The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India.

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. However, the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, exacerbated by the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific theoretical constructs, have limited our ability to do so.

A relationship that makes life worth-living: levels of value orientation explain differences in meaning and life satisfaction.

When people talk about their values they refer to what is meaningful to them. Although meaning is associated with life satisfaction, previous studies report inconsistent results regarding the association of values and well-being. A cross-sectional study ( = 276) addresses the research question, do values influence experiences of meaning and subjective evaluations of life satisfaction? To assess whether providing a definition of "meaningful" is necessary when employing meaning measures, we assigned participants to condition where some provided their definition and others read a definition of "meaningful".

Filthy Animals: Integrating the Behavioral Immune System and Disgust into a Model of Prophylactic Dehumanization.

Unlabelled: The behavioral immune system (BIS) is an evolved psychological mechanism that motivates prophylactic avoidance of disease vectors by eliciting disgust. When felt toward social groups, disgust can dampen empathy and promote dehumanization. Therefore, we investigated whether the BIS facilitates the dehumanization of groups associated with disease by inspiring disgust toward them.

The negative effects of social bond disruption are partially ameliorated by sertraline administration in prairie voles.

Negative social experiences influence both depression and cardiovascular dysfunction. Many individuals who experience negative mood states or cardiovascular conditions have limited social support. Therefore, investigation of drug treatments that may protect against the consequences of social stress will aid in designing effective treatment strategies.

Cardiac and behavioral effects of social isolation and experimental manipulation of autonomic balance.

Improved understanding of how depression and social isolation interact to increase cardiac morbidity and mortality will improve public health. This experiment evaluated the effect of pharmacological autonomic blockade on cardiac and behavioral reactivity following social isolation in prairie voles. Experiment 1 validated the dose and time course of pharmacological autonomic antagonism of peripheral β-adrenergic (atenolol) and muscarinic cholinergic receptors (atropine methyl nitrate), and Experiment 2 used a novel protocol to investigate behavioral responses in the tail suspension test during pharmacological autonomic blockade as a function of social isolation (vs.

The Influence of Environmental Enrichment on Cardiovascular and Behavioral Responses to Social Stress.

Objective: Stress is linked to negative cardiovascular consequences and increases in depressive behaviors. Environmental enrichment (EE) involves exposure to novel items that provide physical and cognitive stimulation. EE has behavioral, cognitive, and neurobiological effects that may improve stress responses in humans and animal models.

The effects of environmental enrichment on depressive and anxiety-relevant behaviors in socially isolated prairie voles.

Objectives: Social isolation is associated with depression, anxiety, and negative health outcomes. Environmental enrichment, including environmental and cognitive stimulation with inanimate objects and opportunities for physical exercise, may be an effective strategy to include in treatment paradigms for affective disorders as a function of social isolation. In a rodent model-the socially monogamous prairie vole-we investigated the hypothesis that depression- and anxiety-related behaviors after social isolation would be prevented and remediated with environmental enrichment.