Effects of opportunity to reciprocate and self-esteem on help-seeking behavior

The present investigation explored the link between an individual's self-esteem and willingness to seek help under conditions in which future reciprocity is, or is not, expected Based on past research on (a) the effects of perceived opportunity to reciprocate on help seeking, and (b) the effects of self-esteem on help-seeking and receiving, it was expected that relative to low self-esteem individuals, high self-esteem individuals would be more committed to the norm of reciprocity in interpersonal helping, and be more reluctant to seek help which cannot be reciprocated Two studies were conducted In the first it was observed that the higher the level of self-esteem the more the expressed commitment to the norm of reciprocity as measured by scores on an especially designed scale The second study assessed actual help-seeking behavior, and found that least help was sought by high self-esteem individuals who did not foresee an opportunity for future reciprocity The conceptual and applied implications of these findings are discussed     

Personality Disorders Are Not as We Thought: Hierarchical Factor Structure at the Criterion Level

The use of personality disorder (PD) categories persists, despite the evidence against them. An often overlooked reason for this is the fact that the true structure underlying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) taxonomy is still unknown: We cannot be certain which disorders are valid, and which ones are arbitrary mixtures of heterogeneous traits. To address this gap, we factor analyzed the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire (PDQ–4+; Hyler, 1994 Hyler, S. E. (1994). PDQ–4+ Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire–4+. New York, NY: New York State Psychiatric Institute. [Google Scholar]) at the criterion level in a mixed clinical and nonclinical sample of 2,519 individuals. The resulting structure was more similar to current dimensional taxonomies than to the DSM classification at all hierarchical levels. Whereas paranoid and antisocial PDs—and to a lesser extent avoidant, dependent, depressive, and schizoid PDs—were fairly homogeneous, all other disorders turned out to be combinations of 2 or 3 unrelated dimensions. Our results strongly support the structure of empirically based dimensional taxonomies and relocate DSM criteria within this emerging framework, thus contributing to preserving much of the knowledge accumulated to date.     

Psychoneuroimmunology and male infertility: A possible link between stress,coping and male immunological infertility

Abstract

This current study investigated a link between stress and coping with some male infertility problems via psychoneuroimmunological theories. The study was carried out on 77 males who came to a fertility clinic for sperm diagnosis. Appraisal and coping with stress reaction to negative life events and to infertility were related to non-sperm cells within the seminal plasma. Those men who had felt strained from external events and from problems of infertility, and had used emotional escape coping strategies, were more prone to have an immunosuppressed reaction, indicated by bacteria within their plasma. Those using task focused control strategies were more prone to have an immunostimulatory reaction, indicated by white blood cells, including in some cases, sperm destroying phagocytes suggesting a possible auto-immunity reaction. When the analyses were done separately on patients with known male fertility problems in comparison with those with unexplained infertility, the two opposing psychoneuroimmunological processes became more pronounced.     

Three dimensions of coping and a look at their evolutionary origin

Serious problems persist concerning the conceptualization and measurement of the coping construct. This study examines the properties and factor structure of the COPE questionnaire, one of the most widely used instruments to measure coping, in a sample of 471 patients. A series of exploratory factor procedures are applied at the item- and scale-level, and the resulting solutions are tested both by their congruence with previously published structures and by confirmatory techniques. Our finding of three robust, generalizable, and parsimonious second-order dimensions—Engagement, Disengagement, and Help-Seeking—challenges the original structure. The results are discussed from an evolutionary perspective, on the assumption that the recognition of coping as the activation of vestigial defenses may make a substantial contribution to clarifying its functions and organization.     

Syllable splitting in literate and preliterate Hebrew speakers: onsets and rimes or bodies and codas?

This study examined consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable splitting among literate (Grade 2) and preliterate (kindergarten) Hebrew speakers. Consideration of both the architecture of Hebrew orthography and phonology led to the prediction that a body-coda rather than an onset-rime subdivision would predominate. Structured and unstructured tasks confirmed the claim that there exists a subsyllabic, supraphonemic level of phonological awareness that is more accessible than individual phonemes. However, as predicted, the syllable body rather than the rime was found to be the more accessible biphonemic unit. Moreover, this preference did not appear to be solely the product of orthographic structure; rather it was also inherent in spoken phonology. Access to single phonemes, in contrast, shifted from an early preliteracy advantage for (monophonemic) onsets to a literacy-based preference for codas.     

De novo conditioning in trauma-exposed individuals with and without posttraumatic stress disorder

Differential conditioning was assessed in 15 medication-free individuals meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 18 trauma-exposed individuals who never developed PTSD (non-PTSD). Conditioned stimuli (CSs) were colored circles, and the unconditioned stimulus was a "highly annoying" electrical stimulus. Individuals with PTSD had higher resting heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) levels and produced larger SC orienting responses. During conditioning, the PTSD group showed larger differential SC, HR, and electromyogram responses to the reinforced vs. nonreinforced stimuli (CS+ vs. CS-) compared with the non-PTSD group. Only PTSD participants continued to show differential SC responses to CS+ vs. CS- during extinction trials. Results suggest that individuals with PTSD have higher sympathetic nervous system arousal at the time of conditioning and are more conditionable than trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD.     

Éléments de validité de contenu des questionnaires d’intérêts Inforizon et exploration de dimensions sous-jacentes à l’organisation de facteurs d’intérêts

This study concerns the confirmatory factorial analysis test of the correspondence between a theory of the definition of the interests proposed in a list of factors and the responses from 5304 subjects in two self-evaluation questionnaires. The questionnaires were provided by a professional advice and support IT tool, Inforizon. It allows the user to explore professional worlds, according to his particular interests. The principles at work are designed to overcome difficulties regularly encountered in the use of interest scores. The empirical structure of the responses to the questionnaires appears to be compatible with the definition model. A second stage is the exploratory research of the explanatory and parsimonious dimensions of the approximately circular organisation of the interest factors.     

The Multidimensionality of Motivation for Jewish Religious Behavior: Content, Structure, and Relationship to Religious Identity

The present study examined the content and structure of self–reported motivation for Jewish religious behavior. Initial items were generated from comprehensive and detailed responses to a semi–structured interview and an open–ended questionnaire. Principal component factor analysis with orthogonal rotation was carried out on the responses of a sample of 323 research participants to two parallel sets of the 111 items produced by the above process. The factor structures for each of these sets of items were highly similar to each other and consisted of the following five reliable factors: belief in a divine order, ethnic identity, social activity, family activity, and upbringing. These factors appear to reflect the way religious behavior can contribute to the satisfaction of a number of general human motives. Persons with different religious identities were found to attribute their performance of religious ritual to different motives, providing a partial explanation for the apparent anomaly of the performance of religious ritual by persons who identify themselves as secular.     

The Silent Treatment? Changes in patient emotional expression after silence

Psychotherapy can be an emotionally laden conversation, where both verbal and nonverbal interventions may impact the therapeutic process. Prior research has postulated mixed results regarding how clients emotionally react following a silence after the therapist is finished talking, potentially due to studying a limited range of silences with primarily qualitative and self-report methodologies. A quantitative exploration may illuminate new findings. Utilising research and automatic data processing from the field of linguistics, we analysed the full range of silence lengths (0.2–24.01 s), and measures of emotional expression—vocally encoded arousal and emotional valence from the works spoken—of 84 audio recordings of Motivational Interviewing sessions. We hypothesised that both the level and the variance of client emotional expression would change as a function of silence length; however, due to the mixed results in the literature, the direction of emotional change was unclear. We conducted a multilevel linear regression to examine how the level of client emotional expression changed across silence length, and an ANOVA to examine the variability of client emotional expression across silence lengths. Results of both analyses indicated that as silence length increased, emotional expression largely remained the same. Broadly, we demonstrated a weak connection between silence length and emotional expression, indicating no persuasive evidence that silence leads to client emotional processing and expression.     

The problem of universals and its perceptual correlates

This paper deals with the philosophical questions which gave rise to the traditional realist theories of universals. The main thesis is that these same questions may also be interpreted as scientific-empirical questions. The study of these problems has begun only very recently and the relevance of the results for the traditional problem of intensional entities has only been remarked by few workers aware of the philosophical problem. The approach adopted here is that of regarding man as a perceptual system situated in an environment and showing certain capacities like perception of universals. The possible ways of access to these entities is discussed on the basis of some recent empirical findings related to perception. One conclusion is that in order to answer the basic philosophical question of how properties, particulars and propositions are perceived may be answered within the domains of science, accepting only the usual presuppositions used in it. Basically, such an approach sees the root of the problem in the great complexity of information processing involved in the actual perception of properties, particulars and propositions.