Creative ways to well-being: Reappraisal inventiveness in the context of anger-evoking situations

Neuroscientific studies in the field of creativity mainly focused on tasks drawing on basic verbal divergent thinking demands. This study took a step further by investigating brain mechanisms in response to other types of creative behavior, involving more “real-life” creativity demands in the context of emotion regulation and well-being. Specifically, functional patterns of EEG alpha activity were investigated while participants were required to generate as many and as different ways as possible to reappraise presented anger-eliciting situations in a manner that reduces their anger. Cognitive reappraisal involves some of the same cognitive processes as in conventional verbal creativity tasks, inasmuch as it requires an individual to inhibit or disengage from an emotional event, to shift attention between different perspectives, and to flexibly adopt new solutions. To examine whether alpha oscillations during cognitive reappraisal are different from those during conventional creative ideation, the EEG was also assessed during performance of the Alternative Uses task, requiring individuals to generate as many and as original uses of an object as possible. While cognitive reappraisal was associated with a similar pattern of alpha power as observed in conventional verbal creative ideation, the former yielded significantly stronger alpha power increases at prefrontal sites, along with lower alpha increases at more posterior cortical sites, indicating higher cognitive control and less spontaneous imaginative thought processes in the generation of effective strategies to regulate an ongoing negative emotional state.     

Girls’ Stuff,boys’ stuff and mental rotation: fourth graders rotate faster with gender-congruent stimuli

Males outperform females in mental-rotation for various reasons, e.g. stimuli characteristics. This study tested the hypothesis that girls and boys solve mental-rotation tests with female- or respectively male-stereotyped objects faster and more correctly. 116 fourth-graders solved a chronometric mental-rotation test with either female- or male-stereotyped action-based objects as stimulus material and reported their solution strategies and familiarity with handling the objects in real life. Boys reacted faster than girls only in the male-stimuli condition, while gender differences were inversed in the female-stimuli condition. All children were faster with gender-congruent material, probably provoked by gender-schematic processing or stereotype lift effects. Furthermore, analytic solving strategies appeared as efficient as holistic strategies in gender-congruent conditions, while holistic strategies were more advantageous only in gender-incongruent conditions. The congruence of stimulus material and gender best predicted children’s reaction time. Practical implications are considered regarding the importance of diverse and gender-equalised material to assess mental-rotation skills.     

Perception of men's personal qualities and prospect of employment as a function of facial hair

The present study investigated the contribution of men's facial hair to impression formation. Participants evaluated photographs of one of four versions of a man--clean shaven, mustached, goateed, or bearded--on a 7-point scale. In Study 1, participants were 106 Brazilian undergraduates (68 men and 38 women). Beardedness was associated with older age, greater responsibility, and leftist political ideas. In Study 2, respondents were 50 Brazilian personnel managers (28 men and 22 women) who made hiring decisions at different companies in the city of Sa? Paulo. Personnel managers clearly preferred clean shaven over bearded, mustached, or goateed men as prospective employees. In a hiring situation for a conservative occupation, a man who signals disposition to conform to rules may be preferred by personnel managers over another who signals nonconformity.     

Acute stressors and cortisol responses: a theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research

This meta-analysis reviews 208 laboratory studies of acute psychological stressors and tests a theoretical model delineating conditions capable of eliciting cortisol responses. Psychological stressors increased cortisol levels; however, effects varied widely across tasks. Consistent with the theoretical model, motivated performance tasks elicited cortisol responses if they were uncontrollable or characterized by social-evaluative threat (task performance could be negatively judged by others), when methodological factors and other stressor characteristics were controlled for. Tasks containing both uncontrollable and social-evaluative elements were associated with the largest cortisol and adrenocorticotropin hormone changes and the longest times to recovery. These findings are consistent with the animal literature on the physiological effects of uncontrollable social threat and contradict the belief that cortisol is responsive to all types of stressors.     

Amount of Learning and Signal Stability Modulate Emergence of Structure and Iconicity in Novel Signaling Systems

Iterated language learning experiments that explore the emergence of linguistic structure in the laboratory vary considerably in methodological implementation, limiting the generalizability of findings. Most studies also restrict themselves to exploring the emergence of combinatorial and compositional structure in isolation. Here, we use a novel signal space comprising binary auditory and visual sequences and manipulate the amount of learning and temporal stability of these signals. Participants had to learn signals for meanings differing in size, shape, and brightness; their productions in the test phase were transmitted to the next participant. Across transmission chains of 10 generations each, Experiment 1 varied how much learning of auditory signals took place, and Experiment 2 varied temporal stability of visual signals. We found that combinatorial structure emerged only for auditory signals, and iconicity emerged when the amount of learning was reduced, as an opportunity for rote-memorization hampers the exploration of the iconic affordances of the signal space. In addition, compositionality followed an inverted u-shaped trajectory raising across several generations before declining again toward the end of the transmission chains. This suggests that detection of systematic form-meaning linkages requires stable combinatorial units that can guide learners toward the structural properties of signals, but these combinatorial units had not yet emerged in these unfamiliar systems. Our findings underscore the importance of systematically manipulating training conditions and signal characteristics in iterated language learning experiments to study the interactions between the emergence of iconicity, combinatorial and compositional structure in novel signaling systems.     

Promoting Mental Health in Disadvantaged Preschoolers: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of Teacher Training Effects

The literature provides solid documentation of the negative consequences of poor psychosocial functioning and behavioral problems in early childhood. Children facing economic disadvantage are at higher risk for poor socio-emotional development and problem behaviors, which draws attention to the need for prevention targeted at this risk group. The aim of our study was to analyze the impact of an evidence-based teacher-training program, the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY-TCM), on the behavior of economically disadvantaged Portuguese children. Participants were 1030 children aged 3–6 years, from 65 preschool classrooms selected for their high percentage of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The study followed an experimental randomized controlled between-group design, with pre- and post-intervention assessments. Teachers in the experimental group attended the IY-TCM program, implemented in six monthly workshops, and four sessions of individual in-class support. Children outcomes were evaluated with the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales—2nd Edition (Social Skills and Problem Behavior scales). After the intervention, preschoolers in the IY-TCM classrooms showed more improvements in their social skills and more decreases in problem behavior. Children with lower levels of social skills (high risk) at pre-intervention and those coming from families in economic need showed greater improvements in social skills, but these effects were not observed for problem behavior. Results support the growing evidence of the effectiveness of the IY-TCM as a stand-alone, non-adapted program in a Portuguese cultural context, which can play a protective role in children’s lives and thus bridge the gap between children coming from different economic backgrounds.     

Illness disclosure and mental health among women with HIV/AIDS

The current study examines two contrasting models of the relationship between illness disclosure and mental health among an ethnically‐diverse group of women with HIV/AIDS. In the first, and commonly accepted model, illness disclosure predicts enhanced mental health status. In the second or alternate model, based on the stigmatization that accompanies HIV/AIDS infection, illness disclosure predicts poorer mental health. We also explore an alternate interpretation for this second model, namely that the mental health status of participants is predictive of their levels of disclosure. A total of 176 women from three major ethnic groups were interviewed and assessed during the baseline visit for a comprehensive longitudinal study. Results showed that these women constituted a highly‐disclosed population; over one‐third of them had disclosed their HIV status to their entire social networks. Contrary to expectation, disclosure was unrelated to mental health among the African‐American (n = 72) and European‐American (n = 47) women. Among the Latina women (n = 57), however, greater disclosure was related to higher levels of depression, psychological distress, and reported pain. Regression analyses controlling for age, education, and illness severity showed that disclosure makes a small but independent contribution to the prediction of mental health status. Thus, among the Latinas, the data were consistent with both the stigma model and the hypothesis that greater distress predicts wider disclosure. General patterns of disclosure are described and possible explanations for the inconsistent relationships found between disclosure and mental health among the three ethnic groups are considered. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Applying Schema Theory to Intimate Aggression: Individual and Gender Differences in Representation of Contexts and Goals1

This study addressed individual and gender differences in the availability and content of memory representations of contexts and goals for physical aggression use in intimate relationships among university students. The contribution of victimization by one's partner to such representations was examined as well. Interaction effects in both quantitative and qualitative results indicated that perpetrator men differed from nonviolent men in measures of accessibility, providing more responses faster, and from nonviolent subjects and perpetrator women in their most frequently supplied categories of explanation for intimate aggression. Findings also provided indirect support for women's defensive uses of aggression, and evidence for the influence of emotion on memory access and content, including suppression of response time among female victims and male nonviolent victims.     

Social-Evaluative Threat and Proinflammatory Cytokine Regulation: An Experimental Laboratory Investigation

ABSTRACT— This study experimentally tested whether a stressor characterized by social-evaluative threat (SET), a context in which the self can be judged negatively by others, would elicit increases in proinflammatory cytokine activity and alter the regulation of this response. This hypothesis was derived in part from research on immunological responses to social threat in nonhuman animals. Healthy female participants were assigned to perform a speech and a math task in the presence or absence of an evaluative audience (SET or non-SET, respectively). As hypothesized, stimulated production of the proinflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) increased from baseline to poststressor in the SET condition, but was unchanged in the non-SET condition. Further, the increases in TNF-α production correlated with participants' cognitive appraisals of being evaluated. Additionally, the ability of glucocorticoids to shut down the inflammatory response was decreased in the SET condition. These findings underscore the importance of social evaluation as a threat capable of eliciting proinflammatory cytokine activity and altering its regulation.