It was intuitive,and it felt good: a daily diary study on how people feel when making decisions

ABSTRACT

In daily life, people make plenty of decisions, either intuitively or based on analysis. So far, research has examined when decision-making leads to correct or biased outcomes. In the present study, we adopted a different perspective and explored how decision-making is associated with how people feel. In an observational study, 134 healthy participants retrospectively reported on six evenings which decisions they had made during that day (total N?=?3,850 decisions). They were also asked to indicate how they had felt before/after each decision. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that (a) people reported having felt better prior to intuitive as compared to analytical decisions, (b) people reported having felt better after as compared to before the decision, and (c) this increase in positive feeling was more pronounced for intuitive decisions. The latter two associations were robust to statistically controlling for the life domain in which the decisions occurred, the decisions’ importance and ease, and daily mood. The retrospective design and the single-item measure of mood are among the limitations of this study. Altogether, the results are in line with the idea that making everyday life decisions intuitively makes people feel good.     

Psychoneurocardiology: Psychosomatic and somatopsychic approaches to hypertension research

We introduce the field of psychoneurocardiology, and cite examples of research into psychosomatic and somatopsychic bases for hypertensive development. Beta-adrenergic hyperreactivity (a possible precursor of hypertension), as indexed by electrocardiographic T-wave amplitude suppression, was greater during active than passive coping tasks. The rise in tonic mean arterial blood pressure in normotensives over a 19-month period was a joint function of self-reported daily stress and baroreceptor-dependent pain dampening (as determined by the PRES method of noninvasive controlled carotid baroreceptor manipulation). The latter finding provides support for the learned model of hypertension. In this model, phasic blood pressure increases stimulate the baroreceptors, which in turn dampen pain and stress. The long-term effect of this relief is initially to increase the frequency of such phasic increases, and eventually to produce a tonic elevation in blood pressure.     

Patterns of parent perception differentiating clinic from nonclinic children

The responses of 393 parents of clinic-referred and welladjusted children to the Children's Behavior Checklist were analyzed. Of 154 items, 66 proved to discriminate between clinic and nonclinic groups. Many of these items were reflective of the general dimensions of Competence and Impulsivity yielded by an overall factor analysis. More specific patterns of factors emerged for subgroups of parents. Interparent agreement in perception was found to be a complex function of a child's age, sex, and adjustment level. The implications of the results for clinical assessment of children and families and for studies of parentchild relations are discussed.     

Parenting style as a mediator between children's negative emotionality and problematic behavior in early childhood

Negative emotionality is considered to be the core of the difficult temperament concept (J. E. Bates, 1989; R. L. Shiner, 1998). In this correlational study, the authors examined whether the relations between children's negative emotionality and problematic behavior (internalizing and externalizing) were partially mediated by parenting style (authoritative and authoritarian) in a community sample of 196 3-year-old children and their mothers. The authors assessed maternal perception of child negative emotionality using the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (M. K. Rothbart, S. A. Ahadi, K. L. Hershey, & P. Fisher, 2001) and assessed problematic child behavior by means of maternal report using the Child Behavior Checklist (T. M. Achenbach, 1992). The results showed that the relations between child negative emotionality and internalizing and externalizing behaviors were partially mediated by mothers' authoritative parenting style. Moreover, when the authors used confirmatory factor analysis to decontaminate possible overlap in item content between measures assessing temperament and problematic behavior, the association between negative emotionality and internalizing behavior was fully mediated by authoritative parenting.     

Young driving learners’ intention to use a handheld or hands-free mobile phone when driving

This paper presents a survey investigating young driving learners’ intention to use a handheld or hands-free mobile phone when driving. A sample of 164 young driving learners completed a questionnaire based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), which measured people’s intentions to use mobile phone while driving in handheld condition or hands-free condition, along with their attitudes towards the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control. The regression analysis models revealed that the TPB was able to explain 43% and 48% variance in hands-free mobile phone use intention and handheld mobile phone use intention, respectively, with perceived behavioral control emerging as the strongest predictor. In addition, TPB components, usage frequency and perceived risk were more dependent on gender than age. These results have several theoretical and practical implications. In particular, interventions should emphasize on the risk of hands-free mobile phone use when driving for young drivers, especially for young male drivers.     

A construction based analysis of child directed speech

The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item‐based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item‐based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item‐based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them.     

Faith,reason and knowledge

Valueware: Technology, Humanity and Organization Christopher Barnatt Praeger Publishers, Praeger Studies on the 21st Century, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT. 1998, 228 pp, references, chapter notes and index. Paperback, ISBN: 0–275–967 15–8, $22.95 USD

Looking Down the Road: A Systems Approach to Futures Studies Douglas Raybeck Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect Heights, IL. 2000, 131 pp., appendix, bibliography and index. Paperback, ISBN: 1–57766–116–8, $10.95 USD     

Telepsychiatry services at a tribally run behavioral health clinic

Telepsychiatry provides a helpful resource to rural, poor, and isolated communities for whom traditional psychiatry may not be an option. Focusing on a tribally run behavioral health clinic, this article describes the clinic's transition from traditional psychiatry to telepsychiatry and then delineates benefits and challenges of telepsychiatry in this setting. Telepsychiatry is recommended based on the experiences of this clinic serving a large southwestern Native American community. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Exposure to a stressor produces a long lasting enhancement of fear learning in rats

In contextual fear conditioning, footshock is given in a context, and re-exposure to this context elicits the conditional defensive response of freezing, a reliable behavioral index of conditional fear. Normally, the amount of contextual freezing is directly proportional to the number of shocks an animal receives in the context. However, pre-exposure to a stressor can produce an enhancement in conditional freezing. Pre-exposure to repeated footshock in one context produces an enhancement of conditional freezing to cues associated with a single shock in a second distinct context. This model of stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) can be utilized to study how stress affects learning of future aversive events. The experiments in this paper characterize the magnitude and longevity of SEFL. In the first experiment, the number of footshocks given during the pre-exposure session was varied and conditional fear to the single shock was assessed. Pre-exposure to 1 shock did not produce an enhancement in fear learning in the second context, but pre-exposure to 4 or 15 shocks did. The time-course of the enhancement was examined in the next two experiments. These experiments show that SEFL persists for at least 3 months.     

Job Seeking Among Retirees Seeking Bridge Employment

Using a sample of recent retirees, the study described here sought to test the general propositions of the Wanberg, Watt, and Rumsey (1996) model by (a) including specific variables that are likely to be relevant to older adults seeking work after retirement (bridge employment) and (b) integrating more recent variable groups (e.g., situational constraints) suggested by recent research (e.g., Wanberg, Kanfer, & Rotundo (1999) and Kanfer, Wanberg, & Kantrowitz (2001) . Generally, the results support the efficacy of the Wanberg et al. model to predict job seeking among this group. Biographical variables such as older worker job search constraints, self-evaluations (e.g., job seeking self-efficacy), and motive/social variables (e.g., social support) were related to job seeking. Some of these, however, were not in the expected direction. Similarities and differences between "regular" job seeking and bridge employment job seeking are discussed.