Affect dynamics and depressive symptomatology: Revisiting the inertia-instability paradox.

The inertia-instability paradox poses an intriguing question in depression research: How can the affective experiences of depressed individuals demonstrate both resistance to change and fluctuation? Prior studies examining this paradox have faced limitations, including small sample sizes, analytic approaches prone to biased parameter estimates, and inconsistent results. Using data from 842 adults ( = 54.31, = 13.

Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Efficacy of a Positive Affect Skills Intervention for Adults With Fibromyalgia.

Background And Objectives: To examine the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a positive affect skills intervention for middle-aged and older adults with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS).

Research Design And Methods: Ninety-five participants with FMS aged 50 and older (94% female) were randomized to 1 of 2 conditions: (a) Lessons in Affect Regulation to Keep Stress and Pain UndeR control (LARKSPUR; = 49) or (b) emotion reporting/control ( = 46). LARKSPUR included 5 weeks of skill training that targeted 8 skills to help foster positive affect, including (a) noticing positive events, (b) savoring positive events, (c) identifying personal strengths, (d) behavioral activation to set and work toward attainable goals, (e) mindfulness, (f) positive reappraisal, (g) gratitude, and (h) acts of kindness.

Partial recall: Implications for the discrete slot limit of working memory capacity.

The nature of working memory capacity (WMC) has been a highly contested topic among cognitive scientists. Some advocate for the discrete nature of this construct, fixed to a set number of independent slots, each capable of storing a single chunk of bound information. Others advocate for a continuous limit, guided by a pool of immediately available resources spent across the to-be-remembered items.

Supervised latent Dirichlet allocation with covariates: A Bayesian structural and measurement model of text and covariates.

Text is a burgeoning data source for psychological researchers, but little methodological research has focused on adapting popular modeling approaches for text to the context of psychological research. One popular measurement model for text, topic modeling, uses a latent mixture model to represent topics underlying a body of documents. Recently, psychologists have studied relationships between these topics and other psychological measures by using estimates of the topics as regression predictors along with other manifest variables.

Visual Perception of Photographs of Rotated 3D Objects in Goldfish ().

This study examined goldfishes' ability to recognize photographs of rotated 3D objects. Six goldfish were presented with color photographs of a plastic model turtle and frog at 0° in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Fish were tested with stimuli at 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° rotated in the picture plane and two depth planes.

Modeling approaches for cross-sectional integrative data analysis: Evaluations and recommendations.

Integrative data analysis (IDA) jointly models participant-level data from multiple studies. In psychology, IDA has been conducted using different fixed-effects and multilevel modeling (MLM) approaches. However, evaluations regarding the performance of these models in an IDA context are limited.

How humans discriminate acoustically among bottlenose dolphin signature whistles with and without masking by boat noise.

Anthropogenic noise in the world's oceans is known to impede many species' ability to perceive acoustic signals, but little research has addressed how this noise affects the perception of bioacoustic signals used for communication in marine mammals. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) use signature whistles containing identification information. Past studies have used human participants to gain insight into dolphin perception, but most previous research investigated echolocation.

Visual perception in a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus): Successful recognition of 2-D objects rotated in the picture and depth planes.

Aquatic species such as bottlenose dolphins can move in 3 dimensions and frequently view objects from different orientations. This study examined their ability to identify 2-D objects visually despite changes in orientation across 2 rotation planes. A dolphin performed a matching-to-sample task in which a sample was presented at a different orientation from its match in a 3-alternative choice array.

Visual perception of planar-rotated 2D objects in goldfish (Carassius auratus).

This study examined the ability of goldfish to visually identify 2D objects rotated in the picture plane. This ability would be adaptive for fish since they move in three dimensions and frequently view objects from different orientations. Goldfish performed a two-alternative forced choice task in which they were trained to discriminate between two objects at 0°, then tested with novel aspect angles (+/- 45°, +/- 90°, +/- 135°, 180°).

North American river otters (Lontra canadensis) discriminate between 2D objects varying in shape and color.

We investigated the ability of North American river otters (Lontra canadensis) to visually discriminate between 2D objects. The otters learned to discriminate between stimuli using multiple visual features and then were tested with stimuli in which one of the features was eliminated (color or shape). Two adult otters were trained in a two-alternative forced choice task to discriminate between a red circle and a blue triangle.

The prevalence and prevention of crosstalk: a multi-institutional study.

It is a common problem in psychology subject pools for past study participants to inform future participants of key experimental details (also known as crosstalk). Previous research (Edlund, Sagarin, Skowronski, Johnson, & Kutter, 2009) demonstrated that a combined classroom and laboratory treatment could significantly reduce crosstalk. The present investigation tested a laboratory-only treatment for the prevention of crosstalk at five universities, along with institutional-level moderators of crosstalk.