understanding the relationship between religion and sexism.     

A Psychometric Evaluation of the Thought Control Ability Questionnaire (TCAQ) and the Prediction of Cognitive Control

Study 1 evaluated the psychometric properties of the English version of the Thought Control Ability Questionnaire (TCAQ; Luciano et al. 2005), an index of perceived control over intrusive cognitions. Confirmatory factor analysis in a sample of 720 University students revealed a clear uni-dimensional structure (after removal of items 5, 7, 8, 14, and 25) with high internal consistency (α = .87, 95% CI = [.86, .88]) and test-retest reliability after a six month interval (r = .68). Correlational analyses supported an inverse relationship with measures of depression, anxiety, maladaptive cognitive control strategies, and obsessive–compulsive symptomatology. Study 2 tested the ability of the TCAQ to predict successful cognitive control during an experimental suppression protocol. Results demonstrated that weak thought control ability was predictive of the frequency and associated levels of distress of a target thought while under instruction to suppress. Additionally, weak perceived thought control ability was predictive of increased efforts to suppress the target material. Collectively, results suggest that thought control ability is a measurable individual difference variable and that the TCAQ is a reliable index of perceived cognitive control.     

Effects of Gestures on Older Adults' Learning from Video‐based Models

This study investigated whether the positive effects of gestures on learning by decreasing working memory load, found in children and young adults, also apply to older adults, who might especially benefit from gestures given memory deficits associated with aging. Participants learned a problem‐solving skill by observing a video‐based modeling example, with the human model using gesture cues, with a symbolic cue, or without cues. It was expected that gesture compared with symbolic or no cues (i) improves learning and transfer performance, (ii) more in complex than simple problems, and (iii) especially in older adults. Although older adults' learning outcomes were lower overall than that of children and young adults, the results only revealed a time‐on‐task advantage of gesture over no cues in the learning phase for the older adults. In conclusion, the present study did not provide strong support for the effectiveness of gestures on learning from video‐based modeling example. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Motion as a cue for viewpoint invariance

Natural face and head movements were mapped onto a computer rendered three-dimensional average of 100 laser-scanned heads in order to isolate movement information from spatial cues and nonrigid movements from rigid head movements (Hill & Johnston, 2001). Experiment 1 investigated whether subjects could recognize, from a rotated view, facial motion that had previously been presented at a full-face view using a delayed match to sample experimental paradigm. Experiment 2 compared recognition for views that were either between or outside initially presented views. Experiment 3 compared discrimination at full face, three-quarters, and profile after learning at each of these views. A significant face inversion effect in Experiments 1 and 2 indicated subjects were using face-based information rather than more general motion or temporal cues for optimal performance. In each experiment recognition performance only ever declined with a change in viewpoint between sample and test views when rigid motion was present. Nonrigid, face-based motion appears to be encoded in a viewpoint invariant, object-centred manner, whereas rigid head movement is encoded in a more view specific manner.