Maintenance of Response Readiness in Patients With Parkinson's Disease: Evidence From a Simple Reaction Time Task.

The authors explored the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on the generation and maintenance of response readiness in a simple reaction time task. They compared performance of idiopathic PD patients without dementia, age-matched controls, and younger controls over short (1-, 3-, and 6-s) and long (12- and 18-s) foreperiod intervals. After each trial, the authors probed memory for visual information that also had to be maintained during the trial interval. Patients and controls did not differ overall in their ability to maintain readiness over long delays. However, within the PD group only, errors in maintaining visual information were correlated with difficulty in maintaining readiness, suggesting that systems impaired in PD may facilitate the maintenance of processing in both motor and cognitive domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ordinal Judgments and Summation of Nonvisible Sets of Food Items by Two Chimpanzees and a Rhesus Macaque.

Two chimpanzees and a rhesus macaque rapidly learned the ordinal relations between 5 colors of containers (plastic eggs) when all containers of a given color contained a specific number of identical food items. All 3 animals also performed at high levels when comparing sets of containers with sets of visible food items. This indicates that the animals learned the approximate quantity of food items in containers of a given color. However, all animals failed in a summation task, in which a single container was compared with a set of 2 containers of a lesser individual quantity but a greater combined quantity. This difficulty was not overcome by sequential presentation of containers into opaque receptacles, but performance improved if the quantitative difference between sizes was very large. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using SMS text messaging to assess moderators of smoking reduction: Validating a new tool for ecological measurement of health behaviors.

Objective: Understanding the psychological processes that contribute to smoking reduction will yield population health benefits. Negative mood may moderate smoking lapse during cessation, but this relationship has been difficult to measure in ongoing daily experience. We used a novel form of ecological momentary assessment to test a self-control model of negative mood and craving leading to smoking lapse. Design: We validated short message service (SMS) text as a user-friendly and low-cost option for ecologically measuring real-time health behaviors. We sent text messages to cigarette smokers attempting to quit eight times daily for the first 21 days of cessation (N-obs = 3,811). Main outcome measures: Approximately every two hours, we assessed cigarette count, mood, and cravings, and examined between- and within-day patterns and time-lagged relationships among these variables. Exhaled carbon monoxide was assessed pre- and posttreatment. Results: Negative mood and craving predicted smoking two hours later, but craving mediated the mood–smoking relationship. Also, this mediation relationship predicted smoking over the next two, but not four, hours. Conclusion: Results clarify conflicting previous findings on the relation between affect and smoking, validate a new low-cost and user-friendly method for collecting fine-grained health behavior assessments, and emphasize the importance of rapid, real-time measurement of smoking moderators. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Restricted use of success cues in retrieval during posthypnotic amnesia.

Evaluated memory for successful and unsuccessful responses to hypnotic suggestions in partially amnesic Ss and in those Ss with normal forgetting. Two analyses (278 undergraduates) demonstrated that highly hypnotizable Ss experiencing partial posthypnotic amnesia tended to show no selective recall for their successes or failures during amnesia, whereas the remainder of the Ss showed definite selective recall of hypnotic success posthypnotically. These findings support F. J. Evans and J. F. Kihlstrom's (see record 1974-06307-001) hypothesis that posthypnotic amnesia involves a disruption of memory organization and suggest that the phenomenon may be mediated by a restriction in the use of normally employed retrieval cues. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Moving toward more perfect unions: Daily and long-term consequences of approach and avoidance goals in romantic relationships.

In 2 daily experience studies and a laboratory study, the authors test predictions from approach-avoidance motivational theory to understand how dating couples can maintain feelings of relationship satisfaction in their daily lives and over the course of time. Approach goals were associated with increased relationship satisfaction on a daily basis and over time, particularly when both partners were high in approach goals. Avoidance goals were associated with decreases in relationship satisfaction over time, and people were particularly dissatisfied when they were involved with a partner with high avoidance goals. People high in approach goals and their partners were rated as relatively more satisfied and responsive to a partner's needs by outside observers in the lab, whereas people with high avoidance goals and their partners were rated as less satisfied and responsive. Positive emotions mediated the link between approach goals and daily satisfaction in both studies, and responsiveness to the partner's needs was an additional behavioral mechanism in Study 2. Implications of these findings for approach-avoidance motivational theory and for the maintenance of satisfying relationships over time are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of a safety awareness group intervention for women with diverse disabilities: A pilot study.

Objective: Describe the development and preliminary evaluation of a safety awareness program for women with disabilities. Design: Baseline and postintervention questionnaires administered to a sample of women who completed a safety awareness program. Participants: Seven women with diverse disabilities. Intervention: Eight interactive sessions designed to increase protective factors. Setting: Community site for persons with disabilities. Main Outcomes: Safety self-efficacy, safety skills, social support/isolation, and safety promoting behaviors. Results: Significant increases from baseline to postintervention were found on measures of self-efficacy and safety skills. Although not statistically significant, improvements were also found in safety promoting behavior. Conclusion: Despite the small sample, findings suggest that participation in a safety awareness program may improve protective factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The social consequences of expressive suppression.

At times, people keep their emotions from showing during social interactions. The authors' analysis suggests that such expressive suppression should disrupt communication and increase stress levels. To test this hypothesis, the authors conducted 2 studies in which unacquainted pairs of women discussed an upsetting topic. In Study 1, one member of each pair was randomly assigned to (a) suppress her emotional behavior, (b) respond naturally, or (c) cognitively reappraise in a way that reduced emotional responding. Suppression alone disrupted communication and magnified blood pressure responses in the suppressors' partners. In Study 2, suppression had a negative impact on the regulators' emotional experience and increased blood pressure in both regulators and their partners. Suppression also reduced rapport and inhibited relationship formation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infant sensitivity to trajectory forms.

The authors investigated whether infants are sensitive to visual event trajectory forms, and whether they are sensitive to the underlying dynamics of trajectory forms. The authors habituated 8-month-old infants to a videotaped event run either forward or reversed in time and then switched them to the same event run in the opposite direction. Infants dishabituated when switched to the event with the novel direction in time, indicating sensitivity to the form of the trajectory. Infants exhibited equivalent habituation rates and looking times for forward and reversed events, thus failing to provide evidence that infants are sensitive to the underlying dynamics. In a partial replication of this first experiment, the same pattern of results was found. Both experiments revealed infant sensitivity to the trajectory forms, but not the underlying dynamics of events. The authors discuss implications for methods used in infant event perception studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Validity of Dietary Restraint Scales: Reply to van Strien et al. (2006).

In T. van Strien, R. C. M. E. Engels, W. van Staveren, and C. P. Herman's (see record 2006-03905-010) comment, they contested the conclusion that dietary restraint scales are invalid measures of acute dietary restriction (E. Stice, M. Fisher, & M. R. Lowe, 2004). The authors respond to their concerns and conclude that researchers should (a) not have to work this hard to find evidence that these scales correlate with dieting restriction, (b) not settle for scales with only weak validity, and (c) use scales that are consistently valid across settings. The authors also discuss new evidence that most weight loss dieters are not achieving the negative energy balance necessary for weight loss, which seems to explain why these scales do not correlate inversely with caloric intake and why those with the highest dietary restraint scores gain more weight over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of speaking rate and lexical status on phonetic perception.

Among the contextual factors known to play a role in segmental perception are the rate at which the speech was produced and the lexical status of the item, that is, whether it is a meaningful word of the language. In a series of experiments on the word-initial /b/p/ voicing distinction, we investigated the conditions under which these factors operate during speech processing. The results indicated that under instructions of speeded responding, listeners could, on some trials, ignore some later occurring contextual information within the word that specified rate and lexical status. Importantly, however, they could not ignore speaking rate entirely. Although they could base their decision on only the early portion of the word, when doing so they treated the word as if it were physically short—that is to say, as if there were no later occurring information specifying a slower rate. This suggests that listeners always take account of rate when identifying the voicing value of a consonant, but precisely which information within the word is used to specify rate can vary with task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)