Reasons for substance use among people with psychotic disorders: method triangulation approach

Substance use disorders (SUD) are common among people with psychotic disorders and are associated with many negative consequences. Understanding the reasons for substance use in this population may allow for the development of more effective prevention and intervention strategies. We examined reasons for tobacco, alcohol, or cannabis use among people with psychotic disorders. Sixty-four participants with a diagnosed psychotic disorder completed a self-report reasons for use questionnaire. A subset of eight participants completed semi-structured qualitative interviews. Both the qualitative and quantitative data indicated that reasons for use of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis differed considerably. Tobacco was primarily used for coping motives, alcohol for social motives, and cannabis for pleasure enhancement motives. Prevention and intervention strategies targeting coexisting psychotic disorders and SUD may improve in effectiveness if they address the perceived beneficial effects of tobacco use, the strong social pressures influencing alcohol use and if they encourage cannabis users to seek alternative pleasurable activities.     

Direct Selling Ethics at the Top: An Industry Audit and Status Report

Unethical conduct by salespeople contributes to loss to the bottom line directly through misuse of expense reports and indirectly through lost customers who are disenchanted with questionable business practices. Self-regulation by industry has become an important strategy in improving the ethical environment of the industry as well as to establish standards that meet or exceed existing statutory or regulatory requirements. Audits of industry regulatory programs provide a mechanism to uncover weaknesses, heighten awareness of the importance of ethics and allow for improvements to be made and risks reduced. This study audits the Direct Selling Industry's code of ethics as it complies with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG) and establishes a benchmark against which subsequent ethics research in the Direct Selling Industry can be compared.     

Attachment style as a piedictor of sexual attitudes and behavior in late Adolescence

Abstract

This research applied attachment theory to the study of sexual attitudes and behaviors in a sample of late adolescents. Four hundred and seventy heterosexual undergraduate students completed questionnaires assessing attachment (discomfort with closeness; anxiety over relationships). relationship history, communication about sex. sexual self-efficacy and locus of control, and attitudes to condoms. Eight weeks later, participants reported on sexual behaviors occurring during the eight-week interval. and perceived risk of these activities. Both discomfort with closeness and anxiety over relationships were associated with external locus of control for sexual outcomes, and with use of drugs before sexual contact. Anxiety over relationships was linked to unsafe sex and to negative attitudes to condoms, but discomfort with closeness was associated with a more cautious approach to sexual risk-taking. Some results were qualified by gender differences. and by differences between the full sample and those who were sexually active. The findings arc discussed in terms of attachment style and its links with communication and affect regulation.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This study indicates that attachment dimensions are reliably related to many aspects of sexual attitudes and behaviors among late adolescents. Insecure attachment was linked to increased drug use before sexual contact. Anxiety over relationships was also linked to less safe sexual practice, but discomfort with closeness was associated with a tendency for males to be cautious about sexual risk-taking. The results support the utility of the attachment perspective on adolescent sexuality, but also highlight the complex relations between attachment dimensions and sexual outcomes. Future research would benefit from more detailed investigations of the attitudes, emotions, and cognitions which may mediate the link between attachment style and sexual behavior. For example, those who are highly anxious about their relationships may engage in more risky sexual practices because they fear that non-compliance with partners' wishes will jeopardize their relationship; the tendency to engage in drug use before sexual cpntact may reflect their attempts to boost self-confidence or to manage negative mood states. Research into these issues has the potential to explain how attachment insecurity is played out in patterns of sexual activity.     

Arousal,valence, and memory for detail

A common finding in the emotion‐memory literature is that memory is enhanced for positively arousing stimuli and negatively arousing stimuli relative to neutral stimuli. We tested the notion that post‐stimulus elaboration is responsible for these effects. Post‐stimulus elaboration refers to the process of thinking about an event (after its offset) more frequently or more in‐depth. We tested the hypothesis by presenting participants with 36 slides depicting events that varied in arousal (low and high) and valence (positive and negative). The opportunity for elaboration was manipulated by requiring participants, during the inter‐slide interval, to complete addition problems, simply view the addition problems, or view a blank slide. Cued recall memory was tested for central and background details. Based on the post‐stimulus elaboration hypothesis it was expected that the greatest memory decline would occur for the central details of negatively and positively arousing slides when participants were required to complete addition problems (i.e., a distractor task × arousal × detail interaction). Contrary to the hypothesis, we found that filling the inter‐slide interval with a distractor task decreased memory for negative stimuli compared to positive stimuli. This effect was independent of arousal. We also found that arousal increased central detail memory for positive and negative stimuli and background detail memory for positive stimuli but not for negative stimuli. This interaction was explained on the basis of pre‐attentive encoding and cue utilisation. It was concluded that in order to understand the complex relationship between emotion and memory, future studies should include, as a minimum, the variables of valence, arousal, and detail.     

Effectiveness of a mental training program for novice scuba divers

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of a mental training program on state anxiety, respiration rate and performance of novice scuba divers. Forty-four participants enrolled in novice open water diving courses served as participants. An intervention group (n = 15), in addition to scuba training, received an audiotaped mental training program designed to reduce anxiety and improve diving performance. A placebo-control group (n = 15) followed the same procedures except that their audiotape contained general information about scuba diving. A control group (n = 14) received only scuba training. The intervention group reported lower pre-dive scores for cognitive anxiety, higher pre-dive scores for self-confidence, performed better on bail-out and mask removal tasks, and showed lower respiration rate than either control group. Respiration rate and somatic anxiety scores significantly predicted bail-out performance. Respiration rate also predicted mask removal performance. These results suggest that novice divers may benefit from mental training as part of their pre-dive instruction.     

Psychosocial Predictors of Health Status and Health Care Costs among People with Fibromyalgia

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of psychosocial characteristics on health status and the relationship between health status and health care use and costs in a group of people with fibromyalgia (FMS) over a 1-year period. The participants were 600 members of a large health maintenance organization. Demographic characteristics (age, education, employment status, ethnicity and income), need variables (comorbid conditions and baseline health status), and psychosocial variables (self-efficacy, helplessness, coping, and depression) were examined. Better health status at baseline, use of emotion-focused coping, and higher self-efficacy predicted better health status the following year. Higher health care use at baseline, being Caucasian, being older, and having more co-morbid conditions predicted higher health care use at 1 year. Only health care costs at baseline predicted health care costs the following year. Our results indicate that health care use and cost tend to be stable. Intense interventions focused on changing patterns of health care use and methods for coping with the change need to be developed and tested.     

Extraversion,Neuroticism, and Face-Name Learning

Previous research has attempted to relate personality traits to paired-associate learning. We tested name recall as a function of extraversion and neuroticism (as assessed by the Eysenck Personality Inventory) and task difficulty. Face photographs were paired with one of three levels of information: names only (an easy task); names and occupations; or names, occupations, and interests (a difficult task). On the easy and difficult tasks, extraverted subjects recalled more names than did subjects scoring at the median or below on that trait. Contrary to expectations, subjects scoring high on neuroticism recalled more names than did subjects scoring low on that trait. Neither trait was significantly related to recall on the moderately difficult task. There was no interaction between traits for name recall, but there was for interests: Neurotic introverts were significantly impaired at recalling interests, whereas the other subjects recalled interests better than names. These findings thus differ from those of paired-associate learning tasks using words and nonsense syllables.     

Individual Differences in Arousal and Accessibility to Information in Memory

The authors conducted 9 experiments to test the hypothesis (S. Schwartz, 1975) that arousal influences the accessibility of information stored in memory. They investigated the relationship between arousal levels (as indexed by personality types) and the type of stimuli or cues presented during study or test. They predicted that low-arousal individuals (stable extroverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and high-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by semantic stimuli, whereas high-arousal individuals (neurotic introverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and low-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by physical (i.e., graphic, phonetic, or both) stimuli. They tested the arousal-accessibility hypothesis by using a variety of tasks including verbal discrimination, false recognition, cued recall, and paired associates. With the exception of the finding that stable extroverted participants performed better than neurotic introverted participants on an incidental associative-matching task (Experiment 3), the results from the verbal discrimination studies (1-5) did not support the hypothesis. In Experiment 6, the authors tested the hypothesis by using a false-recognition task. False alarms varied as a function of phonetic and semantic stimuli, but personality types were not differentially sensitive to the manipulation. The same was true for the cued-recall studies (Experiments 7 and 8); personality types were not differentially sensitive to the semantic and phonetic stimuli. Experiment 9 (paired-associate learning) was a replication of Schwartz's study. The authors found some support for the Schwartz hypothesis: Extraverted participants were adversely affected by semantic similarity. Overall, the findings did not provide much support for the arousal-accessability hypothesis.