Romantic involvement often reduces men's testosterone levels--but not always: the moderating role of extrapair sexual interest

Testosterone (T) appears to facilitate what biologists refer to as mating effort--the investment of time and energy into same-sex competition and mate-seeking behavior. Multiple studies show that men who are romantically involved (i.e., are paired) have lower T than single men, which may be due to a facultative adjustment by men of T levels in response to lower demands for mating effort. The authors proceeded on the basis of the idea that men who retain interests in sexual opportunities with women other than a primary partner continue to dedicate more time and energy to mating effort when romantically paired, and so they predicted that the association between relationship status and T depends on men's extrapair sexual interests. Study 1 used the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory to measure extrapair sexual interests, whereas Study 2 used a broader measure to examine this interaction. Both studies found support for it. These results have implications for an understanding of the biosocial regulation of men's behavior in romantic relationships.     

Quantifying Idiodynamics: A Process Approach to Personality Psychology

Rosenzweig's (1950) concept of idiodynamics is presented, and the importance of time in applied idiodynamics is stressed. Time-series analyses are proposed as one method for realizing the potential of idiodynamics for understanding and modeling individual lives. Building on this, and incorporating Cattell's (1966) notion of the data box, a process approach to personality research is proposed. This approach begins with idiodynamic analyses at the level of individual lives in an effort to identify patterns or themes, then proceeds to examine individual differences in the patterns or themes so identified. Examples of applying this process approach to personality questions are provided. These include identification of cycles in daily moods, assessing the link between each individual's moods and the events in his/her daily life, and the relation between repressive coping style and the experience of and memory for affect-charged life events. Conclusions emphasize how this approach can retain the appeal of the dynamic while maintaining the precision and rule-governed discourse afforded by quantification.     

Susceptibility to Affect: A Comparison of Three Personality Taxonomies

This study had three major goals: to clarify the relationships between Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies, to show that traits from these taxonomies predict differential sensitivities to emotional states, and to explore the relationship between sensitivity to an emotional state and how much that state is actually experienced. A factor analysis of traits from Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies resulted in three factors that were named reward sensitivity, impulsivity-thrill seeking, and punishment sensitivity. These factors predicted a global measure of affect, emotional reactions to a laboratory mood induction, and self-reported affect in daily life. Generally, reward sensitivity predicted positive, but not negative emotions, whereas punishment sensitivity predicted negative, but not positive emotions. Impulsivity-thrill seeking predicted few emotions in either context. Coherence among the relationships found across methodological contexts suggests that the traits that predict emotion susceptibilities in the laboratory similarly predict emotional experience in ongoing daily life.     

Ropressive Coping Style and the Experience and Recall of Emotion: A Naturalistic Study of Daily Affect

ABSTRACT Research shows that people characterized as repressors display inhibited recall for unpleasant memories. In this study, the relationship between repressive coping style and the recall of affect near the time of the experience was compared to delayed recall. An experience sampling technique was used to collect affect data twice daily for 4 weeks. Repressive coping style was found to be related to low levels of average daily unpleasant affect and lowered delayed recall of unpleasant affect. Unlike repressors, high anxious individuals overestimated unpleasant affect during delayed recall. Repressors did not exhibit isolation of the dominant unpleasant affect from nondominant unpleasant affect in daily reporting. The overall pattern of results suggests that the effect of repressive coping style is to diminish the encoding of all unpleasant affect, whereas trait anxiety appears to promote overestimation in the recall of unpleasant affect.     

Illusory displacement of a moving trace with respect to the grid during oscilloscope motion

Observers report that a trace streak, which follows a sinusoidal path, moves vertically with respect to the oscilloscope’s grid when an oscilloscope is oscillated in the vertical plane. The vertical component of the trace streak motion with respect to the grid is illusory. This illusion is stable across a limited range of illumination and physical motion conditions. We hypothesize that this illusion is based on the manner in which the visual system calculates the vertical location of the grid and the trace: the trace location is determined on a moment-to-moment basis, whereas the grid tends to be seen in its average vertical position. The results of two experiments indicate that this hypothesis can account, at least partially, for the illusion. The illusion may have practical implications for pilots or navigators who track target blips on radar screens in moving aircraft.     

The assessment of empathy in early childhood

In much of the literature on empathy in young children, researchers have assessed empathy with the FASTE (Feshbach and Roe Affective Situations Test for Empathy). Consequently, much of the literature on early affective responsiveness and the role of empathy in prosocial development is dependent on the validity of the FASTE. However, examination of the literature on gender differences in young children's empathy has suggested a methodological flaw in picture/story techniques such as the FASTE; children's responses to these instruments appear to vary as a function of the interaction of sex of experimenter with sex of subject. In the present study, we empirically examined the effects of sex of experimenter on children's responses to the FASTE. Eighty preschool children were randomly assigned by sex to four male and four female experimenters and were administered the FASTE. Children scored higher when interviewed by a same-sex experimenter, especially if only the stories that the children comprehended (the happy/sad episodes, not the anger or fear episodes) were examined. The implications of the findings for interpreting the literature on children's empathy (especially gender differences in empathy) are discussed.     

Depression,restraint and eating behavior

Contrary to the belief that weight loss is a principal symptom of depression, several recent studies have suggested that certain people gain rather than lose weight when depressed. The present experiment concerned the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the eating behavior of high- and low-restraint persons. Sixty-eight female undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three groups each designed to induce a different mood state (depressed, neutral or elated), and were classified as high or low restraint based on their responses to a questionnaire. During the mood induction procedure subjects were provided with the opportunity to eat. High-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood ate significantly more than high-restraint persons induced into neutral or elated moods, and more than low-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood. This effect was most prominent among subjects who scored high on the weight-fluctuation factor of the restraint scale. There was no evidence that this effect occurred among subjects who scored high on the concern for dieting factor. The role of emotional arousal on the self-control over eating behavior of high weight-fluctuation persons, and the implications of these findings for the evaluation of depression were discussed.     

Effects of instructions and biofeedback on EEG-alpha production and the effects of EEG-alpha biofeedback training for controlling arousal in a subsequent stressful situation

In Phase One, 44 subjects participated in a 2 (instructions to increase alpha, no instructions to increase alpha) × 2 (alpha biofeedback, no alpha biofeedback) factorial experiment. Results indicated that increases in alpha production were due to instructions to increase alpha and that biofeedback had no effect on alpha production. In Phase Two, the 44 subjects from Phase One were exposed to a threat of shock whereas 11 additional subjects in a control condition were not. The design employed in Phase Two was a 2 (previous instructions and stress, no previous instructions and stress) × 2 (previous biofeedback and stress, no previous biofeedback and stress) plus 1 (no previous instructions/no previous biofeedback, no stress). Results indicated that the threat of shock was effective in increasing arousal (as measured by heart rate and skin resistance) but previous EEG-alpha biofeedback training was not effective in helping subjects decrease arousal while in the stressful situation. The results indicate that it is the instructions (and related information concerning alpha) rather than the biofeedback that is critical in alpha biofeedback training and that this training does not appear to have utility for controlling arousal under stress.     

Conditions on rate normalization in speech perception

Recent work by Summerfield (1975) and others indicates that a listener’s phonemic judgments may vary with the utterance rate of prior context. In particular, if a phonemic distinction is signaled by a temporal cue such as voice onset time (VOT), faster utterance rates tend to shift the phoneme boundary toward smaller values of that cue. The listener thus appears to “normalize” temporal cues according to utterance rate. In the present experiment, subjects identified syllables varying in VOT ([ga]-[k^ha]) following either a slow or a fast version of the phrase “Teddy hears_ _ _ _ .” Typical normalization effects were observed when the precursor phrase and target syllable had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult male vocal tract. However, a reversal of the typical pattern (i.e., a shift in the perceived voicing boundary towardlarger values of VOT with an increased utterance rate) occurred when the precursor and target had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult female vocal tract. Both normalization and “reverse” normalization effects were reduced or eliminated under several conditions of source change between precursor and target. These conditions included a change in fundamental frequency, a change in implied vocal-tract size (as reflected in an upward or downward scaling of formant frequencies), or both.     

A SELF-EVALUATION TOKEN SYSTEM versus AN EXTERNAL EVALUATION TOKEN SYSTEM ALONE IN A RESIDENTIAL SETTING WITH PREDELINQUENT YOUTH1

This study compared the effects of self-evaluation and adult-dispensed tokens on room-cleaning behavior of six predelinquent youths in a residential token-economy setting. The self-evaluation token system proved to be as effective as the external adult-administered system in increasing room-cleaning behavior and was more effective in maintaining performance after contingencies were withdrawn. The self-evaluation token system increased resistance to extinction, compared to the external token system, and appeared to be a useful component for a traditional token-economy system.