Effects of Training Volume on Hormones and Mood in Basketball Players

Mood and basal hormone levels were measured before and after a 4-month training period in 20 professional basketball players on 2 different teams. Training volume was daily quantified by intensities, showing that Team 1 trained nearly twofold the volume of Team 2. Apart from the lack of differences between teams in anthropometric and physical variables, results showed mood improvements in the total sample without differences between teams. However, cortisol levels decreased in Team 1 and increased in Team 2, while the free testosterone–cortisol ratio, free testosterone, prolactin, and luteinizing hormone did not show significant changes. Changes in cortisol were positively related to depression and negatively related to training volume. Results suggest that differences exist in sensitivity and/or timing of both psychological and hormonal responses to 2 given volumes of training.     

心理干预在化疗患者中的应用

本研究针对化疗患者常见的恶心呕吐、烦躁不安等副作用．运用心理行为技术．采用病例对照研究方法,对129名化疗患者进行了比较研究。结果为：各项情绪指标和总的情绪状况以及恶心呕吐反应。干预组患者比对照组改善明显;生活质量各指标在组问和组内比较中,有不同程度的改善,角色、社会、认知功能和疼痛症状在两组比较中改善不明显。由此认为,对化疗患者实施恰当的心理行为技术．干预效果是明显的     

Self-Esteem, Mood, and Intentions to Use Condoms: When Does Low Self-Esteem Lead to Risky Health Behaviors?

The authors assessed the interactive effects of self-esteem and mood on intentions to engage in unprotected sexual intercourse. Prior research has shown that people with low self-esteem tend to evaluate themselves unfavorably when in a negative mood state, whereas people with high self-esteem are less susceptible to changes in self-evaluation following a negative mood induction. The authors hypothesized that people who engage in negative self-evaluations may be more likely to report intentions to engage in unprotected sexual intercourse. Undergraduate females were randomly assigned to a positive or negative mood induction condition. Consistent with their hypotheses, the authors found that among participants who were in a negative mood state, those with low self-esteem were more likely to report intentions to have sexual intercourse without a condom than were those with high self-esteem. In contrast, among participants in a positive mood, there were no differences between those who were low and high in self-esteem.     

Category coherence and category-based property induction

One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by inter-feature causal relationships strengthened inductive projections. However, this effect depended on the degree to which the exemplar with the to-be-projected predicate manifested or satisfied its category's causal laws. That is, the coherence that supports inductive generalizations is a property of individual category members rather than categories. Moreover, we found that an exemplar's coherence was mediated by its degree of category membership. These results were obtained across a variety of causal network topologies and kinds of categories, including biological kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifacts.     

Adult attachment and Mindfulness: Examining directionality,causality, and theoretical implications

We present two studies that together provide preliminary evidence to challenge the view that the relationship between adult attachment and mindfulness is bi-directional (Study 1: repeated measures design and Study 2: a repeated measures study examining the efficacy of attachment security priming and a mindfulness induction). Adult attachment anxiety emerged as a significant predictor of some facets of mindfulness, over time, but the reverse was not true. Priming attachment security increased state mindfulness of mind to a greater degree than a mindfulness induction or control. These findings challenge previous research suggesting that the relationship between adult attachment and mindfulness is bi-directional, suggesting that attachment orientation plays a causal role in the development of mindfulness.     

室内照度和时间对警觉性和视空绩效的影响

本研究考察了白天室内照度和测验时间对个体视空工作记忆和视空能力及主观情绪和警觉性的影响。采用2(高/低照度水平)×2(上午/下午)混合设计,结果发现：被试在高照度水平下的柯西块任务的正确率更高,警觉反应更快,且尤其体现在下午时段;而不同照度水平对点记忆任务、视空能力测验和主观情绪无显著影响。结果表明白天室内照度能够影响个体的视空工作记忆和警觉性,主要表现在高照度照明环境的积极作用上,而对个体的视空能力及情绪变化影响微弱。     

Assessing the effectiveness of drawing an autobiographical memory as a mood induction procedure in children

The objective of our study was to examine the effectiveness of a new version of the autobiographical recall procedure (i.e., drawing a happy personal event) in eliciting a positive mood in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and to compare the drawing condition to the more classical telling condition. The mood of children was assessed before and after induction using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and across the two emotional dimensions of valence and arousal. The results showed that the drawing condition was as effective as the telling condition for inducing a positive mood. Furthermore, in the drawing condition, children reported feeling calmer than in the telling condition, suggesting that drawing was more likely to help children regulate their emotional state. The drawing procedure could be used in future research aiming to induce positive moods in school-aged children, to help further investigate the relationship between cognition and emotion.     

Attentional biases for threat after fear-related autobiographical recall

Background : Previous studies suggested that affective state could enhance stimulus salience and modulate attention allocation for mood-congruent information, but contrasting data have been reported on the effects of mood induction on attentional biases for threat (ABTs) in non-clinical individuals.

Objective : We aimed to assess whether laboratory-induced negative mood can increase individuals’ tendency to allocate attention on threatening stimuli, thus determining a difficulty in attentional disengagement from threat. We also aimed at assessing whether level of trait anxiety could modulate the effect of mood induction on attentional biases.

Methods : We used an autobiographical episode recall procedure for mood induction (fear, happiness and neutral episode recall), and an exogenous cueing task with threatening and non-threatening images to assess attentional biases in 120 undergraduate students.

Results: Participants showed a significant difficulty in disengaging attention from threat after recalling fear-related episodes, independently from their trait anxiety level.

Conclusions: These findings clarify that the ABTs are not exclusive to anxiety disorders or high trait anxiety individuals, and could also arise in non-clinical individuals in a fearful context.     

Mood effects on attentional control: a preregistered replication study and critical analysis

In a widely cited paper, Jefferies et al. (2008) report a study in which they manipulated participants’ mood and examined the effects of this manipulation on their performance on the Attentional Blink task. Their results revealed an interaction between emotional valence and arousal: attentional control of participants who experienced a negative mood with low arousal (i.e. sadness) was best, whereas it was worst for participants who experienced a negative mood with high arousal (i.e. anxiety). Performance for participants who were in a positive mood, either with low arousal (i.e. calmness) or high arousal (i.e. happiness) had intermediate scores. In this study, I examined the replicability of this effect and performed additional analyses to investigate the extent to which this effect is due to perceptual or attentional processes and to examine the role of distraction on AB performance. Importantly, the results showed that the crucial interaction between emotional valence and arousal did not reach significance. This could be due a diversity of factors that are addressed in the discussion.     

Decision mechanisms underlying mood-congruent emotional classification

There is great interest in understanding whether and how mood influences affective processing. Results in the literature have been mixed: some studies show mood-congruent processing but others do not. One limitation of previous work is that decision components for affective processing and responses biases are not dissociated. The present study explored the roles of affective processing and response biases using a drift-diffusion model (DDM) of simple choice. In two experiments, participants decided if words were emotionally positive or negative while listening to music that induced positive or negative mood. The behavioural results showed weak, inconsistent mood-congruency effects. In contrast, the DDM showed consistent effects that were selectively driven by an a-priori bias in response expectation, suggesting that music-induced mood influences expectations about the emotionality of upcoming stimuli, but not the emotionality of the stimuli themselves. Implications for future studies of emotional classification and mood are subsequently discussed.