Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention decreases the prevalence of depression and enhances benefit finding among women under treatment for early-stage breast cancer.

The authors tested effects of a 10-week group cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention among 100 women newly treated for Stage 0-II breast cancer. The intervention reduced prevalence of moderate depression (which remained relatively stable in the control condition) but did not affect other measures of emotional distress. The intervention also increased participants' reports that having breast cancer had made positive contributions to their lives, and it increased generalized optimism. Both remained significantly elevated at a 3-month follow-up of the intervention. Further analysis revealed that the intervention had its greatest impact on these 2 variables among women who were lowest in optimism at baseline. Discussion centers on the importance of examining positive responses to traumatic events--growth, appreciation of life, shift in priorities, and positive affect-as well as negative responses.     

CHILDREN'S PERCEPTIONS OF CHANGES IN SIZE OF TELEVISED IMAGES

Using a Piagétan perspective, this study investigated the ways in which elementary school children perceive changes in the size of a televised image (in this case, a candy bar). The findings suggest that younger children perceive changes in image size from a medium shot to a close-up as changes in the object itself. Children's responses to changes in the televised image parallel their responses to traditional conservation tasks, but conservation of televised images occurs at a later age. In addition, children appear to use different cognitive skills to interpret how a zoom or a cut transforms the size of a televised image. When a zoom is used, children more readily perceive the object as “growing larger.”     

Der Facharzt für Psychotherapeutische Medizin

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Selective attention and stimulus-reinforcer interactions in the pigeon

The study supplies further evidence that non-associative effects and temporal-spatial similarities between certain combinations of cue and consequence cannot explain all instances of stimulus-reinforcer interactions. Pigeons were trained to press a treadle in the presence of a discriminative compound stimulus either to avoid shock or to obtain a food reinforcer. The compound stimulus was composed of diffuse tone and light cues which had identical temporal patterns of onset, duration and offset. With the avoidance schedule the auditory cue acquired more control than the visual cue; however, when food was the reinforcer, the visual cue exerted more control. This pattern of stimulus control on the appetitive schedule did not change if random shocks were also added, even though these shocks were equal in density to the food presentations and equal in magnitude to those used for the avoidance schedule. Other changes in the appetitive procedure, such as making the tone spatially contiguous with food and removing the light in the food hopper, also failed to alter the relative control by the different cues. Prior training with a food reinforcer did not produce any change in the relative control by the two cues when the birds were retrained on the shock-avoidance schedule. The results suggest that some frequently stated alternatives to selective associability are not adequate explanations of this instance of a stimulus-reinforcer interaction.