Health-related possible selves in young and middle adulthood.

The construct of possible selves was used to examine when, in the adult life span, health-related goals become dominant. It was predicted that by middle age most adults would have health-related possible selves and that the strength of self-regulatory variables associated with health-related possible selves would be related to reported health behaviors. Data collected from 171 young (aged 24–39 yrs) and middle-aged (aged 40–59 yrs) adults showed that health-related possible selves become predominant in midlife. In addition, both young and middle-aged adults reported more feared than hoped-for selves in the realm of health. Perceived self-efficacy and number of goal-oriented activities to avoid feared health-relevant selves were significant predictors of health behaviors. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical perspectives on self and health processes over the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Who said what? Source memory for narrator and character agents in literary short stories.

One dimension of reading literacy involves the tracking of agents associated with the text. In a literary short story, there is a society of character agents and pragmatic agents. This study investigated the relative salience of different classes of agents in memory. Two experiments measured source memory as an index of agent salience in long-term memory. Patterns of source memory scores supported an invisible third-person narrator hypothesis and an agent amalgamation hypothesis, but not a structural prominence hypothesis: First-person narrator > nonnarrator character > third-person narrator > 0. Statement detection parameters did not significantly differ among the 3 classes of agents, so differences in source memory could not be explained by differences in the content of the speech acts. Source memory scores also could not be explained by surface features of the text, differences among readers, and sophisticated guessing on the basis of a story abstract. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Increased liking for a solution is not necessary for the attenuation of neophobia in rats.

Recent evidence suggests that liking and wanting of food rewards can be experimentally dissociated (e.g., Berridge, 1996); this dissociation extends to attenuated neophobia in the present study. Rats tend to eat less of a novel food than a familiar food, a phenomenon called neophobia. The present experiments evaluated whether attenuation of neophobia by prior exposure reflects enhanced liking of the flavor using the Taste Reactivity (TR) test. In Experiment 1, rats given five 10-s TR trials with water or various concentrations of saccharin solution (0.1%, 0.2%, 0.5%) did not show a change in the number of hedonic reactions displayed across trials. However, in a subsequent consumption test from a bottle containing 0.25% saccharin solution, rats with no prior saccharin exposure (group water) consumed less than rats with prior saccharin exposure; that is they displayed neophobia. In Experiment 2, whether rats received five 10-s TR trials with water or 0.5% saccharin solution, they did not display a difference in hedonic reactions to 0.25% saccharin solution in two 5-min TR test trials. These results suggest that the attenuation of neophobia is evidenced as an increase in the tendency to approach a bottle containing the flavored solution (wanting), but not as an enhanced liking of that solution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correction to Buehler and Welsh (2009).

Reports an error in A process model of adolescents' triangulation into parents' marital conflict: The role of emotional reactivity by Cheryl Buehler and Deborah P. Welsh (Journal of Family Psychology, 2009[Apr], Vol 23[2], 167-180). In the article “A Process Model of Adolescents’ Triangulation Into Parents’ Marital Conflict: The Role of Emotional Reactivity” by Cheryl Buehler and Deborah P. Welsh (Journal of Family Psychology, 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 167–180), the abstract contains an error. The sample size for the study was 416 rather than 426. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2009-04780-005.) This study examined adolescents' emotional reactivity to parents' marital conflict as a mediator of the association between triangulation and adolescents' internalizing problems in a sample of 2-parent families (N = 426). Four waves of annual, multiple-informant data were analyzed (youth ages 11–15 years). The authors used structural equation modeling and found that triangulation was associated with increases in adolescents' internalizing problems, controlling for marital hostility and adolescent externalizing problems. There also was an indirect pathway from triangulation to internalizing problems across time through youths' emotional reactivity. Moderating analyses indicated that the 2nd half of the pathway, the association between emotional reactivity and increased internalizing problems, characterized youth with lower levels of hopefulness and attachment to parents. The findings help detail why triangulation is a risk factor for adolescents' development and which youth will profit most from interventions focused on emotional regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of conditioning method and testing method on strength of lithium-induced taste aversion learning.

Here the authors evaluated the effect of the method of conditioning (bottle or intraoral [IO] infusion) on the strength of a flavor-drug association when measured in a standard 1-bottle consumption test or when measured by IO infusion in a taste reactivity test. When tested with the bottle test in Experiment 1, rats conditioned by bottle displayed stronger taste avoidance than those conditioned by IO infusion. When tested for rejection reactions with the taste reactivity test in Experiment 2, rats conditioned by infusion displayed a stronger aversion than did rats conditioned by bottle. The results suggest that when the contextual cues of conditioning are similar at conditioning and testing, a stronger association is evident regardless of the individual specifics of each method. These results may shed light on recent reports that different neural mechanisms are involved in conditioning by active consumption and passive infusion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age effects on social cognition: Faces tell a different story.

The authors administered social cognition tasks to younger and older adults to investigate age-related differences in social and emotional processing. Although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger adults in identifying the emotional valence (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral) of facial expressions. However, the age difference in reaction time was largest for negative faces. Older adults were significantly less accurate at identifying specific facial expressions of fear and sadness. No age differences specific to social function were found on tasks of self-reference, identifying emotional words, or theory of mind. Performance on the social tasks in older adults was independent of performance on general cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory) but was related to personality traits and emotional awareness. Older adults also showed more intercorrelations among the social tasks than did the younger adults. These findings suggest that age differences in social cognition are limited to the processing of facial emotion. Nevertheless, with age there appears to be increasing reliance on a common resource to perform social tasks, but one that is not shared with other cognitive domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The day of the week when you were born in 700 ms: Calendar computation in an autistic savant.

Some individuals are able to determine the weekday of a given date in a few seconds (finding for instance that June 12, 1900, was a Tuesday). This ability has fascinated scientists for many years because it is predominantly observed in people with limited intelligence and may appear very early in life. Exceptional visual memory, exceptional concentration abilities, or privileged access to lower levels of information not normally available through introspection have been advanced to explain such phenomena. In the present article, the authors show that a simple cognitive model can explain all aspects of the performance of Donny, a young autistic savant who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Problem of Measurement Model Misspecification in Behavioral and Organizational Research and Some Recommended Solutions.

The purpose of this study was to review the distinction between formative- and reflective-indicator measurement models, articulate a set of criteria for deciding whether measures are formative or reflective, illustrate some commonly researched constructs that have formative indicators, empirically test the effects of measurement model misspecification using a Monte Carlo simulation, and recommend new scale development procedures for latent constructs with formative indicators. Results of the Monte Carlo simulation indicated that measurement model misspecification can inflate unstandardized structural parameter estimates by as much as 400% or deflate them by as much as 80% and lead to Type I or Type II errors of inference, depending on whether the exogenous or the endogenous latent construct is misspecified. Implications of this research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comment on Greenwood (2007): Solving the puzzle of structure/function relations in the aging brain?

Neuroimaging experiments have shown that prefrontal regions of the brain, which have the most age-related volume loss, are also the regions most likely to be more active in older adults than in younger adults. In an attempt to solve this puzzle, P. M. Greenwood (see record 2007-15625-001) has proposed a cascade that flows from age-related atrophy in the brain to changed processing strategies that result in plastic changes in regions adjacent and contralateral to the atrophic areas, culminating in greater functional activity. This hypothesis should stimulate research into these mechanisms and hopefully will ultimately inform researchers' ability to rehabilitate cognitive disorders in the elderly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concurrent brief versus intensive smoking intervention during alcohol dependence treatment.

Alcohol dependent smokers (N=118) enrolled in an intensive outpatient substance abuse treatment program were randomized to a concurrent brief or intensive smoking cessation intervention. Brief treatment consisted of a 15-min counseling session with 5 min of follow-up. Intensive intervention consisted of three 1-hr counseling sessions plus 8 weeks of nicotine patch therapy. The cigarette abstinence rate, verified by breath carbon monoxide, was significantly higher for the intensive treatment group (27.5%) versus the rate for the brief treatment group (6.6%) at 1 month after the quit date but not at 6 months, when abstinence rates fell to 9.1% for the intensive treatment group and 2.1% for the brief treatment group. Smoking treatment assignment did not significantly impact alcohol outcomes. Although intensive smoking treatment was associated with higher rates of short-term tobacco abstinence, other, perhaps more intensive, smoking interventions are needed to produce lasting smoking cessation in alcohol dependent smokers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)