The effects of yoga on stress and psychological health among employees: an 8- and 16-week intervention study

Background: The stresses of modern work life necessitate effective coping strategies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. Yoga has been found to reduce stress in clinical samples, but studies are needed to examine standard gym yoga classes among functional individuals.

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of 8- and 16-week gym yoga on stress and psychological health.

Design and Method: Ninety individuals reporting moderate-to-high stress were randomly assigned to 16 consecutive weeks of yoga, or to a waitlist crossover group who did not practice yoga for 8 weeks then practiced yoga for 8 weeks. Stress and psychological health variables were assessed at baseline, 8 weeks, and 16 weeks.

Results: Significant reductions in stress and all psychological health measures were found within the Yoga group over 16 weeks. When compared to the control group, yoga practitioners showed significant decreases in stress, anxiety, and general psychological health, and significant increases in well-being. The group who did not practice yoga showed significant decreases in stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia after they crossed over and practiced yoga for 8 weeks.

Conclusions: Gym yoga appears to be effective for stress amelioration and promotion of psychological health among workers experiencing stress.     

Developmental Differences in the Ability to Provide Temporal Information About Repeated Events

Children (n = 372) aged 4–8 years participated in one or four occurrences of a similar event and were interviewed 1 week later. Compared with 85% of children who participated once, less than 25% with repeated experience gave the exact number of times they participated, although all knew they participated more than once. Children with repeated experience were asked additional temporal questions, and there were clear developmental differences. Older children were more able than younger children to judge relative order and temporal position of the four occurrences. They also demonstrated improved temporal memory for the first and last relative to the middle occurrences, while younger children did so only for the first. This is the first systematic demonstration of children's memory for temporal information after a repeated event. We discuss implications for theories of temporal memory development and the practical implications of asking children to provide temporal information. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of GABA modulators on the repeated acquisition of response sequences in squirrel monkeys

The present study investigated the effects of positive and negative GABA(A) modulators under three different baselines of repeated acquisition in squirrel monkeys in which the monkeys acquired a three-response sequence on three keys under a second-order fixed-ratio (FR) schedule of food reinforcement. In two of these baselines, the second-order FR schedule and the discriminative stimuli for the response sequence were manipulated ("chain-strained" and "tandem-strained"). In the third baseline condition, response-independent tail shock was presented during acquisition of the response sequence. All of these baselines maintained high error levels and produced slow rates of acquisition. Under both the chain-strained and tandem-strained conditions, the positive GABA(A) modulator triazolam (0.0032-0.1 mg/kg) and the negative GABA(A) modulators beta-CCE (ethyl-beta-carboline-3-carboxylate; 0.01-1 mg/kg), beta-CCM (methyl-beta-carboline-3-carboxylate; 0.0032-0.1 mg/kg), and FG-7142 (methyl-beta-carboline-3-carboxamide; 0.18-10 mg/kg) dose-dependently decreased overall response rate compared to administration of saline (control). Under the same two conditions, triazolam and the negative GABA(A) modulators also increased the percentage of errors; however, the effects on accuracy frequently depended on the baseline condition and the particular modulator. In contrast, triazolam only decreased errors and enhanced acquisition in the presence of concurrent response-independent tail shock when compared to saline administration under this condition. The neutral GABA(A) modulator, flumazenil (1 mg/kg), had no effect on rate or accuracy of responding when administered alone, but antagonized the rate-decreasing and error-increasing effects produced by the negative GABA(A) modulators. Together, these data suggest that the effects of both the positive and negative GABAA modulators on acquisition can be similar in squirrel monkeys (i.e., both types of modulator may produce rate-decreasing and error-increasing effects) and that their effects on acquisition depend, in part, on the environmental conditions maintaining acquisition.     

Beyond the Issue of Ordination

The alienation of sacramental life as a power to be used over and against the community is the basis of all false clericalism; such clericalism is deeply rooted in sexist symbols of domination and passivity. Women cannot ask to be ordained without questioning fundamentally this concept of clericalism.     

The role of attention in the relationship between inspection time and IQ in children.

This study investigated the possibility that the widely reported relationship between IQ and Inspection Time (IT) in children (e.g. Nettlebeck & Young, 1990) may derive from the involvement of various aspects of attention in both IT and psychometric ability tasks. Forty-nine participants, aged approximately 8–11 years, were given a battery of tests designed to measure different aspects of attention, the Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) intelligence test and a visual IT test. Analysis using multiple regression indicated that, although attention predicted CPM score, IT was still a significant predictor of CPM score after age and the attention measures had been partialled out, indicating that IT scores account for a unique proportion of the variance in CPM scores. Age and IT were significantly (negatively) correlated. This correlation became non-significant once the attention measures had been removed. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies. After a consideration of a number of methodological criticisms, suggestions for further research are outlined.     

Existentialism and family therapy: a neglected perspective

This article describes an approach to therapeutic work with families based more on a value-system about persons in relationship than on an objectively validated scientific view and makes a claim for the contribution of existential philosophy to such endeavour.     

Counselling effectiveness: A critical discussion

Studies of counselling effectiveness are examined critically with respect to the measures they use, their methodological weaknesses, and problems of interpretation. The deficiencies of various measuring devices — including unstructured accounts, structured questionnaires, pre- and post-counselling ratings, physiological indicators, experimental investigations, and social actions effects — are discussed. Many of the experiments are criticised for poor design and over-interpretation of findings. Fundamental methodological problems are also discussed, including the extent to which the effectiveness of counselling can appropriately be examined by existing scientific methods. More knowledge of counselling processes is required before there can be any satisfactory measurement of counselling effects.     

One's Modus Ponens: Modality,Coherence and Logic

Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth‐conditional accounts of meaning towards non‐truth‐conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens. These revisionary, non‐truth‐conditional accounts tout these failures, and the alleged tension between the behavior of modal vocabulary and classical logic, as data in support of their departure from tradition, since the revisionary semantics invalidate some of these patterns. I, instead, offer a semantics for modality with the resources to accommodate the puzzling data while preserving classical logic, thus affirming the tradition that modals express ordinary truth‐conditional content. My account shows that the real lesson of the apparent counterexamples is not the one the critics draw, but rather one they missed: namely, that there are linguistic mechanisms, reflected in the logical form, that affect the interpretation of modal language in a context in a systematic and precise way, which have to be captured by any adequate semantic account of the interaction between discourse context and modal vocabulary. The semantic theory I develop specifies these mechanisms and captures precisely how they affect the interpretation of modals in a context, and do so in a way that both explains the appearance of the putative counterexamples and preserves classical logic.     

Will I Fit in and Do Well? The Importance of Social Belongingness and Self-Efficacy for Explaining Gender Differences in Interest in STEM and HEED Majors

Throughout the world, the labor market is clearly gender segregated. More research is needed to explain women’s lower interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors and particularly to explain men’s lower interest in HEED (Health care, Elementary Education, and the Domestic spheres) majors. We tested self-efficacy (competence beliefs) and social belongingness expectations (fitting in socially) as mediators of gender differences in interest in STEM and HEED majors in a representative sample of 1327 Swedish high school students. Gender differences in interest in STEM majors strongly related to women’s lower self-efficacy for STEM careers and, to a lesser degree, to women’s lower social belongingness expectations with students in STEM majors. Social belongingness expectations also partly explained men’s lower interest in HEED majors, but self-efficacy was not an important mediator of gender differences in interest in HEED. These results imply that interventions designed to lessen gender segregation in the labor market need to focus more on the social belongingness of students in the gender minority. Further, to specifically increase women’s interest in STEM majors, we need to counteract gender stereotypical competence beliefs and assure women that they have what it takes to handle STEM careers.     

On the interpretation of working memory span in adults

Experimental research into children's working memory span has shown that retention duration contributes substantially to span performance, while processing efficiency need not be related to concurrent memory load (Towse, Hitch, & Hutton, 1998). These findings have been used to argue for a model of working memory span that emphasizes time-based forgetting rather than the popular resource-sharing or tradeoff framework. The present paper considers whether adults perform working memory span tasks in a qualitatively different way. Data from reading span and operation span tasks show that adults' performance can be distinguished from that of children, but also that a task-switching model of working memory span can explain some important aspects of performance.