The Influence of Self-compassion on Perceived Stress Reactivity

Contemplative psychological traits (e.g., mindfulness and self-compassion) have become a popular area of research in recent years, often in the context of their influence on stress (Creswell & Lindsay, 2014). One promising subset of contemplative science research demonstrates that higher levels of contemplative traits are associated with decreased physiological stress reactivity during psychosocial stress induction. This is important due to the negative health outcomes that are associated with persistently heightened stress reactivity. Research investigating self-compassion has demonstrated that higher levels of trait self-compassion are associated with lower levels of stress reactivity (Breines et al., 2015; Luo et al., 2018). Currently, this area of research is limited to stress induction studies, which can be costly and time-consuming. A cross-sectional self-report measure of stress reactivity, the Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale (PSRS; Schlotz et al., 2013) was recently developed and validated, but it has not yet been examined in relation to trait self-compassion. To evaluate whether self-compassion may be an intervention target to buffer against stress reactivity, it would be helpful to establish how it is related to the PSRS. Thus, this study investigated whether trait levels of self-compassion significantly account for variance in a regression model with self-reported stress reactivity as the dependent variable, while controlling for state stress levels. It also investigated whether self-compassion moderates the relation between state stress and self-reported stress reactivity. Planned post-hoc analyses were conducted to examine these same analyses with each specific subscale of the PSRS (i.e., Prolonged Reactivity, Reactivity to Work Overload, Reactivity to Social Evaluation, Reactivity to Social Conflict, and Reactivity to Failure). Results indicate that self-compassion significantly accounted for variance in total stress reactivity while controlling for state stress, but it did not moderate the relation between state stress and total stress reactivity. Post-hoc analyses demonstrated that self-compassion significantly accounted for variance in stress reactivity measured via each specific subscale while controlling for state stress. When the Reactivity to Social Evaluation subscale score was the dependent variable, self-compassion accounted for more variance than any other subscale. Further, the post-hoc moderation analyses were only significant for self-compassion moderating the relation between state stress and Reactivity to Social Evaluation, indicating that self-compassion may confer unique stress-buffering properties during social-evaluative situations (e.g., job interviews). Limitations of this study included having a well-educated, upper middle class sample population, the inability to determine causality from a cross-sectional design. Recommendations for future research included examining self-compassion intervention effects on self-reported stress reactivity and investigating the ability of self-compassion to protect against job stress or academic stress by buffering against social-evaluative stress reactivity

Adverse childhood experiences exacerbate the association between day-to-day discrimination and mental health symptomatology in undergraduate students

Background: Background: Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and day-to-day discrimination (hereafter, “discrimination”) both contribute to mental health symptomatology in young adulthood, but how these constructs interact and whether they are associated with mental health remains unclear. This study evaluated whether the relation between discrimination in young adulthood and mental health symptomatology varied as a function of ACEs exposure. Methods: Undergraduates (n = 251) completed self-report measures related to ACEs, discrimination, and mental health symptomatology (i.e., depression, anxiety, somatization, and psychological distress). Linear and logistic regression models were implemented to test for potential exacerbation effects of ACEs on the relation between discrimination and mental health symptomatology. Results: Participants with greater discrimination exposure and ACEs reported significantly more depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms, along with more psychological distress, relative to those with less discrimination exposure and few or no ACEs. Limitations: Data were cross-sectional, thus, causality cannot be inferred. ACEs and discrimination measures examined ACE counts and general discrimination, respectively, which did not allow for examination of possible differences across specific ACEs (e.g., childhood sexual abuse vs. neglect) or specific types of discrimination (e.g., sexual-orientation-based discrimination vs. race-based discrimination). Conclusions: Conclusions: These results are among the first to inform the conceptualization of ACEs and discrimination in etiological models of young adults’ mental health. Both ACEs and discrimination, rather than exposure to only one of these stressors, may be synergistically associated with young adults’ mental health symptomatology. Clinicians could address stress-sensitive mental health issues by assessing for both ACEs and discrimination exposure

Baryon Magnetic Moments and Axial Coupling Constants with Relativistic and Exchange Current Effects

The large relativistic corrections to the constituent quark current operators improve the predictions for the axial couplings of the baryons, but worsen those for their magnetic moments. The exchange current corrections that are associated with flavor and spin dependent hyperfine interactions between the quarks with a form suggested by pseudoscalar meson exchange can compensate the relativistic corrections to the baryon magnetic moments. This is demonstrated by a calculation of the magnetic moments of the non-strange and strange baryons using wave functions and exchange current operators, which correspond to a recent phenomenological spin- and flavor dependent interquark interaction model with a linear confining interaction, which yields a spectrum close to the empirical one. The possibility that part of the flavor and spin dependent interaction could be due to vector and axial-vector exchange is explored.Comment: Confinement exchange current contribution included, results improved, coauthor list expande

The π−\pi-Gluon Exchange Interaction Between Constituent Quarks

The interaction mediated by irreducible pion and gluon exchange between constituent quarks is calculated and shown to have a strong tensor component, which tends to cancel the pion exchange tensor interaction between quarks. Its spin-spin component is somewhat weaker than the pion exchange spin-spin interaction, while its central and spin-orbit components are small in comparison to the corresponding single gluon exchange interactions. The combination of the $\pi-$gluon exchange interaction with the single pion exchange interaction and a weak gluon exchange interaction between constituent quarks has the qualitative features required for understanding the hyperfine splittings of the spectra of the nucleon and the $\Delta$ resonances.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, 5 Postscript figure

Is there diquark clustering in the nucleon?

It is shown that the instanton-induced interaction in qq pairs, iterated in t-channel, leads to a meson-exchange interactions between quarks. In this way one can achieve a simultaneous understanding of low-lying mesons, baryons and the nuclear force. The discussion is general and does not necessarily rely on the instanton-induced interaction. Any nonperturbative gluonic interaction between quarks, which is a source of the dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and explains the $\pi$ - $\rho$ mass splitting, will imply an effective meson exchange picture in baryons. Due to the (anti)screening there is a big difference between the initial 't Hooft interaction and the effective meson-exchange interaction. It is demonstrated that the effective meson-exchange interaction, adjusted to the baryon spectrum, does not bind the scalar diquark and does not induce any significant quark-diquark clustering in the nucleon because of the nontrivial role played by the Pauli principle.Comment: Final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D; typos have been corrected; some formulae have been written in a more detailed form; some references have been update

Penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty

More and more hadron states are found to be difficult to be accommodated by the quenched quark models which describe baryons as 3-quark states and mesons as antiquark-quark states. Dragging out an antiquark-quark pair from the gluon field in hadrons should be an important excitation mechanism for hadron spectroscopy. Our recent progress on the penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty is reviewed.Comment: Plenary talk at the 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics 2011 (APFB2011), 22-26 Aug., 2011, Seoul, Kore

Port connectivity indices: an application to European RoRo shipping

In recent years, there has been significant interest in the development of connectivity indicators for ports. For short sea shipping, especially in Europe, Roll-on Roll-off (RoRo) shipping is almost equally important as container shipping. In contrast with container shipping, RoRo shipments are primarily direct, thus the measurement of its connectivity requires a different methodology. In this paper, we present a methodology for measuring the RoRo connectivity of ports and illustrate its use through an application to European RoRo shipping. We apply the methodology on data collected from 23 different RoRo shipping service providers concerning 620 unique routes connecting 148 ports. We characterize the connectivity of the ports in our sample and analyze the results. We show that in terms of RoRo connectivity, neither the number of links nor the link quality (frequency, number of competing providers, minimum number of indirect stops) strictly dominate the results of our proposed indicator. The highest ranking ports combine link quality and number. Finally, we highlight promising areas for future research based on the insights obtained.</p

Meson exchange and nucleon polarizabilities in the quark model

Modifications to the nucleon electric polarizability induced by pion and sigma exchange in the q-q potentials are studied by means of sum rule techniques within a non-relativistic quark model. Contributions from meson exchange interactions are found to be small and in general reduce the quark core polarizability for a number of hybrid and one-boson-exchange q-q models. These results can be explained by the constraints that the baryonic spectrum impose on the short range behavior of the mesonic interactions.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure added, expanded discussio