Psychometric adaption of the impulsive driver behavior scale in a Chinese sample

Impulsivity plays an important role in aberrant driving behavior and crash involvement. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Impulsive Driver Behavior Scale (IDBS, Bıçaksız & Özkan, 2016a) with a Chinese sample. Two hundred and ninety-nine drivers completed the Chinese version of the Impulsive Driver Behavior Scale, the Driver Behavior Questionnaire, the Big Five Inventory and some social-demographic and traffic violation items. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a four-factor solution with 20 items yielded a better fit to the data than other solutions. The reduced IDBS showed good reliability and a stable structure. Drivers’ functional impulsivity was positively correlated with positive driver behavior and some ordinary violations. Meanwhile, the other three dimensions of dysfunctional impulsivity showed negative correlations with positive driver behavior and positive associations with aberrant driving behavior and penalty points and fines. Impulsive driver behavior is also associated with agreeableness and conscientiousness. These results provide evidence supporting the IDBS as a reliable and valuable instrument for measuring driving impulsivity in the Chinese traffic environment.     

Pace of Life and Enjoyment of Life

The paper addresses the paradox that people in modern societies believe themselves to be very happy and satisfied with their lives while simultaneously are subjected to increasing time pressure and pace of life. It starts with presenting evidence for time pressure covering objective and subjective indicators. Evidence for Germany is given by comparing time-budgets in 1991/92 and in 1999. Time use among full time employed in Germany and other EU-societies in the 1990s is compared to the US and Japan by means of diary-data. As regards work life, overwork and the gap between actual and preferred working hours are examined. Survey-results on the relationship between work load, time pressure, stress and health are reported.Most of these data support the conclusion that time pressure has emerged as a major social problem. Hence citizens are beginning to consider time prosperity as a dimension of their well-being beyond their consumer wealth.However, this growing pace of life does not reduce life satisfaction and happiness. Here a paradox evolves as increasing time pressure goes hand in hand with increased subjective well-being (SWB) at country level in cross-cultural comparison as well as at individual level.In the third section some answers to this paradox are explored: A first answer is offered through the modernization theory: life satisfaction and QOL are proliferating along with economic growth and living standards. This process at the same time accelerates social life. Hence, the negative effects of time pressure are counterbalanced by various yields of the modernization process resulting in a pattern of "heavy-going" satisfaction.A second explanation is the psychological approach: time pressure fulfils positive functions for mobilizing individual resources. A variation of this argument is that the multiple-choice-society offers a wide variety of attractive options resulting in people engaging in too many activities. Here, the enjoyment of life is equated with taking advantage of every opportunity.However, this paper prefers a third approach based on Simmel's explanation of the ambivalent consequences of modernity. Even where the majority of citizens report high levels of happiness and life satisfaction – which can be explained through "arousal" or "eu-stress" – the need to ease the time-burden of disadvantaged groups and to down-speed work and social life in general is essential.     

Premovement activity of the pre-supplementary motor area and the readiness for action: studies of time-resolved event-related functional MRI

The supplementary motor area (SMA) is thought to play in important role in the preparation and organisation of voluntary movement. It has long been known that cortical activity begins to increase up to 2s prior to voluntary self-initiated movement. This increasing premovement activity measured in EEG is known as the Bereitschaftspotential or readiness potential. Modern functional brain imaging methods, using event-related and time-resolved functional MRI techniques, are beginning to reveal the role of the SMA, and in particular the more anterior pre-SMA, in premovement activity associated with the readiness for action. In this paper we review recent studies using event-related time-resolved fMRI methods to examine the time-course of activation changes within the SMA throughout the preparation, readiness and execution of action. These studies suggest that the pre-SMA plays a common role in encoding or representing actions prior to our own voluntary self-initiated movements, during motor imagery, and from the observation of others' actions. We suggest that the pre-SMA generates and encodes motor representations which are then maintained in readiness for action.     

Pain coping and social support as predictors of long-term functional disability and pain in early rheumatoid arthritis

Pain-related avoidance factors and social resources, as assessed by pain coping and social support, are supposed to have lasting effects on functional disability and pain in chronic pain disorders. As a follow-up to a prospective study demonstrating short-term effects after one year (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 179-193, 1998), the role of pain coping and social support at the time of diagnosis was investigated in relationship to the long-term course of functional disability and pain after three and five years in 78 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), taking into account personality characteristics of neuroticism and extraversion, clinical status and use of medication. In line with findings at the one-year follow-up, results showed that more passive pain coping predicted functional disability at the three-year, but not the five-year follow-up. In addition, low levels of social support at the time of diagnosis consistently predicted both functional disability and pain at the three and five-year follow-ups. Results indicate that pain coping and social support, assessed very early in the disease process, can affect long-term functional disability and pain in RA, and suggest that early interventions focusing on pain-related avoidance factors and social resources for patients at risk may beneficially influence long-term outcomes in RA.     

大学生心理压力感量表编制理论及其信、效度研究

本研究在对心理压力感理论维度分析的基础上,编制了大学生心理压力感量表。量表的因素分析结果表明：(1)大学生心理压力主要有两方面,一是个人自身压力包括家庭压力、适应压力、健康压力、恋爱压力、自卑压力和挫折压力：一是社会环境压力包括人际压力、择业压力、情绪压力、学校环境压力和学业压力。(2)通过信、效度检验,大学生心理压力感量表的理论维度结构合理,具有良好的信度,达到心理测量学的相关要求。(3)心理压力感量表的各维度对大学生的心理健康水平具有良好的预测作用,可以作为评估大学生心理压力水平的有效测量工具。     

Pathways of Economic Influence on Adolescent Adjustment

An important part of a science aimed at the prevention of human dysfunction involves the development of empirically based models that identify processes of risk for or protection from emotional distress or behavioral problems over time. The present study developed and evaluated such a model that proposed two pathways through which family economic pressure was expected to influence change in adolescent internalizing symptoms (depression and anxiety) during the period from the eighth to the tenth grades. A total of 377 rural families in a midwestern state provided data for the analyses. The results were generally consistent with the conceptual model in that family economic pressure increased adolescent perceptions of family economic hardship, which, in turn, reduced the adolescent's sense of control or mastery over time. Lowered mastery was associated with increases in emotional distress. Also consistent with the model, prior levels of mastery appeared to reduce the magnitude of economic stress experienced by the adolescent, whereas prior emotional distress intensified the economic stress process. Although gender differences were found in these processes, the overall pattern of results suggests that girls and boys are both at risk for internalizing problems when families experience economic pressure. Implicatios of the findings for the dvelopment of effective preventive interventions with financially stressed families in rural areas are discussed.     

Right-hemispheric cortical contributions to language ability in healthy adults

In this study we investigated the correlation between individual linguistic ability based on performance levels and their engagement of typical and atypical language areas in the brain. Eighteen healthy subjects between 21 and 64 years participated in language ability tests, and subsequent functional MRI scans measuring brain activity in response to a sentence completion and a word fluency task. Performance in both reading and high-level language tests correlated positively with increased right-hemispheric activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (specifically Brodmann area 47), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and the medial temporal gyrus (Brodmann area 21). In contrast, we found a negative correlation between performance and left-hemispheric DLPFC activation.Our findings indicate that the right lateral frontal and right temporal regions positively modulate aspects of language ability.     

Co-localisation of abnormal brain structure and function in specific language impairment

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior frontal cortex and decreased in the right caudate nucleus and superior temporal cortex bilaterally. The unaffected siblings also showed reduced grey matter in the caudate nucleus relative to controls. In an auditory covert naming task, the SLI group showed reduced activation in the left inferior frontal cortex, right putamen, and in the superior temporal cortex bilaterally. Despite spatially coincident structural and functional abnormalities in frontal and temporal areas, the relationships between structure and function in these regions were different. These findings suggest multiple structural and functional abnormalities in SLI that are differently associated with receptive and expressive language processing.     

Brain activation during spatial updating and attentive tracking of moving targets

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed to study spatial updating and its neural correlates. In a dynamic 3D-scene, targets moved among visually indistinguishable distractors. The targets and distractors either stayed visible during continuous viewpoint changes or they turned invisible. The parametric variation of tracking load revealed load-dependent activations of the intraparietal sulcus, the superior parietal lobule, and the lateral occipital cortex in response to the attentive tracking task. Viewpoint changes with invisible objects that demanded retention and updating produced load-dependent activation only in the precuneus in line with its presumed involvement in updating spatial working memory.     

Message sidedness in advertising: the moderating roles of need for cognition and time pressure in persuasion

Persuasion has been extensively researched for decades. Much of this research has focused on different message tactics and their effects on persuasion (e.g., Chang & Chou, 2008; Lafferty, 1999). This research aims to assess whether the persuasion of a specific type of message is influenced by need for cognition (NFC) and time pressure. The 336 undergraduates participated in a 2 (message sidedness: one-sided/two-sided) × 3 (time pressure: low/moderate/high) between-subjects design. Results indicate that two-sided messages tend to elicit more favorable ad attitudes than one-sided messages. As compared with low-NFC individuals, high-NFC individuals are likely to express more favorable ad attitudes, brand attitudes and purchase intention. Moderate time pressure tends to lead to more favorable ad attitudes than low time pressure and high time pressure. In addition, moderate time pressure is likely to elicit more favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions than high time pressure, but does not elicit more favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions than low time pressure. Furthermore, when high-NFC individuals are under low or moderate time pressure, two-sided messages are more persuasive than one-sided messages; however, message sidedness does not differentially affect the persuasion when high-NFC individuals are pressed for time. In contrast, one-sided messages are more persuasive than two-sided messages when low-NFC individuals are under low or high time pressure, and two-sided messages are more persuasive than one-sided messages when low-NFC individuals are under moderate time pressure.