Successes and failures in resisting cigarettes affect partner support for smoking cessation

Objective: Potential support providers may rely on observable behaviours (e.g. resisting a cigarette vs. smoking) to determine how much and what kind of support to provide. We evaluated the effect of smokers’ salient behaviour on partners’ likelihood of providing positive and negative support.

Design: Partners of smokers (N = 131) were randomly assigned to recall a time when their partner either successfully resisted a cigarette, failed to resist a cigarette or a control condition (no recall). All participants reported the likelihood of providing positive and negative support to their partner. Perceived commitment to quitting smoking was measured as a potential mediator.

Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome was intention to provide support for a quit attempt.

Results: Participants who recalled their partners’ past failures reported more intentions to engage in negative support and smaller ratios of positive to negative intended support than did participants in the success or control condition. These effects were partially mediated by perception of commitment to quitting.

Conclusion: Lapses in a quit attempt may change the nature of the support quitters receive. Interventions to improve communication between partners about the smoker’s commitment to quitting and experienced challenges may result in better support.     

Cultural differences in the dialectical and non-dialectical emotional styles and their implications for health

Previous cross-cultural studies have repeatedly demonstrated that East Asians are more likely to show a dialectical emotional style than Americans, but do not distinguish between specific types of dialectical emotional styles. Using an age diverse sample, we found that compared to Americans, Japanese are more likely to experience both positive and negative emotions moderately frequently (i.e., moderate dialectical), but are no more likely to experience them frequently (i.e., high dialectical). Thus, dialectical emotions prevalent in East Asia may be characterised by a "middle way" rather than by emotional extremes. Furthermore, we explored whether dialectical emotion types are associated with better health profiles depending on cultural background. Our results show that the moderate dialectical type is associated with fewer physical symptoms in Japan than in the USA. Together, these findings show the cultural differences in the experience of balanced positive and negative emotions and their health correlates.     

Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production...     

Assessing readiness for change in adolescents with eating disorders

The Readiness and Motivation Interview (RMI) is a semistructured interview measure of readiness and motivation to change that can be used for all eating disorder diagnoses. The RMI has demonstrated excellent psychometric properties and has both clinical and predictive utility in adult samples. This study examined the psychometric properties of the RMI in a younger population, namely, 12- to 18-year-old girls with eating disorders. Study participants (N = 65) completed the RMI and measures of convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. Adolescents with eating disorders were able to conceptualize and articulate their readiness for change and to report the extent to which change efforts were for themselves versus for others. RMI readiness profiles across eating disorder symptom domains in adolescents were comparable to those in adults, with higher reported readiness to change binge eating than to change dietary restriction or compensatory strategies. Differences in internal consistency between adult and adolescent samples are discussed. Interviewing adolescents early in treatment about readiness may assist clinicians in forming an alliance with this difficult-to-engage population, while also providing valuable information for treatment planning.     

Recalling taboo and nontaboo words

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotional and taboo words has not been previously investigated. Two experiments demonstrated that taboo and emotional words benefit less from deep processing than do neutral words. This is consistent with the proposal that memories for taboo and emotional words are a function of the arousal level they evoke, even under shallow encoding conditions. Recall was higher for taboo words, even when taboo words were cued to be recalled after neutral and emotional words. The superiority of taboo word recall is consistent with cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging research.     

A measure of racial identity in African American adolescents: the development of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity--Teen

The Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity--Teen (MIBI--T) is designed to assess the 3 cross-situationally stable dimensions (centrality, regard, and ideology) of the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI; R. M. Sellers, M. A. Smith, J. N. Shelton, S. A. J. Rowley, & T. M. Chavous, 1998) within teenagers. Adolescent responses (n= 489) to the MIBI--T were subjected to several analyses to evaluate the psychometric character of the measure. Findings indicated that the MIBI--T represents a valid framework for African American adolescents. Its internal structure is consistent with the conceptual framework of the MMRI, and findings support its construct validity. Results also indicate model invariance across grade level and gender, as well as suggest evidence of predictive validity. Further information about the MIBI--T and the full set of items are presented.     

Using frame-of-reference training to understand the implications of rater idiosyncrasy for rating accuracy

Frame-of-reference (FOR) rater training is one technique used to impart a theory of work performance to raters. In this study, the authors explored how raters' implicit performance theories may differ from a normative performance theory taught during training. The authors examined how raters' level and type of idiosyncrasy predicts their rating accuracy and found that rater idiosyncrasy negatively predicts rating accuracy. Moreover, although FOR training may improve rating accuracy even for trainees with lower performance theory idiosyncrasy, it may be more effective in improving errors of omission than commission. The discussion focuses on the roles of idiosyncrasy in FOR training and the implications of this research for future FOR research and practice.