Receiving and giving support: Effects on relationships and well-being

Sixty-five subjects reported amount of social support given and received, and satisfaction with relationships where support exchanges took place. Negative affect from relationships, psychological symptoms, and happiness were also measured. Multiple regression analyses showed that receiving and giving support was related to some negative feelings toward the relationships concerned. Receiving support was also related to inflated anxiety symptoms. Effects of receiving support on guilt and dependent feelings were moderated by relationship satisfaction. Effects of giving support on anxiety were also moderated by relationship satisfaction. Extraversion and satisfaction with relationships predicted happiness. There were some individual differences in support exchanges. Extraverts gave more support. Women received more support whereas conscientious people received less.     

Self-organized criticality and learning a new coordination task

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that a self-organized criticality (SOC) practice condition would have a higher improvement rate in performance outcome than a typical progressive difficulty of practice regimen. The roller ball task was used where participants undergo a phase transition from failure to successful performance after sufficient practice. The findings from two experiments showed that the SOC condition had the fastest rate of improvement and the highest performance success level. The success probability in the SOC practice regime was close to the theoretically predicted value of 50%. It appears that the SOC practice condition - by scaling task difficulty to skill level in a self-controlled adaptive strategy - facilitates the learning of new movement coordination pattern by keeping the participant close to the parameter region of the transition of the movement dynamics.     

Correlations between Dual-Pathway White Matter Alterations and Language Impairment in Patients with Aphasia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Neuropsychology Review - While converging evidence suggests linguistic roles of white matter tracts, detailed associations between white matter alterations of dual pathways and language abilities...     

Effects of Gender and Appearance Comparisons on Associations Between Media-Based Appearance Pressure and Disordered Eating: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Sex Roles - Appearance pressure from mass media and appearance social comparisons have been implicated in theory and research on disordered eating. However, mediating effects of upward and downward...     

Life events,social support and depression amongst Taiwanese housewives

Eighty-five community housewives in a Taiwanese city were surveyed. Multiple regression analysis indicated that age, life events and social support were found to relate to depression symptomatology. Younger housewives reported more depression symptoms than their older counterparts. Life events were related to depression, while social support protected women from depression.     

青少年父母依恋与生活满意度的关系:心理素质的中介作用

采用青少年父母依恋问卷、中学生心理素质问卷(简化版)和生活满意度量表在中国七个省(市)调查1953名初一至高三的学生,通过结构方程模型和bootstrap法考察青少年父亲依恋和母亲依恋对生活满意度的影响及其差异以及心理素质的中介作用。结果表明:(1)青少年父亲依恋、母亲依恋、心理素质和生活满意度之间两两显著正相关。(2)控制性别和学段后,心理素质在父亲依恋、母亲依恋与生活满意度间起部分中介作用。(3)父亲依恋和母亲依恋对生活满意度的影响无显著差异。     

The Inversion Effect for Chinese Characters is Modulated by Radical Organization

In studies of visual object recognition, strong inversion effects accompany the acquisition of expertise and imply the involvement of configural processing. Chinese literacy results in sensitivity to the orthography of Chinese characters. While there is some evidence that this orthographic sensitivity results in an inversion effect, and thus involves configural processing, that processing might depend on exact orthographic properties. Chinese character recognition is believed to involve a hierarchical process, involving at least two lower levels of representation: strokes and radicals. Radicals are grouped into characters according to certain types of structure, i.e. left–right structure, top–bottom structure, or simple characters with only one radical by itself. These types of radical structures vary in both familiarity, and in hierarchical level (compound versus simple characters). In this study, we investigate whether the hierarchical-level or familiarity of radical-structure has an impact on the magnitude of the inversion effect. Participants were asked to do a matching task on pairs of either upright or inverted characters with all the types of structure. Inversion effects were measured based on both reaction time and response sensitivity. While an inversion effect was observed in all 3 conditions, the magnitude of the inversion effect varied with radical structure, being significantly larger for the most familiar type of structure: characters consisting of 2 radicals organized from left to right. These findings indicate that character recognition involves extraction of configural structure as well as radical processing which play different roles in the processing of compound characters and simple characters.     

书法训练对军校大学生的情绪调节

本研究旨在探讨书法训练对军校大学生不良情绪的调节效应.被试为90名男性军校大学生,将其分为毛笔组、钢笔组和对照组三个实验组,毛笔组和钢笔组被试在一个月内按每日30分钟分别进行毛笔书写和钢笔书写训练,对照组完全休息,分别在实验前、中和后作SCL-90症状评量表的评定.结果表明毛笔组组内前后三次SCL-90总分和各因子分均呈明显下降趋势,总分和强迫症、人际关系、偏执、精神状态等四项因子三次间存在显著性差异,而钢笔组和对照组前后三次SCL-90总分和各因子分均无明显变化.书法训练对军校大学生在紧张环境下的不良情绪有较好的调节效果.