Peer support telephone dyads for elderly women: Was this the wrong intervention?

Tested a preventive intervention in which peer telephone dyads were developed for low-income, community-living, elderly women with low perceived social support. After an initial assessment, respondents were randomly assigned to either an assessment-only control or received 10 weeks of friendly staff telephone contact. After a second assessment, participants receiving the staff contact were randomly assigned to continue that contact or were paired in dyads to continue phone contact with one another. Dependent variables were measures of perceived social support, morale, depression, and loneliness. All groups, particularly the staff contact group, showed some improvement in mental health scores over time, but there were no significant differences between intervention groups, or between intervention and assessment-only control groups. The results suggest that participation in the study and in personal assessment interviews at home were probably morale enhancing, and that additional telephone contact did not significantly add to that effect. Evidence also indicates that, in this sample, low perceived family support was significantly related to poor mental health, so it is possible that a program designed to increase friend support may have been the wrong intervention.     

Categorical perception of vocal emotion expressions

Continua of vocal emotion expressions, ranging from one expression to another, were created using speech synthesis. Each emotion continuum consisted of expressions differing by equal physical amounts. In 2 experiments, subjects identified the emotion of each expression and discriminated between pairs of expressions. Identification results show that the continua were perceived as 2 distinct sections separated by a sudden category boundary. Also, discrimination accuracy was generally higher for pairs of stimuli falling across category boundaries than for pairs belonging to the same category. These results suggest that vocal expressions are perceived categorically. Results are interpreted from an evolutionary perspective on the function of vocal expression.     

Circadian phase-shifted rats show normal acquisition but impaired long-term retention of place information in the water task

It is thought that circadian rhythms may influence learning and memory processes. However, research supporting this view does not dissociate a mnemonic impairment from other performance deficits. Furthermore, published reports do not specify the type of memory system influenced by the circadian system. The present study assessed the effects of phase shifting on acquisition and expression of place navigation in the water maze, a task sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction. The results showed that phase-shifting circadian rhythms in rats impaired the expression of place information on a retention test but not initial acquisition or encoding of place information. These results suggest that disruption of circadian rhythms may impair consolidation of previously encoded hippocampal place information.     

Impact of intended emotion intensity on cue utilization and decoding accuracy in vocal expression of emotion

Actors vocally portrayed happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust with weak and strong emotion intensity while reading brief verbal phrases aloud. The portrayals were recorded and analyzed according to 20 acoustic cues. Listeners decoded each portrayal by using forced-choice or quantitative ratings. The results showed that (a) portrayals with strong emotion intensity yielded higher decoding accuracy than portrayals with weak intensity, (b) listeners were able to decode the intensity of portrayals, (c) portrayals of the same emotion with different intensity yielded different patterns of acoustic cues, and (d) certain acoustic cues (e.g., fundamental frequency, high-frequency energy) were highly predictive of listeners' ratings of emotion intensity. It is argued that lack of control for emotion intensity may account for some of the inconsistencies in cue utilization reported in the literature.     

Mill on Quality and Quantity

A well known paragraph in Mill's 'Utilitarianism' has standardly been misread. Mill does not claim that if some pleasure is of 'higher quality', then it will be (or ought to be) chosen over the pleasure of lower quality regardless of their respective quantities. Instead he says that if some pleasure will be chosen over another available in larger quantity, then we are justified in saying that the pleasure so chosen is of higher quality than the other. This assertion is unproblematic.     

The Role of Social Ties in Explaining Heterogeneity in the Association Between Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being

Whether economic growth improves subjective well-being has been under debate. Studies that find such an association also document heterogeneity between countries in the magnitude of the relationship. We test a theoretical model in which economic growth enhances subjective well-being only when a large share of the population derives their subjective well-being from relational goods with positive externalities instead of positional goods with negative externalities. The choice between relational and positional goods is determined by individuals’ relational abilities and expectations which we operationalize as attachment security. We specifically test whether economic growth improves subjective well-being more in those countries where the average attachment security is higher. We find support for the hypothesis in the Eurobarometer data but less support in the World Values Survey data.     

Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding

Sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. We advance this research by using an extensive personality measure, the IPIP‐NEO‐120, with large country samples (N > 1000), from 22 countries. Furthermore, to capture the multidimensionality of personality we measure sex differences with a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis distance D). Results indicate that past research, using univariate measures of effect size, have underestimated the size of between‐country sex differences in personality. Confirming past research, there was a strong correlation (r = .69) between a country's sex differences in personality and their Gender Equality Index. Additional analyses showed that women typically score higher than men on all five trait factors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness), and that these relative differences are larger in more gender equal countries. We speculate that as gender equality increases both men and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles.