This study examined age differences in phasic heart rate in response to neutral, negative and positive pictures. Heart rate changes and subjective ratings were analyzed in 22 middle-aged (40-55 years) and 30 older (56-78 years) participants. The effects of valence on the HR pattern across time were similar to that obtained by Bradley and co-workers. Conversely to previous studies, we did not report any age-related reduction in cardiac reactivity. Instead, when viewing positive pictures, the triphasic wave form appeared in the group of older adults, but for younger participants, it was replaced by a sustained deceleration. These results were interpreted in the light of the socioemotional selectivity theory.

Mothers (N= 35) and their adult children completed questionnaires and were interviewed in order to examine relationships between mothers' caregiving representations and their adult children's attachment representations, and relationships between attachment/caregiving representations and beliefs about mothering. Mothers' and their children's accounts of and present thinking about their past relationship were highly similar, indicating that the two parts develop concordant states of mind regarding their relationship. In contrast, there was no relationship between mothers' and their adult children's beliefs about mothering, suggesting that such beliefs are not simply passed on from generation to generation within families. Attachment/caregiving classification interacted with generation in influencing a belief that biological facts determine maternal behavior, young adults with preoccupied attachment being particularly prone to reject this idea. Attachment/caregiving classification also had a significant effect on participants' tendency to adhere to an idealized conception of mothering, this tendency being associated with a dismissive attachment/caregiving representation.

The present study investigated differences in judgments of one’s own and others’ knowledge (the own-other difference). Consistent with the below-average effect (e.g., Kruger, 1999), our main results showed that the participants gave lower knowledge ratings of their own extent of knowledge than of another person’s extent of knowledge (Experiment 1). Furthermore, lower and more realistic judgments were found when the participants judged their own as compared with when judging another person’s overall accuracy (frequency judgments) of answering knowledge questions correctly (Experiment 1 and 2). On the basis of these results it is argued that judgmental anchoring may be important also in the context of indirect comparisons, and that previous conclusions of cross-cultural psychology regarding the above-average effect may be oversimplified.

Participants tend to falsely remember a nonpresented critical word after having studied a list of the word's primary associates. This paper presents a Swedish version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, which provides a tractable method of experimentally inducing and investigating such illusory memories. In Experiment 1, using 60 19-32 yr olds, it was demonstrated that the constructed stimulus material induced highly reliable false-recall and false-recognition effects, and, moreover, that veridical and false memories were associated with a similar phenomenological experience of remembering. The results from Experiment 2, using 40 19-32 yr olds, indicate that the susceptibility to false recognition can be substantially reduced when participants are explicitly required to monitor the sources of their memories. These findings are consistent with predictions derived from the source-monitoring framework.

Significance testing based on p-values is standard in psychological research and teaching. Typically, research articles and textbooks present and use p as a measure of statistical evidence against the null hypothesis (the Fisherian interpretation), although using concepts and tools based on a completely different usage of p as a tool for controlling long-term decision errors (the Neyman-Pearson interpretation). There are four major problems with using p as a measure of evidence and these problems are often overlooked in the domain of psychology. First, p is uniformly distributed under the null hypothesis and can therefore never indicate evidence for the null. Second, p is conditioned solely on the null hypothesis and is therefore unsuited to quantify evidence, because evidence is always relative in the sense of being evidence for or against a hypothesis relative to another hypothesis. Third, p designates probability of obtaining evidence (given the null), rather than strength of evidence. Fourth, p depends on unobserved data and subjective intentions and therefore implies, given the evidential interpretation, that the evidential strength of observed data depends on things that did not happen and subjective intentions. In sum, using p in the Fisherian sense as a measure of statistical evidence is deeply problematic, both statistically and conceptually, while the Neyman-Pearson interpretation is not about evidence at all. In contrast, the likelihood ratio escapes the above problems and is recommended as a tool for psychologists to represent the statistical evidence conveyed by obtained data relative to two hypotheses.

The relationship between creativity and androgyny was studied in 163 women and men with the Creative Functioning Test (CFT) and the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). A 2 (femininity: high/low) x 2 (masculinity: high/low) x 2 (sex) ANOVA was conducted on subjects' CFT scores. A significant interaction effect between femininity and masculinity was found showing that subjects high on both femininity and masculinity (androgynous) and low on both scales (undifferentiated) reached higher CFT scores than female-typed and male-typed subjects. Further, a significant three-way interaction including sex of subject indicated that the former two-way interaction was accounted for by men only.

Heart period variability and heart rate were studied in 15 women and 15 men while they were viewing negatively (snakes/spiders), neutrally (scenic views), and positively (cats and kittens/puppies and dogs) valenced films. Time-frequency analyses of the heart period variability power spectrum in the high frequency region (0.12-0.4 Hz), reflecting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), were carried out during 5 minutes in each condition. The main finding showed that RSA-magnitude (high frequency power) was inversely related to emotional valence: lowest magnitudes were found in response to positive films, and highest magnitude to negative films. The findings were interpreted as reflecting motor or behavioral inhibition, and increased attention to negatively valenced, stimuli.

The aim of the present study was to explore the ability of personality to predict academic performance in a longitudinal study of a Swedish upper secondary school sample. Academic performance was assessed throughout a three-year period via final grades from the compulsory school and upper secondary school. The Big Five personality factors (Costa & McCrae, 1992) - particularly Conscientiousness and Neuroticism - were found to predict overall academic performance, after controlling for general intelligence. Results suggest that Conscientiousness, as measured at the age of 16, can explain change in academic performance at the age of 19. The effect of Neuroticism on Conscientiousness indicates that, as regarding getting good grades, it is better to be a bit neurotic than to be stable. The study extends previous work by assessing the relationship between the Big Five and academic performance over a three-year period. The results offer educators avenues for improving educational achievement.

Individuals with a dismissing-avoidant pattern of attachment are assumed to repress anxiety-related signals, a disposition hypothesized to interfere with facial mimicry and emotional contagion. Further, they are assumed to have one internal working model associated with anxiety, operating out of awareness at early, automatic stages of information processing, and another positive model operating at later, cognitively controlled stages of processing. The main aim of the present investigation was to compare facial mimicry in dismissing-avoidant and non-dismissing subjects at different levels of information processing. Pictures of happy and angry faces were exposed to 61 subjects at three different exposure times (17, 56, and 2,350 ms) in order to elicit facial muscle reactions, first at automatic levels and then at a more controlled levels. Corrugator activity ("frowning muscles") represented negative emotions and zygomaticus activity ("smiling muscles") positive emotions. The dismissing-avoidant subjects scored significantly lower on emotional empathy than the non-dismissing subjects. At the automatic level the dismissing-avoidant subjects showed "normal" corrugator responses (negative emotions) upon exposure to angry faces. At the cognitively controlled level of processing (2,350 ms) a significant interaction effect was shown between Faces x Muscles x Attachment pattern. The dismissing-avoidant subjects showed no corrugator response and an increased zygomaticus response ("smiling reaction") to the angry face, whereas the non-dismissing subjects reacted with a significant mimicking reaction. The dismissing-avoidant subjects' tendency to "smiling" in response to the angry face at the controlled level (2,350 ms) may be interpreted as a repression of their earlier, automatically evoked (56 ms) negative emotional reaction.

The hypotheses of this investigation were based on attachment theory and Bowlby's conception of "internal working models", supposed to consist of one mainly emotional (model-of-self) and one more conscious cognitive structure (model-of-others), which are assumed to operate at different temporal stages of information processing. Facial muscle reactions in individuals with positive versus negative internal working models were compared at different stages of information processing. The Relationship Scale Questionnaire (RSQ) was used to categorize subjects into positive or negative model-of-self and model-of-others and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used to measure trait anxiety (STAI-T). Pictures of happy and angry faces followed by backward masking stimuli were exposed to 61 subjects at three different exposure times (17 ms, 56 ms, 2,350 ms) in order to elicit reactions first at an automatic level and then consecutively at more cognitively elaborated levels. Facial muscle reactions were recorded by electromyography (EMG), a higher corrugator activity representing more negative emotions and a higher zygomaticus activity more positive emotions. In line with the hypothesis, subjects with a negative model-of-self scored significantly higher on STAI-T than subjects with a positive model-of-self. They also showed an overall stronger corrugator than zygomatic activity, giving further evidence of a negative tonic affective state. At the longest exposure time (2,350 ms), representing emotionally regulated responses, negative model-of-self subjects showed a significantly stronger corrugator response and reported more negative feelings than subjects with a positive model-of-self. These results supported the hypothesis that subjects with a negative model-of-self would show difficulties in self-regulation of negative affect. In line with expectations, model-of-others, assumed to represent mainly knowledge structures, did not interact with the physiological emotional measures employed, facial muscle reactions or tonic affective state.

Previous studies on gender differences in facial imitation and verbally reported emotional contagion have investigated emotional responses to pictures of facial expressions at supraliminal exposure times. The aim of the present study was to investigate how gender differences are related to different exposure times, representing information processing levels from subliminal (spontaneous) to supraliminal (emotionally regulated). Further, the study aimed at exploring correlations between verbally reported emotional contagion and facial responses for men and women. Masked pictures of angry, happy and sad facial expressions were presented to 102 participants (51 men) at exposure times from subliminal (23 ms) to clearly supraliminal (2500 ms). Myoelectric activity (EMG) from the corrugator and the zygomaticus was measured and the participants reported their hedonic tone (verbally reported emotional contagion) after stimulus exposures. The results showed an effect of exposure time on gender differences in facial responses as well as in verbally reported emotional contagion. Women amplified imitative responses towards happy vs. angry faces and verbally reported emotional contagion with prolonged exposure times, whereas men did not. No gender differences were detected at the subliminal or borderliminal exposure times, but at the supraliminal exposure gender differences were found in imitation as well as in verbally reported emotional contagion. Women showed correspondence between their facial responses and their verbally reported emotional contagion to a greater extent than men. The results were interpreted in terms of gender differences in emotion regulation, rather than as differences in biologically prepared emotional reactivity.

Social anxiety and related social impairment are linked to self-efficacy and dysfunctional coping. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. This study investigated relationships between severity of social anxiety as well as related experiences of social impairment and self-efficacy, social control and coping strategies. Social anxiety was regarded as a continuum ranging from mild social discomfort to totally inhibiting anxiety. Participants (N= 113, ages 19-60 years), recruited from a forum for individuals with social phobia and among university students, responded to a self-administered questionnaire. Besides the expected association between a low sense of social control and more severe social anxiety and related social impairment, we found severity of social anxiety and related impairment to be associated with low self-efficacy. This relationship was partly mediated by dysfunctional coping strategies. We suggest that low self-efficacy may increase an individual's tendency to rely on dysfunctional coping strategies for dealing with anxiety experienced in social situations. In turn, using dysfunctional coping strategies appears to exacerbate the experience of impairment from social anxiety.