Crafts as Leisure-Based Coping: Craft Makers’ Descriptions of Their Stress-Reducing Activity

The goal of this study was to explore how crafts help women, who do crafting as a leisure activity, cope with stress. This qualitative study is based on the narratives of 15 textile craft makers aged 27–57 who were reporting stress in work and non-work settings. The participants reported that their crafting varied depending on the specific life circumstances they encountered. The analysis revealed that crafts provided recreation, satisfaction, optimism, positive relationships, and support as well as helped participants to cope with negative feelings. Crafts served as a leisure-coping resource and a leisure-based coping strategy.     

Data Collection in a Flat World: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Mechanical Turk Samples

Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor system run by Amazon.com, provides quick, easy, and inexpensive access to online research participants. As use of MTurk has grown, so have questions from behavioral researchers about its participants, reliability, and low compensation. In this article, we review recent research about MTurk and compare MTurk participants with community and student samples on a set of personality dimensions and classic decision‐making biases. Across two studies, we find many similarities between MTurk participants and traditional samples, but we also find important differences. For instance, MTurk participants are less likely to pay attention to experimental materials, reducing statistical power. They are more likely to use the Internet to find answers, even with no incentive for correct responses. MTurk participants have attitudes about money that are different from a community sample's attitudes but similar to students' attitudes. Finally, MTurk participants are less extraverted and have lower self‐esteem than other participants, presenting challenges for some research domains. Despite these differences, MTurk participants produce reliable results consistent with standard decision‐making biases: they are present biased, risk‐averse for gains, risk‐seeking for losses, show delay/expedite asymmetries, and show the certainty effect—with almost no significant differences in effect sizes from other samples. We conclude that MTurk offers a highly valuable opportunity for data collection and recommend that researchers using MTurk (1) include screening questions that gauge attention and language comprehension; (2) avoid questions with factual answers; and (3) consider how individual differences in financial and social domains may influence results. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychometric properties of the Coping Strategy Indicator (CSI) in a study of coping behaviour amongst malawian students

Abstract

The Coping Strategy Indicator (CSI; Amirkhan 1990) is an inductively derived measure of responses to adverse circumstances. Although seeking to isolate “a few fundamental strategies with wide applicability” (Amirkhan 1990). the initial validation studies were all based on Californian populations. The present study repork findings from completion of the CSI by 415 Malawian students as part of their enrolment health check up. Factor analysis (principal components analysis with varimax rotation) identified three factors with very similar structure and loadings to those identified by Amirkhan, namely, Support Seeking, Problem Solving and Avoidance. As with the initial validation study, there was some evidence of withdrawal and distraction forming identifiable sub-components of Avoidance. The CSI does appear to provide a measure of core coping strategies which is robust across cultural settings, the theoretical implications of which are considered. The influence of factors such as age and gender on CSI scores is discussed     

Forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping strategy that can reduce health risks and promote health resilience: theory,review, and hypotheses

Experimental evidence suggests that when people are transgressed against interpersonally, they often react by experiencing unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is conceptualized as a stress reaction. Forgiveness is one (of many) ways people reduce unforgiveness. Forgiveness is conceptualized as an emotional juxtaposition of positive emotions (i.e., empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love) against the negative emotions of unforgiveness. Forgiveness can thus be used as an emotion-focused coping strategy to reduce a stressful reaction to a transgression. Direct empirical research suggests that forgiveness is related to health outcomes and to mediating physiological processes in such a way as to support the conceptualization that forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping strategy. Indirect mechanisms might also affect the forgiveness-health relationship. Namely, forgiveness might affect health by working through social support, relationship quality, and religion.     

Beteendeterapi Vid Angest,Depression Och Smkrta

Davidson, P 0 (Ed) : The Behavioral Management of Anxiety, Depression and Pain. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976. 197 sid.     

协作抑制的认知机制

协作抑制是指当人们在一个记忆小组中一起提取信息的时候,小组提取的信息总量比等量个体提取的信息总量要少.心理学研究者致力于从认知角度对该现象进行解释,主要的理论解释有提取策略破坏假说和提取抑制假说.前者认为小组成员的提取结果对组内其他成员的信息组织策略产生了干扰,导致小组的提取成绩低.而后者认为小组内成员的提取结果会抑制其他成员对非提取项目的表征,降低小组协作提取能力,出现协作抑制.本文对两种理论假说的提出背景,基本观点,证据支持及现有争论进行了介绍,同时指出了未来的研究应关注于对两种机制的关键矛盾点进行区别性检验、对不同认知机制在不同条件下成立可靠性的检验以及通过对编码阶段进行操控来进一步考察协作抑制的认知机制.     

Adult age differences in subjective and objective measures of strategy use on a sequentially cued prediction task

Differences in strategy use are thought to underlie age-related performance deficits on many learning and decision-making tasks. Recently, age-related differences in learning to make predictions were reported on the Triplets Prediction Task (TPT). Notably, deficits appeared early in training and continued with experience. To assess if age differences were due to early strategy use, neural networks were used to objectively assess the strategies implemented by participants during Session 1. Then, the relationship between these strategies and performance was examined. Results revealed that older adults were more likely to implement a disadvantageous strategy early in learning, and this led to poorer task performance. Importantly, the relationship between age and task performance was partially mediated by early strategy use, suggesting that early strategy selection played a role in the lower quality of predictions in older adults.     

Ageing and attentional control

The research examines the structural bottleneck account and the resource account of the substantial dual-task deficits among older adults. Procedures from two common dual-task methodologies—the psychological refractory period and the relative-priority manipulation—were used to encourage maximization of the joint performance. Performance and time-sharing strategies from subjects between the ages of 20 and 70 years were examined. Age-related declines in time-sharing efficiency and in the precision of the executive control process were observed. The age-related effect was larger when two manual responses were required than when one manual and one vocal response were required, but no evidence for obligatory sequential processing was found. Except for the most demanding conditions, comparable practice effects were observed between the younger and older subjects, suggesting considerable cognitive plasticity in the older subjects. Implications for the two attentional accounts were discussed.     

进化心理学视角下母亲教养行为的代际传承性研究

采用问卷法,从生命史理论的角度探讨母亲教养行为的代价传递性。研究问题一显示,童年期家庭环境的艰苦性和不可预测性不能预测个体成年后的生命史策略,原生家庭母亲的专制型教养方式通过焦虑型依恋行为的中介作用可以间接地负向预测成年女儿的生命史慢策略,原生家庭母亲的民主型教养方式可以直接预测成年女儿的生命史慢策略;研究问题二显示,生命史慢策略在原生家庭母亲的民主型教养行为和成年女儿的合作型协同教养行为之间起着完全中介作用。     

Heterogeneous factor analysis models: A bayesian approach

Multilevel factor analysis models are widely used in the social sciences to account for heterogeneity in mean structures. In this paper we extend previous work on multilevel models to account for general forms of heterogeneity in confirmatory factor analysis models. We specify various models of mean and covariance heterogeneity in confirmatory factor analysis and develop Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedures to perform Bayesian inference, model checking, and model comparison.We test our methodology using synthetic data and data from a consumption emotion study. The results from synthetic data show that our Bayesian model perform well in recovering the true parameters and selecting the appropriate model. More importantly, the results clearly illustrate the consequences of ignoring heterogeneity. Specifically, we find that ignoring heterogeneity can lead to sign reversals of the factor covariances, inflation of factor variances and underappreciation of uncertainty in parameter estimates. The results from the emotion study show that subjects vary both in means and covariances. Thus traditional psychometric methods cannot fully capture the heterogeneity in our data.