Predicting Substance Use from Religiosity/Spirituality in Individuals with Cystic Fibrosis

Journal of Religion and Health - Religiosity and spirituality predict lower alcohol and other substance use in community samples of adolescents and adults. However, the roles of religiosity and...     

Environmental and Psychological Factors that Influence the Creative Excellence of Brazilian and Portuguese Women

There is increasing recognition of the importance of creativity for social development. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there were differences among Brazilian and Portuguese women recognized for their creative excellence in relation to the psychological and environmental factors that might impact their achievements. The sample was composed of 33 women; 18 who were socially recognized for excellence in creativity in different areas (nine Brazilian, nine Portuguese) were compared to 15 who were not recognized (nine Brazilian, six Portuguese). The instruments used were the Biographical Questionnaire of Creative Women, a semi‐structured interview guide, and the Creative Production Analysis Guide. Non‐parametric tests indicated significant differences in environmental factors and personal cognitive characteristics between the creative and non‐creative women when compared within each country. However, no significant differences among Brazilian and Portuguese creative women were found, thus indicating that they present similar psychological profiles.     

Spirituality in Clinical Practice: The Perspective of Brazilian Medical Students

Journal of Religion and Health - The purpose of this study was to evaluate the beliefs, opinions, and experiences of medical students from a Catholic confessional university concerning spirituality...     

Positive Personality Traits as Predictors of Psychotherapy Progress

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - The objectives of this paper were to study if the traits of the Positive Personality Model (PPM; de la Iglesia and Castro Solano, in Front Psychol 9:2025,...     

Action representation deficits in adolescents with developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD), a severe and frequent disorder of reading acquisition, is characterized by a diversity of cognitive and motor deficits whose interactions still remain under debate. Although deficits in the automatization of sensorimotor control have been highlighted, internal action representation allowing prediction has never before been investigated. In this study, we considered action representation of 18 adolescents with pure DD and 18 age-matched typical readers. Participants actually and mentally performed a visually guided pointing task involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). While actual and mental movement times of typical readers were isochronous and both conformed to Fitts’ law, the movement times of dyslexics differed between conditions, and only the actual movement times conformed to Fitts’ law. Furthermore, the quality of motor imagery correlated with word reading abilities. This suggests that the process of action representation is impaired in pure DD and supports the sensorimotor perspective of DD. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Anger and aggression in women: Influence of sports choice and testosterone administration

We report on two studies of anger and aggression in women. One study concerns an experimental study of anger induction in aggressive and non-aggressive sportswomen. It was found that sports choice in itself, contrary to expectation, does not predict anger arousal and aggressive behavior in the laboratory. However, at an individual level the anger proneness of the subject, as measured by a questionnaire we developed, was related to the intensity of aggressive behavior and subjectively reported anger. The second study concerns the activating effects of androgens on aggression and anger proneness. In a group of 22 female-to-male transsexuals, a battery of anger proneness and aggression questionnaires was administered twice: shortly before and 3 months after the start of androgen treatment. Administration of androgens was clearly associated with an increaese in anger proneness, although there were no changes in several aspects of overt aggressive behavior. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Is the news making us unhappy? The influence of daily news exposure on emotional states

There is evidence that exposure to negative news is making people feel bad, but not much is known about why this only affects some people or whether this also applies to everyday news exposure. This study examined the direct and indirect effects of daily news exposure on people's affective states. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), 63 respondents (24 men and 39 women) reported their news exposure and affective states five times a day for 10 days. In addition, personal relevance of the news and personality characteristics, neuroticism and extraversion, were assessed. Results showed that negative news perceptions were related to more negative affect and less positive affect, and these effects were moderated by personal relevance, but not personality characteristics. The implications of these outcomes are discussed.     

A comparison of isolated and synthesized contingencies in functional analyses

Recently, researchers have compared the utility of isolated versus synthesized contingencies in functional analysis (FA) methodology (e.g., Fisher et al., 2016; Slaton et al., 2017). A limitation of these studies is that there were other differences across FA methodologies (e.g., design, contingency) that did not allow for isolation of the influence of isolated versus synthesized contingencies. Therefore, the current study compared outcomes of FAs that involved isolated versus synthesized contingencies for problem behavior of 5 children while controlling for these other differences across FAs (Experiment 1). Next, the current study compared the effects of interventions based on the functions identified in the isolated and synthesized contingencies for each participant (Experiment 2). Results indicated isolated contingency FAs produced differentiated responding for 1 or both functions for all 5 participants, and there were little to no differences between treatments informed by isolated and synthesized contingency FAs.     

The (Dis)Pleasures of Creativity: Spontaneous Eye Blink Rate during Divergent and Convergent Thinking Depends on Individual Differences in Positive and Negative Affect

Previous research has demonstrated that individual differences in affect and motivation predict divergent and convergent thinking performance, two thinking processes involved in creative idea generation. Individual differences in affect and motivation also predict spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR) during divergent and convergent thinking; and sEBR predicts divergent and convergent thinking performance. This study investigates experimentally whether the relationship between sEBR and divergent and convergent thinking depends on individual differences in affect and motivation. Eighty-two participants completed the Emotion/motivation-related Divergent and Convergent thinking styles Scale (EDICOS; G. Soroa et al., 2015), performed the alternative uses task (AUT; divergent thinking) or the remote associates task (RAT; convergent thinking), while their sEBR was captured with an eye-tracker. The results showed that individual differences in positive affect positively correlated with sEBR for the AUT, whereas individual differences in negative affect positively correlated with sEBR for the RAT. Furthermore, the interaction between individual differences in positive and negative affect and sEBR predicted divergent and convergent thinking performance. The contribution of our study is therefore that individual differences in positive and negative affect can both positively correlate with sEBR during divergent and convergent thinking; and that this predicts divergent and convergent thinking performance.     

Murray Sidman: A life of giving

Murray Sidman's contributions to the science of behavior span many areas including avoidance behavior, coercion and its effects, stimulus control, errorless learning, programmed learning, stimulus equivalence, and single-subject methodology. He was also a great mentor to many and helped shape the discipline we now call behavior analysis. In this memoriam, we briefly highlight his scholarly legacy and share some personal anecdotes.