A constructive neural-network approach to modeling psychological development

This article reviews a particular computational modeling approach to the study of psychological development – that of constructive neural networks. This approach is applied to a variety of developmental domains and issues, including Piagetian tasks, shift learning, language acquisition, number comparison, habituation of visual attention, concept learning, and theory of mind. Implications of this modeling for theoretical understanding of psychological development are considered.     

心理健康素质测评系统·中国成年人健康信念量表的编制

编制适合中国社会文化特点的成年人健康信念量表。根据健康信念对心理健康影响的大量研究结果,确定健康信念量表包括合理性和可控性两个维度的理论构想;通过访谈相关医务工作者以及在心理学专家中征集项目的方式形成初始问卷,并通过预测筛选,确定量表的最终项目。对天津市387名大学生、事业单位职员、公务员和农民工进行正式施测,检验量表的各项心理测量学指标。结果：健康信念量表包括两个维度,分别是可控性和合理性,量表具有良好的重测信度、内部一致信度、结构效度、内容效度以及校标关联效度。结论：健康信念量表具备令人满意的心理测量     

心理健康素质测评系统·中国成年人认知风格问卷的编制

通过对认知风格既往文献的回顾和分析,从临床心理学的角度将认知风格定义为个体在解释生活事件时所偏爱的和习惯化的特征性认知方式,并确定了4个维度：过度概括化、选择性提取、个体化和灾难化。通过开放式问卷调查、参考国内外已有量表、自编项目及专家评定,形成27个项目的认知风格问卷初测版,并分别在大学生样本和非学生样本中进行测试,筛选出在两个样本中都符合心理测量学要求的16个项目,最终形成认知风格问卷正式版。对认知风格问卷正式版进行心理测量学指标考察,结果发现问卷的内部一致性信度、重测信度、结构效度、内容效度、聚合效     

Psychological aspects of orthognathic surgery

Abstract

With the dramatic growth in the number of adults undergoing orthodontics to correct malocclusion, and those undergoing surgical orthodontics or orthognathic surgery to correct skeletal discrepancies in the orofacial region, it is important to examine the psychological characteristics of these patients before and after treatment is completed. This paper serves as a general review and summarizes the findings of two major longitudinal studies of patients seeking surgical correction and compares them with people who underwent conventional orthodontics, those who rejected any treatment, and those who sought cosmetic surgery. Both studies revealed that most women seeking surgical orthodontics focused on aesthetic improvement as a motive, whereas men sought to improve their appearance and mastication. Women were also more likely to report problems with the temporomandibular joint as a motive. Men and women scored similarly on a measure of body image, although women reported lower facial image presurgically and higher postsurgically than did men. The greatest gains following surgery were in facial and profile image for both men and women. Orthodontic patients showed less improvement, while those rejecting treatment experienced a decline in body image. Many functional improvements did not occur until 24 months postoperatively; lingering paraesthesia was described by 49% of the sample. Emotional reactions included anxiety preoperatively, and depression postoperatively, especially among patients scoring high on neuroticism and those experiencing other major life events. These studies reveal that people seeking surgical orthodontics are within the normal range of most personality measures and experience greater gains psychologically than do conventional orthodontic patients.     

Towards a psychosocial mediator model of hostility and CHD

Abstract

How might hostility contribute to the development of CHD? One possible explanation, labelled “psychosocial vulnerability”, is that hostile individuals inhabit a more taxing interpersonal world, and that increased stress, in turn, causes CHD. However, previous research testing this proposition has suffered from a measurement confound by employing self-reports of stress, social support, and hostility. One hundred and twelve subjects participated in the current study and completed the Cook-Medley Hostility scale. Then, each subject's closest friend was asked to estimate for the past year: (1) how many stressors had been encountered by the subject; (2) how easily the subject was upset by a stressor; (3) how many emotional reactions the subject disclosed after a stressor; and (4) how much social support was available to the subject. Results suggested that hostile men and women may both be phychosocially vulnerable, but they are so at different stages of the stressor-distress process. There was no relation between hostility and observed stressor frequency for either men or women, however, hostility in men was found to be related to increased distress in reaction to stressors and in women was related to decreased disclosure about these stressful events. Importantly, hostility in both men and women was related to decreased levels of observed social support, as compared to their non-hostile peers.     

Self-Reported Psychological Well-Being and Disease-Related Strains among Adults with Diabetes

The study was designed to describe self-reported psychological well-being among adults with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and to explore associations of psychological well-being with disease-related strains, such as self-reported long-term complications, frequency of hypoglycaemia and disablement or sick-leave. A sample comprising 534 Norwegian adults with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes aged 25-70 years participated in the study. Psychological well-being was assessed using three different scales; the WHO (Ten) Well-Being Index, the Short Zung Depression Rating Scale and four items from the anxiety sub-scale of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist. Findings indicate that adults with both types of diabetes reported relatively poor psychological well-being. There was a tendency for younger persons to report the worst psychological well-being. For symptoms of anxiety this tendency was most evident among people with Type 2 diabetes. People being disabled due to diabetes reported relatively markedly impaired psychological well-being, whereas self-reported diabetes-related complications and the number of episodes with hypoglycaemia were weakly associated with psychological well-being. Findings may indicate that healthcare practitioners should pay more attention to the psychological needs of people with diabetes. This applies especially to younger people with Type 2 diabetes.     

Psychological wellbeing and the diathesis-stress hypothesis model: The role of psychological functioning and quality of relations in promoting subjective well-being in a life events study

Negative life events are associated with poor wellbeing and mental health outcomes. Following a diathesis-stress model, we tested whether psychological functioning and quality of interpersonal relationships moderated the effect of life events on subjective wellbeing. This study comprised data from a young and middle-aged adult sample (n = 364) drawn from an Australian university-student population. Results indicated that life events were associated with negative but not positive wellbeing outcomes. Perceived impact of life events was a stronger predictor of wellbeing than was the number of life events. Psychological functioning and quality of interpersonal relationships were associated with both wellbeing dimensions but only quality of interpersonal relationships moderated the effect of life events on wellbeing. In conclusion, perceived impact of life events was more strongly related to wellbeing than number of life events. Interpersonal relationships moderate the effect of life events with those reporting higher levels of quality of interpersonal relationships reporting less decrement in negative affect following stressful life events.     

Closure of autobiographical memories: The effects of written recounting from first- or third-person visual perspective

Autobiographical memories are recalled with varying degrees of psychological closure. Closure is a subjective assessment of how far a remembered experience feels resolved, and it has been suggested that one predictor of closure is the amount of emotional detail in the memory. Study 1 examined which aspect of emotional detail is important for closure, and showed that open and closed negative memories were distinguished by ratings of emotion evoked during recall, not by remembered emotion from the time of the event. The recall of open memories was accompanied by more intense, more negative, and less positive emotion than the recall of closed memories. Biased retelling of memories has been shown to influence closure and on the basis of evidence that third-person recall serves a distancing function, Study 2 examined whether instructions to repeatedly recount an open memory from a third-person perspective would increase closure compared with a single or repeated recounting from a first-person perspective. While repeated third-person recounting had the greatest influence on closure, there were also increases in the first-person recounting groups. The results suggest that closure can be increased by reporting memories in written narrative form, particularly if repeatedly expressed from the third-person perspective.     

La gestion de la souffrance par le psychologue clinicien. Étude des impacts et des stratégies de coping

We focus in this study on strategies used by clinical psychologists to cope with their own or patient psychological distress in the framework of help relationship. A self-administered form was sent to listings of professionals by e-mail. The sample is made of 187 French clinical psychologists. To cope with patients’ suffering, psychologists use mostly avoidance coping style. And the strategies they prefer are “supervision”, “personal therapy” and “speaking with colleagues” (problem focused coping strategies). To cope with their own distress, which has a lot of negative impacts on help relationship, psychologists have most frequently a problem focused coping style but their favourite strategy is to “lighten their schedules”. And almost a quarter of the sample presents a significant level of distress. In conclusion, results show that psychological distress management by psychologists is an important question with a lot of ethical questions.