Psychological processes and mental states.

Comments on D. Kipnis's (see record 199707781-001) article that argues against the use of psychological processes as a basis for the explanation of social behavior. The present author concerns himself with Kipnis's use of "psychological processes" and "mental states" as synonyms. He claims that Kipnis overstepped his argument by generalizing his conclusion from the term "mental states" to "psychological processes." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A stimulus–response social psychology?

Comments on D. Kipnis's (see record 199707781-001) article that critically analyzes social psychology's assumption that psychological states can explain social behavior. The present author suggests that, essentially, Kipnis is calling for a return to behavioral social psychology, in suggesting that social psychology be solely concerned with explanations of what social behavior arises in response to objective changes in technology. The author continues that it is certainly not the case that humans are merely reactive in response to environmental stimuli (including technology), but, rather, as Dewey and Mead argued, they are equally proactive, causal, influencing agents acting on the environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can social behavior be influenced by events that we are unaware of?

Responds to the comments of K. A. Markus (see record 199810886-007), T. D. Nelson (see record 199810886-008), and M. C. Green et al (see record 199810886-008) referring to D. Kipnis's (see record 199707781-001) article analyzing social psychology's assumption that psychological states can explain social behavior. In the present reply, Kipnis addresses the arguments contained in the 3 aforementioned comments, and concludes with the assumption that the content of consciousness is explained by people's interactions with events in their world, and, further, that the understanding of social behavior will progress when theory and empirical research are extended to include societal events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Behavior technologies" caricature of social psychology.

Comments that D. Kipnis's (see record 1994-29516-001) examination of present-day social psychology journals and textbooks ignored primary outlets in social psychology, widely taught mainstream texts, and "handbook" and "annual review" treatments. Fair use of these sources would have revealed that only a minor fraction of article titles and chapter topics can reasonably be subsumed under "Power and Behavior Technology." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological adjustment of adolescents attempting to lose or gain weight.

The psychological adjustment of high school boys and girls who were trying to reduce or gain weight was compared in a large sample. Reducers of both sexes and male gainers exhibited lower physical self-esteem. Girls who were trying to change weight in either direction showed depression and lower global self-esteem, but male reducers and gainers did not differ on these measures. Restraint Scale scores for girls were predicted by body image, weight variables, depression, and social anxiety; restraint for boys was predicted by body image and weight variables only. Thus, the psychological correlates of weight-changing efforts are more extensive in girls. The adolescent's decision to gain or lose weight may be brought on by his/her psychological adjustment as well as by the prevailing social pressure. Alternately, a weight-change attempt may be a risk factor for psychopathology, especially for girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychobiology of Altered States of Consciousness.

The article reviews the current knowledge regarding altered states of consciousness (ASC) (a) occurring spontaneously, (b) evoked by physical and physiological stimulation, (c) induced by psychological means, and (d) caused by diseases. The emphasis is laid on psychological and neurobiological approaches. The phenomenological analysis of the multiple ASC resulted in 4 dimensions by which they can be characterized: activation, awareness span, self-awareness, and sensory dynamics. The neurophysiological approach revealed that the different states of consciousness are mainly brought about by a compromised brain structure, transient changes in brain dynamics (disconnectivity), and neurochemical and metabolic processes. Besides these severe alterations, environmental stimuli, mental practices, and techniques of self-control can also temporarily alter brain functioning and conscious experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adjustment of young adolescents in two-parent nuclear, stepfather, and mother-custody families.

This study examined differences in the psychological adjustment (self-reports of global severity of psychopathology, goal directedness, and school-related problems) and correlates of the psychological adjustment of 234 seventh- and ninth-grade students who resided in two-parent nuclear (intact) families, stepfather families, or mother-custody divorced families. These three family structures were equivalent, or were equated statistically, on demographic and socioeconomic variables. Adjustment was unrelated to family structure, gender, and grade or to any interactions among these variables. However, trends in the correlates of adjustment were similar for adolescents in each of the three family-structure groups. Generally, adjustment was negatively related to family conflict and to the use of externalizing coping strategies; was positively related to the family dimensions of cohesion, expressiveness, and personal growth; and was positively related to social support from friends. Current models of adolescent adjustment are discussed, and the limitations of self-report data are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychology and Medicine: Psychobiological Dimensions of Health and Illness.

Reviews the book, Psychology and Medicine: Psychobiological Dimensions by Donald Bakal (1979). Bakal believes that psychology "is rapidly becoming an integral part of modern health care delivery systems" and directs his book toward developing this interest by showing the theoretical and practical relevance of psychological concepts to major health problems. In the first section, which has the inclusive title "Medicine: Mind and Body", he describes a "paradigm shift" in medicine, away from an emphasis on the physiological and biochemical systems as basic to understanding disease toward a "psychobiological" approach to illness which focuses on the inter-relationships between the social, psychological, and physiological determinants of health and disease. He amplifies this point by discussing such matters as personality-disease relationships, psychomatic medicine, a cross-cultural variation in models of health and illness and the implications of the split brain research for states of consciousness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conjunctive moderator variables in vulnerability and resiliency research: Life stress, social support and coping skills, and adolescent sport injuries.

In life event research relating to vulnerability and resilience factors, single moderator variables have typically been the focus of study. Little is known about the ways in which moderator variables may interact with one another to increase vulnerability or resilience. We propose a distinction between conjunctive moderation, in which multiple moderators must co-occur in a specific combination or pattern to maximize a relation between a predictor and an outcome variable, and disjunctive moderation, in which any one of a number of moderators maximizes the predictor–criterion relation. Our results indicate that social support and psychological coping skills are statistically independent psychosocial resources and that they operate in a conjunctive manner to influence the relation between life stress and subsequent athletic injury in adolescents. Only athletes low in both coping skills and social support exhibited a significant stress–injury relation, and in that vulnerable subgroup, negative major life events accounted for up to 30% of the injury variance. Methodological considerations in the assessment of conjunctive moderator effects are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analysis of the association between marital relationships and health problems: An interactional perspective.

Reviews the evidence for a relationship between 3 types of marital variables (marital status, marital adjustment, and marital interaction) and health problems (etiology, course/outcome/treatment) as well as the effect that health problems have on marriage. The mechanisms responsible for these associations also are evaluated. The evidence suggests that marital variables affect health status but that the effect is indirect and nonspecific. The major explanatory model, the stress/social support hypothesis, has provided a broad conceptual framework rather than testable hypotheses. The results of the review suggest, however, that sufficient evidence exists for researchers to focus on exploring specific explanations. A hypothetical model is presented that includes interpersonal, intrapersonal, psychological, and physiological variables. This model is intended as a blueprint for exploration as well as a summary of available evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ghosts, taxonomies, and social psychology.

This article critically analyzes social psychology's assumption that psychological states can explain social behavior. On the basis of an analysis of the logic of classification systems, the author argues that there are no procedures available to independently verify the existence of these psychological states. As a consequence, explanations of social behavior are subject to continual challenge and replacement. Furthermore, it is argued that focusing on psychological states serves to inhibit the systematic study of societal changes (particularly changes in technology) that are affecting and shaping all aspects of human existence. This article describes an alternate paradigm that coordinates one dimension of societal events—technology—with changes in people's consciousness and subsequent behavior. A taxonomy of technology is described in the closing section of the article. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Birth order and social behavior.

Recent research of Schachter has redirected a longstanding interest in physiological, psychological, and sociological correlates of order of birth to affiliative or withdrawal tendencies as birth-order correlates. The most firmly established and persistent finding relative to birth order shows an overproportion of 1st-born children in college. Substantial evidence also exists showing (1) 1st-born to be more susceptible than later born to social pressure and (2) 1st-born women, when apprehensive, to be more strongly attracted than later-born women to the company of others. Studies relating birth order to conformity or dependence, delinquency, alcoholism, and schizophrenia as well as college attendance and affiliative behavior are reviewed. (2p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Studies of brain dysfunction in schizophrenia.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of the psychologist the extensive research literature concerned with the physiological correlates of behavior. Research concerned with the electroencephalographic, histopathological, and biochemical analysis of schizophrenics receives concentrated attention. The review also includes "several psychological and physiological studies which focus specifically on the question of brain disorder in schizophrenia." The studies made within the last twenty to twenty-five years are included. 81-item bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vocal affect expression: A review and a model for future research.

Contends that in the literature on the vocal expression of emotion, there is a discrepancy between reported high accuracy in vocal-auditory recognition and a lack of evidence for the acoustic differentiation of vocal expression. The latter is explained by (a) a paucity of research on voice quality, (b) neglect of the social signaling functions of affect vocalization, and (c) insufficiently precise conceptualization of the underlying emotional states. A component-patterning model of vocal affect expression is proposed that attempts to link the outcomes of antecedent event evaluation to biologically based response patterns. The likely phonatory and articulatory correlates of the physiological responses characterizing different emotional states are described in the form of 3 major voice types (narrow/wide, lax/tense, full/thin). Specific predictions about changes in acoustic parameters resulting from changing voice types are compared with the pattern of empirical findings yielded by a comprehensive survey of the literature on vocal cues in emotional expression. Although the comparison is largely limited to the lax/tense voice type (because acoustic parameters relevant to the other voice types have not yet been systematically studied), a high degree of convergence is revealed. (120 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional states and physical health.

Positive emotional states may promote healthy perceptions, beliefs, and physical well-being itself. To explore potential mechanisms linking pleasant feelings and good health, the authors consider several lines of research including (a) direct effects of positive affect on physiology, especially the immune system, (b) the information value of emotional experiences, (c) the psychological resources engendered by positive feeling states, (d) the ways in which mood can motivate health-relevant behaviors, and (e) the elicitation of social support. As anticipated by the Greek physician Hippocrates, positive emotions and healthy outcomes may be linked through multiple pathways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pre-hurricane perceived social support protects against psychological distress: A longitudinal analysis of low-income mothers.

Objective: In this study, we examined the influence of pre-disaster perceived social support on post-disaster psychological distress among survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Method: Participants (N = 386) were low-income mothers between 18 and 34 years of age at baseline (M = 26.4, SD = 4.43). The majority (84.8%) was African American; 10.4% identified as Caucasian, 3.2% identified as Hispanic, and 1.8% identified as other. Participants were enrolled in an educational intervention study in 2004 and 2005. Those who had completed a 1-year follow-up assessment prior to Hurricane Katrina were reassessed approximately 1 year after the hurricane. Measures of perceived social support and psychological distress were included in pre- and post-disaster assessments. Using structural equation modeling and multiple mediator analysis, we tested a model wherein pre-disaster perceived social support predicted post-disaster psychological distress both directly and indirectly through its effects on pre-disaster psychological distress, exposure to hurricane-related stressors, and post-disaster perceived social support. We predicted that higher pre-disaster perceived social support would be predictive of lower pre-disaster psychological distress, lower hurricane-related stressors, and higher post-disaster perceived social support, and that these variables would, in turn, predict lower post-disaster psychologically distress. Results: Our analyses provide partial support for the hypothesized model. Although pre-disaster perceived social support did not exert a direct effect on post-disaster psychological distress, the indirect effects of all 3 proposed mediators were significant. Conclusions: Pre-disaster social support can decrease both exposure to natural disasters and the negative psychological effects of natural disaster exposure. These findings underscore the importance of bolstering the post-disaster social support networks of low-income mothers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Touch relieves stress and pain

The contribution of non-biomedical factors to the experience of pain in the cancer patient has not been well established. Although intensity of pain reports cannot be fully explained by extent of identifiable nociception or neuropathy, behavioral factors have been only modest predictors of cancer pain report. Most studies that have demonstrated associations between pain and behavioral factors were conducted with highly selected groups of patients with all data collected concurrently. Thus the predictive value of the behavioral factors has been indeterminable. In this study, 358 bone marrow transplant patients (196 male, 162 female) completed pretransplant biomedical, physical functioning, psychological and social evaluations. For 25 days following transplantation, patients completed daily visual analogue scale oral pain reports and nurses recorded opioid use. At least once a week oral medicine staff completed a standardized, validated measure of observable oral mucositis as a measure of nociception. Results indicated that psychological and social variables were significant predictors of pain in this sample. Distress, particularly distress specific to the transplant, was the strongest predictor, while self-efficacy and coping style were weaker, but significantly associated with pain report for either men or women. While the psychological and social variables were significant predictors of pain, most of the variance in pain report was explained by biomedical variables rather than psychological or social variables. These results are consistent with those of previous research and indicate that biopsychosocial associations predate the onset of pain, but are at best modest predictors of cancer patients who will report greater or lesser pain. Clinical applications and limits of these data are discussed, particularly in relation to emotional distress, coping style and the differences found in predicting pain in men and women.     

Psychological Ecology or Psychonomics.

Comments made by the present author have to do with problems of prediction of job success, appropriate vocational placement, selection for particular tasks, and the like which have been viewed in an increasingly sophisticated fashion. The author states that formerly psychologists tended to oversimplify prediction problems by trying to predict one criterion with one predictor test, the current trend is to a recognition that the "criterion" is actually made up of a large number of variables, each of which may be related in a complicated fashion to a large number of predictor variables. He feels that rather than asserting that intelligence predicts school success, we now speak of tests of verbal and numerical skills predicting performance on abstract intellectual tasks. The author mentions George Gaylord Simpsons' The Meaning of Evolution, where this author paints a picture of the physical, geographic world of the earth that provides a wide range of living conditions, and of the biological world of living organisms that differentially adapt themselves to these varied conditions. The present author is getting at the study of ecology or bionomics, which he defines as the study of relationships and interactions between organisms and their environment and other organisms. Subsequently, he proposes the terms psychological ecology or psychonomics, which can be defined as the study of the manner in which multiple characteristics of the individual interact with the multiple characteristics of the environment to promote or hinder the survival and optimal performance of the individual. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are hypertensives less assertive? A controlled evaluation.

Assessed the performance of 12 male hypertensives (mean age 47.36 yrs) in increasingly demanding interpersonal interactions. 12 extended role-played scenes incorporating the expression of positive and negative emotional states were used. Behavioral, physiological, and subjective ratings were obtained. Performance of the hypertensives was compared to that of both patient and nonpatient normotensive Ss who were carefully matched with the hypertensives on a number of demographic variables. Results indicate that the hypertensives responded less assertively on a number of dimensions than did the nonpatient comparison group. However, the performance of the normotensive patient group was similar to that of the hypertensive patients. Physiological and subjective data indicated comparable responding across all 3 experimental groups. The discussion focuses on the existence of a chronic-illness syndrome that potentially has strong behavioral correlates. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judith Rodin: Early Career Awards for 1977.

Judith Rodin received an Early Career Award for major theoretical contributions to our understanding of the relationship between obesity and general sensitivity to external stimulation, and for seminal studies on altruism, on aging and the effects of control or helplessness, and on the consequences of overcrowding. Rodin's work, in collaboration with Stanley Schachter, places human obesity in a broader theoretical context involving information processing correlates and potential physiological mechanisms. Her eclectic contributions on altruism, overcrowding, and control brilliantly combine field and laboratory procedures, illustrating the implications of social psychological principles and phenomena for an understanding of human problems and suggesting directions for their remedy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)