Activity restriction and prior relationship history as contributors to mental health outcomes among middle-aged and older spousal caregivers.

In a sample of cancer patients (n?=?75) and spousal caregivers (24 men and 51 women), restriction in caregiver routine activities mediated associations between caregiving stress (patient symptom severity) and caregiver depressed affect and resentment. Moreover, the antecedents and affective consequences of caregiver activity restriction were consistent with the theory of communal relationships (e.g., M. S. Clark & J. Mills, 1979, 1993). If a relationship had been communal in the past (i.e., characterized by mutual concern for and responsiveness to one another's needs), activity restriction was predicted by intimacy and affectional loss (rather than by the severity of patient symptoms) and in turn predicted caregiver depressed affect. Among caregivers in less communal relationships, activity restriction was predicted by severity of patient symptoms (rather than by intimacy and affectional loss) and in turn predicted resentment of care recipients and the caregiving role. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of task demands on implicit memory for object-location associations.

Examined the effect of task demands and the nature of the object probed on implicit and explicit memories for object location associations, in 5 experiments. 111 undergraduates probed objects (letters or symbols), 1 at a time, in 1 of 9 locations in a rectangle. They located or named the object. Each object was probed in the same location across 10 trial blocks, and then all the objects changed locations. Decrease or increase in naming times across trials was noted to find out the presence of priming for associations. Results show that implicit and explicit memory were affected differently by task demands. Priming could be obtained when the task engaged, but did not overtax, attentional capacity. Explicit memory performance was best when the task did not require much attentional capacity. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextually relevant aspects of meaning.

A series of six experiments investigated whether inferences about contextually relevant aspects of meaning were encoded into memory during reading. In all the experiments, subjects studied short paragraphs. Then, test sentences were presented that expressed relevant aspects of meaning that had not been explicitly stated in the paragraphs. For example, for a paragraph about searching for the correct color to paint a picture of a tomato, a relevant aspect of meaning would be that tomatoes are red. The test sentences were presented either immediately following the relevant paragraph or after a delay. With immediate testing, it was argued that the facilitation obtained in verification latency could result from processes occurring either when the context was read or when the test sentence was verified. With delayed testing, evidence was found to support the hypothesis that contextually relevant aspects of meaning are incorporated into the memory representation of the paragraph, but such evidence was obtained only when the retrieval environment encouraged the use of newly learned information in the decision process on the test sentence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intimacy in conversational style as a function of the degree of closeness between members of a dyad.

Analyzed 58 naturally occurring telephone conversations between pairs of female friends, acquaintances, and strangers to investigate how intimacy is conveyed by conversational style. In comparison with strangers, friends used more implicit openings, raised more topics, were more responsive to one another (e.g., by asking more questions), and used more complex forms of closing. Acquaintances were generally more similar to strangers than they were to friends. (50 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Components of activation: Repetition and priming effects in lexical decision and recognition.

Examined activation decay functions in 4 experiments in which 52 undergraduates performed 2 different tasks: lexical decision and word recognition. Activation (amount of facilitation) was measured both for item repetition and for priming between newly learned associates. Results indicate that there were at least 3 different components of activation: a short-term component that decayed with 1 or 2 intervening items and appeared to be common to priming and repetition, an intermediate component for repetition in recognition, and a long-term component for repetition. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Use Sociobiology?

An essay-review of the book and the field it proposed to establish looks at the uses of biological data and methods for communications research.
Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson.     

The physician perspective of health psychologists in medical settings.

Examined physician attitudes and utilization of psychologists in medical settings by administering a 15-item questionnaire to 397 26–78 yr old physicians (84% male) practicing family/general practice, surgery, internal medicine, or miscellaneous clinical medicine. Although differences in attitudes were associated with age, sex, and specialty, generally favorable attitudes toward psychologists were found among Ss. Results show a recognition by the majority of Ss of the role that psychological factors play in medical disease and an appreciation of clinical psychological skills by a large majority. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alternative student evaluation structures and a focused schedule of instruction in an innercity junior high school.

Examined the effects of a particular model of direct instruction, focused instruction (FI), and 2 alternative student evaluation structures—individual learning expectations (ILE) and relative standing (RS)—on students' mathematics achievement and attitudes. Ss were 307 7th-grade students in 10 classes, who studied mathematics for 11 wks. Results indicated that FI, along with certificates of recognition, whether awarded on the basis of ILE or of RS, caused significantly higher achievement. There were no significant differences between the ILE and RS evaluation methods. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automating Content Extraction of HTML Documents

Web pages often contain clutter (such as unnecessary images and extraneous links) around the body of an article that distracts a user from actual content. Extraction of useful and relevant content from web pages has many applications, including cell phone and PDA browsing, speech rendering for the visually impaired, and text summarization. Most approaches to making content more readable involve changing font size or removing HTML and data components such as images, which takes away from a webpages inherent look and feel. Unlike Content Reformatting, which aims to reproduce the entire webpage in a more convenient form, our solution directly addresses Content Extraction. We have developed a framework that employs an easily extensible set of techniques. It incorporates advantages of previous work on content extraction. Our key insight is to work with DOM trees, a W3C specified interface that allows programs to dynamically access document structure, rather than with raw HTML markup. We have implemented our approach in a publicly available Web proxy to extract content from HTML web pages. This proxy can be used both centrally, administered for groups of users, as well as by individuals for personal browsers. We have also, after receiving feedback from users about the proxy, created a revised version with improved performance and accessibility in mind.