Reactivity and personal control over stimulation supply

The experiment was designed to study the effect of personal control, operationalized in terms of choice between a more demanding and a less demanding task, on persons with different levels of reactivity. Subjects were randomly assigned and individually tested in a 2 (High reactivity/Low reactivity) × 2 (Low rate of stimulus presentation/ High rate of stimulus presentation) × 2 (Choice/No Choice) factorial experiment with 15 subjects per condition. The two principal dependent measures were the total number of correct responses in a serial RT task and the post-task levels of anxiety, anger, and curiosity. The major finding was that while the availability of control had a positive effect on both task performance and affect, its role was situation-specific, i.e. limited to the difficult task. Most probably the availability of control masks the variability of reaction due to individual differences in reactivity. However, high-reactives are still left with the residual stress of unresolved emotions.     

Effects of Acute Stress or Centrally Injected Interleukin-1beta on Neuropeptide Expression in the Immune System

Acute stress stimulates the expression and release of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) from the hypothalamus, and the pro-opiomelanocortin products beta-endorphin and ACTH from the anterior pituitary. These neuropeptides are also expressed in immune tissues, and it has been proposed that they may modulate immune responses to stress through paracrine mechanisms. We subjected rats to restraint stress or central injection of interleukin (IL)-1beta to determine whether these acute stimuli can alter the expression of neuropeptides in the spleen and thymus. Restraint stress significantly increased the contents of all these neuropeptides in thymic, but not splenic, extracts. A single icv injection of IL-1beta increased contents of CRH, AVP, ACTH and beta-endorphin in the spleens of both sham-operated and adrenalectomised (ADX) rats. IL-1beta increased thymic contents of CRH and ACTH in sham-operated rats but these increases were not observed in ADX rats. These results suggest that the effects of IL-1beta on neuropeptide expression in the spleen are independent of glucocorticoids, whereas IL-1beta stimulation of neuropeptide expression in the thymus is dependent on circulating glucocorticoids. There were significant correlations between increases in CRH, ACTH and beta-endorphin in the spleen, and between CRH and ACTH in the thymus, consistent with the suggestion that IL-1beta-induced increases in ACTH and beta-endorphin may be mediated through CRH. These results provide evidence that stressors can directly influence neuropeptide expression in immune tissues. Thus stress may influence immune functions through paracrine mechanisms involving locally synthesised neuropeptides as well as through activation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis.     

The perestroika of the family? Gender and occupational differences in family values in modern day Russia

The recent dramatic changes in the political and economic structures of Eastern Europe have focused interest on the position of women in Russia, where a greater openness in discussing inequalities has been accompanied by a more regressive harkening back to traditional gender roles. The study reported in this paper examines gender and occupational differences in general attitude toward the family, disclosure to family members, and child-rearing values. Three hundred sixty-eight students, 179 manual workers, and 160 entrepreneurs completed a structured measure of family orientation and replied to open-ended questions on family taboos and child-rearing practices, while a subsample (N = 475) completed a family disclosure inventory. Multivariate analyses of variance analyses revealed women to be more family oriented than men, while gender and occupation interacted in producing family disclosure rates. HILOGLINEAR analyses found that the topics suitable for family discussion, as well as the child-rearing values promoted by our respondents, were also best predicted by considering the interaction between both gender and occupation. The implications of these findings for the future shape of Russian family relations is discussed.     

General vs health‐specific consideration of immediate and future consequences to explain eating and exercise behavior in a Norwegian student population: A randomized survey experiment

Over several decades, the consideration of future consequences (CFC) construct has been used to explain and predict health behaviors. However, the reported associations between CFC and health behaviors are relatively weak, leading to the low explanatory power of the models. Recent research suggests that CFC can be a domain‐specific construct. In this study, we explored the psychometric properties of the Norwegian CFC‐general and CFC‐health questionnaires in terms of factor structure and discriminant and convergent validity and tested the association between the general and domain‐specific CFC and exercise and eating behaviors. In a randomized survey experiment, 1,001 university students were assigned to either a CFC‐general or a CFC‐health questionnaire. In the tested models, two dimensions of CFC, consideration of immediate consequences (CFC‐I) and consideration of future consequences (CFC‐F), were independent variables. The exercise and eating behaviors, measured both as self‐evaluated behaviors and self‐reported frequency measures, were dependent variables. The results showed that in both CFC‐general and CFC‐health, CFC‐I and CFC‐F are distinct dimensions that differentially explain variance in health behaviors. A domain‐specific CFC‐health explained a significantly higher amount of variance in self‐reported eating and exercising behaviors than a general CFC. Self‐evaluated health behaviors were better explained by CFC than self‐reported behavioral frequencies. Practical implications of the findings and avenues for future research are discussed.     

Unrealistic optimism and perceived control: role of personal competence

This work analyzed the effects of unrealistic optimism in the interaction between the emotional valence of future events, the perception of control over these events, and the person with whom one compares oneself. It was hypothesized that, if the person of comparison is judged as very competent, a pessimistic bias should be produced. Likelihood of four different types of events (positive and controllable, positive and uncontrollable, negative and controllable, and negative and uncontrollable) were rated by 133 university students (22 men and 111 women) for themselves, for an average student, for their best friend, and for a bright friend. A pessimistic bias was observed on the relative likelihood of the events when the comparison was made between oneself and a competent and bright friend, when events were perceived as controllable, especially positive ones. Not enough is known, however, to provide meaningful interpretation at present; that must await further data and theoretical development.     

Evidence for preserved representations in change blindness

People often fail to detect large changes to scenes, provided that the changes occur during a visual disruption. This phenomenon, known as "change blindness," occurs both in the laboratory and in real-world situations in which changes occur unexpectedly. The pervasiveness of the inability to detect changes is consistent with the theoretical notion that we internally represent relatively little information from our visual world from one glance at a scene to the next. However, evidence for change blindness does not necessarily imply the absence of such a representation---people could also miss changes if they fail to compare an existing representation of the pre-change scene to the post-change scene. In three experiments, we show that people often do have a representation of some aspects of the pre-change scene even when they fail to report the change. And, in fact, they appear to "discover" this memory and can explicitly report details of a changed object in response to probing questions. The results of these real-world change detection studies are discussed in the context of broader claims about change blindness.     

The contextual modulation of conditioned taste aversions by the physical environment and time of day is similar

In a pair of experiments, we have compared the ability of changes of place (Exp. 1) and changes of time of day (Exp. 2) to separately modulate learned saline-aversion memory phenomena in rats. Neither a spatial nor a temporal change disrupted latent inhibition using the present behavioral procedure. However, pre-exposure to the taste increased the contextual control of the learned aversion expression. The aversion reappeared in the place or at the time of conditioning after extinction in a different context. The results indicate that environmental and temporal contexts can independently, but similarly modulate taste aversion learning.     

Processing of Grammatical Gender in a Three-Gender System: Experimental Evidence from Russian

Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective–noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and phonologically transparent masculine or feminine nouns. Experiment 2 examines priming for transparent nouns against a neutral baseline (possible only for feminines and neuters), revealing that priming is due primarily to inhibition from discordant gender. Experiment 3 demonstrates gender priming with phonologically opaque masculine and feminine nouns. Experiment 4 returns to transparent masculine and feminine nouns with a different kind of baseline, using three versions of a single word root (prost—simple, in the feminine adjectival form prostaja, masculine adjectival form prostoj, and the adverbial form prosto ), and shows that gender can also facilitate lexical access, at least for feminine nouns. We conclude that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues on-line, helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.     

Epidemiology of alcohol consumption and related problems in Latin American countries: Contributions of psychology

Alcohol consumption is the leading risk factor for morbi‐mortality in many Latin American Countries. However, epidemiologic studies are relatively scarce. Among factors such as limited research capacity, disciplinary traditions and an emphasis on psychopathology within the field of psychology, have been postulated to account for this. The aim of this article is to review epidemiologic research on alcohol in Spanish Speaking Latin American Countries, and to measure the contribution of psychology to the field. A systematic search was performed in English and Spanish using regional and international data bases. We identified 269 articles. Most focused on consumption patterns in youth, with samples from a single school and using a variety of measures. With the exception of multinational efforts like Emergency Room Collaborative Alcohol Analysis Project or those supported by World Health Organization/Pan American Health Organization, studies reviewed reflected little cross country collaboration. Mexico accounted for most of the productivity, while many countries had very few or no articles. Most research was performed by health science researchers with a small contribution from psychology, but which increased significantly over time. The results of this review provide a broad identification of patterns regarding epidemiologic research on alcohol, and demonstrate the need for national scientific policies to promote research on public health topics.