A COMPARISON OF NORTH-AMERICAN AND BRAZILIAN COLLEGE STUDENTs' PERSONALITY PROFILES ON THE 16 PF QUESTIONNAIRE

Le questionnaire de personnalité 16 PF (Forme A) a été traduit en portugais et soumis à un échantillon représentatif des étudiants de Sao Paulo (Brésil), comprenant 770 H et 555 F. Pour chaque facteur, les résultats ont été comparés à ceux d'un échantillon standardisé d'étudiants américains: les étudiants brésiliens sont, en général, moins sociables (A —) et moins enthousiastes (F —), plus soupçonneux (L +) et plus imaginatifs (M +); ils sont également moins conservateurs (Qi +) et plus indépendants (Q2 +). l'analyse de second ordre fait apparaître les Brésiliens comme plus anxieux et plus introvertis, montrant également plus de spontanéité et de créativité que les sujets américains. On constate enfin l'existence de différences entre hommes et femmes, tant à l'intérieur de chaque groupe qu'entre les deux échantillons.     

Can genetic risk information enhance motivation for smoking cessation? An analogue study.

Protection motivation theory and the extended parallel processing model are used to predict the motivational impact of information regarding a genetic susceptibility to heart disease. One hundred ninety-eight smokers read 1 of 3 vignettes: gene positive, gene negative, or standard smoking risk information. Analyses examined whether the impact of type of risk information was moderated by smokers' self-efficacy (SE) levels. Key outcomes were intention to quit and intention to attend an information session about quitting. There were significant main effects of SE and of receiving gene-positive risk information on intentions to quit. There was a significant Risk x SE interaction on intentions to attend an information session. SE was not associated with intentions to attend the information session for smokers in the gene-positive group. Intentions to attend the session were negatively associated with SE for smokers in the lower risk groups. Implications for using genetic risk information to motivate smoking cessation are discussed.     

The effects of valence and arousal on the emotional modulation of time perception: evidence for multiple stages of processing

Previous research has demonstrated that both emotional valence and arousal can influence the subjective experience of time. The current research extends this work by (1) identifying how quickly this emotional modulation of time perception can occur and (2) examining whether valence and arousal have different effects at different stages of perception. These questions were addressed using a temporal bisection task. In each block of this task, participants are trained to distinguish between two different exposure durations. Participants are then shown stimuli presented at a number of durations that fall between the two learned times, and are asked to indicate whether the test stimulus was closer in duration to the shorter or longer learned item. In the current study, participants completed blocks of trials in which the durations were "Short" (100-300 ms) or "Long" (400-1600 ms). Stimuli consisted of neutral photographs as well as four categories of emotional images: high-arousal negative, high-arousal positive, low-arousal negative, and low-arousal positive. In Short blocks, arousing and nonarousing negative images were judged to have been shown for shorter durations than they actually were (i.e., the duration was underestimated); this effect occurred at durations as brief as 133 ms. In Long blocks, the display time for highly arousing negative items was overestimated, whereas durations were underestimated for highly arousing positive items and less arousing negative items. These data suggest that arousal and valence have different effects at different stages of perception, possibly due to the different neural structures involved at each stage of the emotional modulation of time perception.