The impact of personality on the reporting of unfounded symptoms and illness.

This study examined the role of personality in the reporting of symptoms and illness not supported by underlying pathology. After assessment of the Big Five personality factors, 276 healthy volunteers were inoculated with a common cold virus. On each of the following 5 days, objective indicators of pathology, self-reported symptoms, and self-reported illness onset were assessed. Neuroticism was directly associated with reports of unfounded (without a physiological basis) symptoms in individuals at baseline and postinoculation in those with and without colds. Neuroticism was also indirectly associated with reports of unfounded illness through reports of more symptoms. Openness to Experience was associated with reporting unfounded symptoms in those with verifiable colds, whereas Conscientiousness was associated with reporting unfounded illness in those who were not ill.     

Control Beliefs and Faith as Stress Moderators for Korean American Versus Caucasian American Protestants

Examined relationships among negative life events, four locus of control attributions (Internality, Powerful Others, Chance, and God Control), and psychological distress for Korean American versus Caucasian American Protestants. Negative events and Powerful Others beliefs were positively related to distress, whereas Internality was negatively related to distress. Ethnicity and God Control interacted: The relationship between God Control beliefs and anxiety was negative for Caucasians but positive for Koreans. Three-way interactions (Ethnicity × Locus of Control × Negative Events) also emerged. As Caucasians' Powerful Others beliefs increased, the positive relationship between negative events and depression became stronger; Koreans' Powerful Others beliefs had no such effect. As Caucasians' God Control beliefs increased, the negative event–depression relationship changed from positive to negative; the reverse was true for Koreans. Findings support the value of assessing ethnoculture and religiousness in stressful life events research.     

Do animals have rights?

A right, unlike an interest, is a valid claim, or potential claim, made by a moral agent, under principles that govern both the claimant and the target of the claim. Animals cannot be the bearers of rights because the concept of rights is essentially human; it is rooted in and has force within a human moral world.     

Personality in panic disorder with agoraphobia: a Rorschach study.

In this study, we tested several hypotheses derived from self psychology (Diamond, 1987) regarding personality features of patients suffering from panic disorder and agoraphobia (PDA). PDA patients are thought to suffer from a deficit in negative affect-regulating capacity, surrounded by defenses such as avoidance, repression, denial, and reaction formation against dependency needs. These defenses are thought to lead to a greatly impoverished affective life. The Rorschach Comprehensive System was used to assess the personality features of avoidance, restricted affective life, and reaction formation against dependency needs. We found evidence for the presence of a highly avoidant information-processing style (86% of protocols had lambda [L] greater than .99) and a constricted affective life (low weighted sum color [WSumC] and low affective ratio [Afr]). Our results were consistent with the hypothesis of reaction formation against dependency needs (low food content [Fd]). Findings are discussed in light of studies that found a high incidence of avoidant personality disorder in PDA patients.     

Very long-term memory for knowledge acquired at school and university

Recent research into the very long-term retention of knowledge originally acquired during the process of formal education at school and university has demonstrated that such knowledge may be retained at high levels over very long retention intervals. The pattern of retention typically takes the form of a comparatively short period marked by forgetting (lasting between 1 and 6 years) followed by a long period of stable retention (usually longer than 30 years). For courses taken at school the level attained over a series of courses (e.g. in learning a foreign language or studying mathematics) is an important determinant of long-term retention. Students who attain moderate or advanced levels of learning show high levels of retention with very little forgetting, whereas students who attain only lower levels of learning show steady forgetting, and after a period of 6 years retain very little knowledge. Similar patterns of retention are present for university students taking single courses in science and literature subjects, and students with higher grades retain more knowledge although the reliable relationship here, between grade obtained and amount remembered, is weak and accounts for only small portions of the variance in retention. Taken together these findings suggest that the retention of knowledge acquired through formal education persists over longer periods of time than popularly believed. Recent theory proposes that these long-lasting effects of education are partly related to the types of learning schedules followed during acquisition and partly related to the nature of the to-be-acquired knowledge, and to whether or not knowledge can be represented schematically.     

Syllogizing ret: Applying formal logic in rationalemotive therapy

In this paper, it is shown how formal (deductive) logic can be applied to rational-emotive therapy. Several formal methodologies or techniques of belief system analysis are presented and illustrated.     

Childhood precursors of adolescent drug use: a longitudinal analysis.

Childhood and adolescent intrapersonal and interpersonal influences on older adolescents' drug use were examined with an interactional approach. Data were obtained when subjects were 5-10, 13-18, and 15-20 years old. Latent-variable confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the fit of the variables to the latent constructs. Next, a structural model was hypothesized and tested to assess the influences of childhood and earlier adolescent factors on later adolescent drug use. Childhood aggression and parental sociopathy affected drug use in late adolescence. Unconventionality during early and middle adolescence had an important and pervasive impact on all aspects of middle and late adolescent functioning. Finally, both intrapersonal and interpersonal factors from childhood and early adolescence affected self-drug use during middle and late adolescence.     

Chunking by Proximal Arm Cues Facilitates Rats′ Performance in the Radial Maze

Three experiments showed that training rats to chunk a 16-arm radial maze into striped and wire mesh (gridded) arms facilitates their spatial working memory for arm locations. Rats were trained to visit eight unblocked baited arms of a 16-arm radial maze (half-maze run) and then were exposed to the complete maze to sample the remaining eight baited arms (whole-maze run). The initially exposed eight arms were either all striped or all gridded on alternating trials for half the rats (Arm Cue Relevant, ACR group). The remaining rats (Arm Cue Irrelevant, ACI group) received a mixture of striped and gridded arms on their half-maze runs. Following this phase of segmented trials, all rats were exposed only to all 16 arms over a series of trials in the first two experiments. In the third experiment, the initial eight arms were either all striped or all gridded on alternating trials for all rats. During some second, whole-maze runs, however, all arms contained the same proximal cue. ACR rats made fewer reentries than ACI rats in all phases of all experiments. This difference was maintained over increasing delays between half- and whole-maze runs in the first experiment, changes in arm cue and blocking configurations in the second experiment, and removal of differential arm cues in the third experiment.     

Body dissatisfaction,eating disorders,and depression: A developmental perspective

McCarthy (1990) contends that a cultural ideal of thinness (the thin ideal) causes depression and eating disorders to occur more frequently in women than men. She believes eating disorders are a way of coping with depression and hypothesizes that the thin ideal has its greatest impact during puberty when sexual attractiveness becomes important and changes in physical appearance increase the discrepancy between the adolescent girl's actual and ideal body image. The present study used a cross-sectional design of 5th, 8th, and 12th grade males and females (N = 599) to test several predictions from McCarthy's model. As expected, 8th and 12th grade females preferred a thinner than average body shape. They were more dissatisfied with their bodies than males and scored higher on measures of disordered eating. In contrast, before puberty (5th grade) boys were more depressed than their female peers but this pattern was reversed in 8th grade boys and girls. Paralleling changes in depression, disordered eating scores were highest in 8th and 12th grade girls. Both of these findings underscore the role of maturational factors in the onset of eating disorders. Although the sample was ethnically diverse and mainly from middle and low socioeconomic groups, there was a surprisingly high incidence of body dissatisfaction and symptoms of disordered eating. This illustrates the pervasiveness of thinness as a standard of feminine beauty in our society and the damaging effects it can have.