Cardiovascular Disease and Psychiatric Comorbidity: The Potential Role of Perseverative Cognition

The high comorbidity between psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular disease has received increasing attention, yet little is known about the processes linking the two. One plausible contributing mechanism is the tendency of those with psychiatric disorders to ruminate on stressful events. This phenomenon, sometimes called perseverative cognition, can extend the psychological and physiological effects of stress, which could contribute to cardiovascular disease etiology. In this paper, we discuss the potential role of perseverative cognition in mediating the relationship between psychiatric illness and cardiovascular disease. Rumination can delay physiological recovery from acute stress, which in turn has been found to predict future cardiovascular health. This delayed recovery could act as a mechanism in the longitudinal link between worry and cardiovascular health. The cognitive inflexibility that characterizes mood and anxiety disorders may then contribute to disease not by producing greater reactivity, but instead through extending activation, increasing the risks for cardiovascular damage

The fluency of spoilers Why giving away endings improves stories

Spoilers, despite their name, seem to increase enjoyment of stories. This could be because readers enjoy reading expected endings, because knowing the ending allows them to appreciate aesthetic elements instead of guessing what will happen, or because knowing the ending increases fluency by enabling readers to correctly interpret clues and events. We conducted three experiments to test these hypotheses. Experiment 1 collected ratings at the midpoints of anthologized stories, and determined that readers experience greater pleasure even before reading the end of spoiled stories. This spoiler benefit was mediated by processing fluency, and not by appreciation of aesthetic elements. Experiment 2 found that spoilers similar to those in Experiment 1 do not increase ease of reading -or pleasure -for very-easy-to-read stories. Experiment 3 found, however, that very simple spoilers could increase the pleasure of easy-to-read stories

Rumination as a Mediator of Chronic Stress Effects on Hypertension: A Causal Model

Chronic stress has been linked to hypertension, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly specified. We suggest that chronic stress poses a risk for hypertension through repeated occurrence of acute stressors (often stemming from the chronic stress context) that cause activation of stress-mediating physiological systems. Previous models have often focused on the magnitude of the acute physiological response as a risk factor; we attempt to extend this to address the issue of duration of exposure. Key to our model is the notion that these acute stressors can emerge not only in response to stressors present in the environment, but also to mental representations of those (or other) stressors. Consequently, although the experience of any given stressor may be brief, a stressor often results in a constellation of negative cognitions and emotions that form a mental representation of the stressor. Ruminating about this mental representation of the stressful event can cause autonomic activation similar to that observed in response to the original incident, and may occur and persist long after the event itself has ended. Thus, rumination helps explain how chronic stress causes repeated (acute) activation of one's stress-mediating physiological systems, the effects of which accumulate over time, resulting in hypertension risk

Competition Breeds Desire

Desire spurs competition; here we explore whether the converse is also true. In one study, female quartets (N = 58) completed anagrams, with the winner to receive compact speakers; controls anagrammed without competition. In the other study, female quartets (N = 74) described their ideal first date to a male judge, who chose the best description; controls read to him others' date descriptions without competition. In both studies, creating competition increased desire and altered how much participants wanted, but not how much they liked, the competed-for thing. Competition may activate a general “wanting system,” producing overvaluing in settings from stock markets to partner selection

Major memory for microblogs

Online social networking is vastly popular and permits its members to post their thoughts as microblogs, an opportunity that people exploit, on Facebook alone, over 30 million times an hour. Such trivial ephemera, one might think, should vanish quickly from memory; conversely, they may comprise the sort of information that our memories are tuned to recognize, if that which we readily generate, we also readily store. In the first two experiments, participants' memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books-a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences. Our final experiment, using headlines, sentences, and reader comments from articles, suggested that the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind.</p

Who’s funny: Gender stereotypes, humor production, and memory bias

It has often been asserted, by both men and women, that men are funnier. We explored two possible explanations for such a view, first testing whether men, when instructed to be as funny as possible, write funnier cartoon captions than do women, and second examining whether there is a tendency to falsely remember funny things as having been produced by men. A total of 32 participants, half from each gender, wrote captions for 20 cartoons. Raters then indicated the humor success of these captions. Raters of both genders found the captions written by males funnier, though this preference was significantly stronger among the male raters. In the second experiment, male and female participants were presented with the funniest and least funny captions from the first experiment, along with the caption author's gender. On a memory test, both females and males disproportionately misattributed the humorous captions to males and the nonhumorous captions to females. Men might think men are funnier because they actually find them so, but though women rated the captions written by males slightly higher, our data suggest that they may regard men as funnier more because they falsely attribute funny things to them.</p

Positive and negative opinion modeling: The influence of another's similarity and dissimilarity.

Modeling research that has focused on the effects of observing similar others appears to have underes-timated the influence of observing dissimilar others. Two experiments demonstrated that observing a model express liking for a piece of music induced more favorable opinions of the music (positive modeling) when the model was similar to the participant observer in relevant opinions, and more negative opinions (negative modeling) when the model was dissimilar to the participant in relevant opinions. Of note, this pattern was more pronounced when participants also believed their general backgrounds were dissimilar rather than similar to that of the model. Underlying social comparison processes and the mediational role of participants ’ liking of the model are considered