Sharpen Your Pencils: Preliminary Evidence that Adult Coloring Reduces Depressive Symptoms and Anxiety

Adult coloring books have flooded the market with titles alluding to therapeutic value, yet it is unclear whether they fulfil that promise. Here, we tested whether adult coloring was related to improvements in psychological outcomes. Female university students (n = 104) were randomly assigned to a coloring intervention or a logic-puzzle control group. Participants completed an inventory of psychological measures (depressive symptoms, stress, anxiety, flourishing, resilience, mindfulness) and then participated in a 1-week intervention of either daily coloring or logic-puzzles. Following the intervention, participants again completed the inventory of psychological measures. Coloring participants showed significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety after the intervention, but control participants did not. We conclude that daily coloring can improve some negative psychological outcomes and that it may provide an effective, inexpensive, and highly accessible self-help tool for nonclinical samples.     

Definitions of Gender and Sex: The Subtleties of Meaning

Definitions of the word gender were collected from 137 participants, who also completed questionnaires designed to determine aspects of the usage of the words gender and sex. The majority of participants were European American (86.9%), followed by Latino/a (3.6%), Asian/Asian American (2.9%), African American (2.2%), Native American (1.5%), and West Indian (1.5%). Most participants (70.9%) had attended at least some college and occupations included students (43%), professionals (27.8%), health care workers (4.3%), technical workers (5%), sales and service workers (9.4%), maintenance workers (1.4%), and business owners (1.4%). Data were examined to see which common themes emerged from the free form define gender question, the amount of interchangeability of sex and gender in a sentence completion task, and the varieties of beliefs about the relation between the terms gender and sex. Results indicate a variety of understandings and beliefs about gender that range from the common response that gender is the same as sex to some less common responses that associate gender with females or discrimination. Implications of the ambiguous meaning of gender are discussed with an emphasis on the responsibility of researchers to clarify their own understanding of the terms when they discuss gender or sex in their research and publications.     

The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and event-specific drinking: The relationship between FoMO and alcohol use,harm, and breath alcohol concentration during orientation week

Current Psychology - The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) is the feeling that one is missing out on rewarding experiences. FoMO research has largely focused on the link between FoMO and unhealthy social...     

Working memory training improves visual short-term memory capacity

Since antiquity, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have been interested in human memory. However, researchers today are still working to understand the capabilities, boundaries, and architecture. While the storage capabilities of long-term memory are seemingly unlimited (Bahrick, J Exp Psychol 113:1–2, 1984), working memory, or the ability to maintain and manipulate information held in memory, seems to have stringent capacity limits (e.g., Cowan, Behav Brain Sci 24:87–185, 2001). Individual differences, however, do exist and these differences can often predict performance on a wide variety of tasks (cf. Engle What is working-memory capacity? 297–314, 2001). Recently, researchers have promoted the enticing possibility that simple behavioral training can expand the limits of working memory which indeed may also lead to improvements on other cognitive processes as well (cf. Morrison and Chein, Psychol Bull Rev 18:46–60 2011). However, initial investigations across a wide variety of cognitive functions have produced mixed results regarding the transferability of training-related improvements. Across two experiments, the present research focuses on the benefit of working memory training on visual short-term memory capacity—a cognitive process that has received little attention in the training literature. Data reveal training-related improvement of global measures of visual short-term memory as well as of measures of the independent sub-processes that contribute to capacity (Awh et al., Psychol Sci 18(7):622–628, 2007). These results suggest that the ability to inhibit irrelevant information within and between trials is enhanced via n-back training allowing for selective improvement on untrained tasks. Additionally, we highlight a potential limitation of the standard adaptive training procedure and propose a modified design to ensure variability in the training environment.