Entertainment as Pleasurable and Meaningful: Identifying Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Entertainment Consumption

The purpose of this research is to broaden the conceptualization of entertainment selection to identify not only pleasure‐seeking (hedonic concerns) as a motivator, but to also recognize that individuals may choose media as a means of “truth‐seeking” (eudaimonic concerns). This article conceptualized and developed measures to illustrate that entertainment can be used as a means of experiencing not only enjoyment, but also as a means of grappling with questions such as life's purpose and human meaningfulness. Four studies were conducted in the development of these measures, providing evidence for their validity in terms of entertainment preference and individual differences, and illustrating how these motivations predict preferences for entertainment that elicits unique affective experiences.     

Type D personality and the development of PTSD symptoms: A prospective study.

Psychological trauma and prolonged stress may cause mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Pretrauma personality is an important determinant of posttraumatic adjustment. Specifically, trait neuroticism has been identified as a risk factor for PTSD. Additionally, the combination of high negative affectivity or neuroticism with marked social inhibition or introversion, also called Type D personality (Denollet, 2000), may compose a risk factor for PTSD. There is no research available that examined pretrauma Type D personality in relation to PTSD. The present study examined the predictive validity of the Type D personality construct in a sample of Dutch soldiers. Data were collected prior to and 6 months after military deployment to Afghanistan. Separate multiple regression analyses were performed to examine the predictive validity of Type D personality. First, Type D personality was defined as the interaction between negative affect and social inhibition (Na × Si). In a second analysis, Type D was defined following cutoff criteria recommended by Denollet (2000). Results showed that negative affectivity was a significant predictor of PTSD symptoms. Social inhibition and the interaction Na × Si did not add to the amount of explained variance in postdeployment PTSD scores over the effects of childhood abuse, negative affectivity, and prior psychological symptoms. A second analysis showed that Type D personality (dichotomous) did not add to the amount of explained variance in postdeployment PTSD scores over the effects of childhood abuse, and prior psychological symptoms. Therefore, Type D personality appears to be of limited value to explain development of combat-related PTSD symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Letter to the Editors

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier Joel Garreau. Doubleday, New York, 1991. 546 pp. $12.00(paperback).

Urban Concepts Denise Scott Brown. Academy Editions, London; St. Martins Press, New York, 1990. 96 pp. $19.95 (paperback).

Making a Middle Landscape, Peter G. Rowe. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. 313 pp. $39.95.

Philosophical Streets: New Approaches to Urbanism, Dennis Crow, editor. Maisonneuve Press, Washington, DC, 1990. 173 pp. $26.95, $13.95 (paperback).

The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo Saskia Sassen. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1991.397 pp. $39.50.

Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications David J. Maguire, Michael F. Goodchild, and David W. Rhind, editors. Longman Scientific and Technical/John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1991. 2 vols., 1056 pp. $250.

The Moral Order of a Suburb M. P. Baumgartner. Oxford University Press, New York, 1988. 172 pp. $28, $12.95 (paperback).

Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Economic Development Michael I. Luger and Harvey A. Goldstein. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991.242 pp. $39.95, $13.95 (paperback).

Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World Daniel Yankelovich. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 1991.290 pp. $16.95.

Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States Elizabeth D. Huttman, editor. Wim Blauw and Juliet Saltman, coeditors. Duke University Press, London and Durham, 1991. 431 pp. $59.95.

Reusing America's Schools: A Guide for Local Officials, Developers, Neighborhood Residents, Planners and Preservationists Daniel Carlson. The Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Washington, DC, 1991. 68 pp. $14.95 (paperback).

New Households, New Housing Karen A. Franck and Sherry Ahrentzen, editors. Van Nostrand Reinhold Book, New York, 1989. 343 pp. $32.95 (paperback).     

Oxidation Behavior of γ′-Ni3Al-Based Ni–20Al–5Cr Alloys With and Without Reactive Elements Under Different Heating Conditions

Oxidation of Metals - High-temperature oxidation of a model γ′-Ni3Al-based Ni–20Al–5Cr alloy and versions of this alloy doped with Y, Hf, or Si, or some combination of these,...     

Effects of soft-segment prepolymer functionality on the thermal and mechanical properties of RIM copolymers

Segmented copolyureas (PUr) and copoly(urethane–urea)s (PUU) comprising 50% by weight of polyurea hard segments (HS) and polyether soft segment (SS) with different functionalities, have been formed by reaction injection moulding (RIM). The HS were formed from 4,4′-diphenylmethane diisocyanate reacted with mixed isomers of 3,5-diethyltoluene diamine. The nominal functionality of the SS prepolymers used (either amino- or hydroxyl-functionalised polyoxypropylenes with a constant molar mass per functional group of ∼ 2000 g mol⁻¹) was systematically increased from 2 to 4. RIM materials were characterised using dynamic mechanical thermal analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, tensile stress–strain and fracture mechanics studies. Generally, the PUr exhibited far superior thermal-mechanical properties than equivalent PUU materials but inferior fracture resistance, owing to morphological variations resulting from differences in copolymerisation behaviour. For both systems, tensile behaviour was shown to be dominated by the degree of phase separation, whereas fracture properties showed a degree of dependence on SS functionality.     

An investigation of scotopic threshold-versus-illuminance curves for the analysis of color-matching data

Stiles developed a method for estimating whether rod-photoreceptor activity contributed to color-matching data. This method requires knowledge of the rod threshold at the illuminance levels of lights being viewed. Stiles suggested that the Aguilar and Stiles scotopic threshold-versus-illuminance (TVI) curve could serve as a convenient approximation of the rod threshold. Stiles' method was intended for use in color-matching experiments where the stimuli are presented side by side, but, in the Aguilar and Stiles experiment, detection thresholds were measured for temporally pulsed lights. This study compares rod-sensitivity with detection and side-by-side adjustment tasks. The illumination level of the test and background light was kept below the absolute threshold of the short-wavelength sensitive cones, because there is evidence that cone signals may interact with the scotopic TVI function. The threshold data fell mainly within the range of the Aguilar and Stiles observers. There were two notable deviations from the Aguilar and Stiles curve: (1) consistent with previous reports, the scotopic TVI function had a slope shallower than the Aguilar and Stiles curve when measured with a short-wavelength background; (2) thresholds measured from a dark surround with a spatial adjustment task were higher than the Aguilar and Stiles thresholds even though the slopes were the same. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Instructional footprinting and semantic preservation in Linda

Linda is a co-ordination language designed to support process creation and interprocess communication within conventional computational languages. Although the Linda paradigm touts architectural and language independence, it often suffers performance penalties, particularly on local area network platforms. Instructional footprinting is an optimization technique with the primary goal of enhancing the execution speed of Linda programs. The two main aspects of instructional footprinting are instructional decomposition and code motion. The paper addresses the semantic issues encountered when the Linda primitives, IN and RD, are decomposed and moved past other Linda operations. Formal semantics are given as well as results showing significant speed-up (as high as 100%) when instructional footprinting is used.