Search results for "PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Health Psychology"
showing 10 items of 174 documents
Does Childhood Temperamental Activity Predict Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior over a 30-Year Period? Evidence from the Young Finns Study
2016
We examined associations between childhood temperamental activity, physical activity (PA), and television (TV) viewing over a 30-year period. The participants (1220 boys and 1237 girls) were aged 3, 6, 9, and 12 years in 1980 and were followed until 2011. Temperamental activity was evaluated by participants' mothers at baseline. The PA was assessed based on maternal ratings of the child from ages 3 to 6 and via self-report age from the age of 9 across all measurements. TV viewing was assessed using self-reports taken from 2001 to 2011. The associations between temperamental activity and the level and change of PA and TV viewing were determined using linear growth modeling stratified by gend…
Lay understanding of the causes of binge drinking in the United Kingdom and Australia: a network diagram approach
2017
Binge drinking is associated with deleterious health, social and economic outcomes. This study explored the lay understanding of the causes of binge drinking in members of the general public in the United Kingdom and Australia. Participants in the United Kingdom (N = 133) and Australia (N = 102) completed a network diagram exercise requiring them to draw causal paths and provide path strength ratings between 12 candidate factors (24-h opening, age, alcohol advertizing, alcohol availability, boredom, drinking culture, income, low cost, parental influence, peer pressure, stress and supermarket discounts) and binge drinking. Results indicated good consistency in paths across samples, although…
Yes, you can? A speaker’s potency to act upon his words orchestrates early neural responses to message-level meaning
2013
Evidence is accruing that, in comprehending language, the human brain rapidly integrates a wealth of information sources-including the reader or hearer's knowledge about the world and even his/her current mood. However, little is known to date about how language processing in the brain is affected by the hearer's knowledge about the speaker. Here, we investigated the impact of social attributions to the speaker by measuring event-related brain potentials while participants watched videos of three speakers uttering true or false statements pertaining to politics or general knowledge: a top political decision maker (the German Federal Minister of Finance at the time of the experiment), a well…
The development of a Spanish language version of the Worn Out scale of the General Well-Being Questionnaire (GWBQ).
2006
The paper describes the development of a short Spanish-language version of the General Well-Being Questionnaire (GWBQ; Cox & Gotts, 1987), based on the 12 items of its Worn Out scale. Research has shown the English-version Worn Out scale to be sensitive to aspects of the design and management of work. This study aimed to test its cross-cultural consistency in a Spanish-language workplace context. The data were collected from a sample of 229 workers in Valencia (Spain). Confirmatory Factor Analyses showed the factorial validity, reliability, and concurrent validity of the new Spanish version to be adequate. The sensitivity of the new measure to safety behavior and the reporting of accide…
Sequential grouping modulates the effect of non-simultaneous masking on auditory intensity resolution.
2012
The presence of non-simultaneous maskers can result in strong impairment in auditory intensity resolution relative to a condition without maskers, and causes a complex pattern of effects that is difficult to explain on the basis of peripheral processing. We suggest that the failure of selective attention to the target tones is a useful framework for understanding these effects. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the sequential grouping of the targets and the maskers into separate auditory objects facilitates selective attention and therefore reduces the masker-induced impairment in intensity resolution. In Experiment 1, a condition favoring the processing of the maskers and the targ…
Relationship between Meditative Practice and Self-Reported Mindfulness: the MINDSENS Composite Index
2014
Mindfulness has been described as an inherent human capability that can be learned and trained, and its improvement has been associated with better health outcomes in both medicine and psychology. Although the role of practice is central to most mindfulness programs, practice-related improvements in mindfulness skills is not consistently reported and little is known about how the characteristics of meditative practice affect different components of mindfulness. the present study explores the role of practice parameters on self-reported mindfulness skills. A total of 670 voluntary participants with and without previous meditation experience (n = 384 and n = 286, respectively) responded to an…
Effects of emotional picture viewing on voluntary eye blinks
2014
Eyeblinks, whether reflexive or voluntary, play an important role in protecting our vision. When viewing pictures, reflexive eyeblinks are known to be modulated by the emotional state induced thereby. More specifically, the hedonic valence (unpleasantness-pleasantness) induced by the picture has been shown to have a linear relationship with the amplitude of a startle blink elicited during picture viewing. This effect has been attributed to congruence between an ongoing state and task demands: an unpleasant emotional state is assumed to bias our attention towards potentially harmful stimuli, such as startle tones. However, recent research suggests that the valence-specific modulation may not…
Factors limiting performance in a multitone intensity-discrimination task: disentangling non-optimal decision weights and increased internal noise.
2013
To identify factors limiting performance in multitone intensity discrimination, we presented sequences of five pure tones alternating in level between loud (85 dB SPL) and soft (30, 55, or 80 dB SPL). In the "overall-intensity task", listeners detected a level increment on all of the five tones. In the "masking task", the level increment was imposed only on the soft tones, rendering the soft tones targets and loud tones task-irrelevant maskers. Decision weights quantifying the importance of the five tone levels for the decision were estimated using methods of molecular psychophysics. Compatible with previous studies, listeners placed higher weights on the loud tones than on the soft tones i…
The influence of university students stress mindsets on health and performance outcomes
2018
Background Emerging evidence indicates that holding particular stress mindsets has favorable implications for peoples’ health and performance under stress. Purpose The aim of the current study was to examine the processes by which implicit and explicit stress mindsets relate to health- and performance-related outcomes. Specifically, we propose a stress beliefs model in which somatic responses to stress and coping behaviors mediate the effect of stress mindsets on outcomes. Methods Undergraduate university students (N = 218, n = 144 females) aged 17– 25 years completed measures of stress mindset, physical and psychological wellbeing, perceived stress, perceived somatic responses to stress, p…
Readiness to change among involuntarily and voluntarily admitted patients with substance use disorders
2019
AbstractBackgroundHealth care workers in the addiction field have long emphasised the importance of a patient’s motivation on the outcome of treatments for substance use disorders (SUDs). Many patients entering treatment are not yet ready to make the changes required for recovery and are often unprepared or sometimes unwilling to modify their behaviour. The present study compared stages of readiness to change and readiness to seek help among patients with SUDs involuntarily and voluntarily admitted to treatment to investigate whether changes in the stages of readiness at admission predict drug control outcomes at follow-up.MethodsThis prospective study included 65 involuntarily and 137 volu…