The caregiver’s burden: Psychological distress in the younger adult caregiver

Research reveals that informal, adult caregivers (25 years of age and older) of chronically ill loved ones incur psychological stress from the caregiving experience. However, there is little research on the psychological impact on the younger adult caregiver (ages 18-24). Therefore, the focus of this study was to explore the psychological effects of being a younger adult caregiver and what factors contribute to, or insulate the younger adult caregiver from the distress of caregiving. The results indicate that younger adult caregivers are unique in that different factors contribute to or insulate them from distress compared to adult caregivers

Conceal, Don\u27t Feel: Gender Differences in Implicit and Explicit Expressions of Emotions

Previous studies revealed that gender-role conforming men rated themselves lower on emotional scales (Etherton, Lawson, & Graham, 2014) and expressed emotion less freely than women in experimental situations (Brody, Lovas, & Hay, 1995). Further, men with high gender-role stress indicated fear of losing control over emotions (Jakupcak, 2003). The purpose of the current study was to explore if the physiological response to emotional suppression is similar to that associated with fear and anxiety. Gender-role conforming men and women experienced fearful and emotional stimuli. Experimenters recorded explicit and implicit reactions before and after exposure. Results showed females experienced greater changes in response after stimuli exposure compared to males. Implications of this research may indicate that males experience increased stress associated with emotional suppression

The relationship between homonegativity, sexual harassment myth acceptance, harasser and target sex, and perceptions of sexual harassment

The current purpose was to determine the relationship between participant homonegativity, sexual harassment myth acceptance, and perceptions of sexual harassment where the gender of the target and harasser varied. Contrary to the hypothesis, higher and lower homonegativity participants did not differ in their perceptions of harassment severity, realism, or consequence and higher homonegativity participants did not report any differences in perceptions between the different-sex and same-sex scenarios. However as hypothesized, participant homonegativity was positively correlated with sexual harassment myth acceptance. Interestingly, participants higher in homonegativity or sexual harassment myth acceptance were more likely to rate the harassment as less severe and had less of an emotional reaction. The current results imply that regardless of the type sexual harassment (different or same-sex), higher homonegativitly participants may not react in institutionally appropriate ways regarding sexual harassment in the workplace

The Relationship Between Color Shade and Emotion Association in Pre-School Aged Children

Color choices can be emotion-driven (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). Because there is evidence that the color shade - emotion association may develop through socialization and enculturation, the current purpose was to determine if color shade was associated with emotion in very young children (i.e., preschoolers) who have experienced lower levels of socialization / enculturation. Participants were read a story about a happy, sad, or angry character and were then asked to pick specific crayons to color a picture of the story character. Inconsistent with the hypotheses, emotion depicted in the story did not correlate with color shade choice (e.g., lighter color shades for the happy character). The results imply that the color-emotion association may be less evident in younger children who have less exposure to those color-emotion associations

The Influence of Pre-existing Memories on Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

When people form episodic connections between memories that share a common retrieval cue, the tendency for those memories to interfere in later retrieval is often eliminated, and forgetting of the interfering information is reduced. For example, episodic integration protects memories from retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), a phenomenon in which practicing retrieving some associates of a cue leads to the suppression of others that interfere with retrieval (Anderson, Green, & McCulloch, 2000). The purpose of this study was to determine whether semantic integration, as a result of pre-existing associations between practiced items and their unpracticed competitors, also moderates RIF. This research was motivated by the existence of many pre-existing associations between the practiced and unpracticed sets in one study that failed to replicate the RIF effect with item specific cues (Butler, William, Zacks, & Maki, 2001). It was hypothesized that pre-existing associations increase the implicit, semantic integration among the items, “insulating” them from inhibitory effects. The results were consistent with this hypothesis: when associations between the practiced and nonpracticed sets were maximized, no forgetting was observed, however when such associations were minimized, there were reliable levels of RIF. The benefits of semantic integration were replicated across four experiments including one that used Butler’s original materials and design. Furthermore, when Butler’s items were simply re-arranged in order to minimize the associations and thus reduce semantic integration, the typical RIF effect was observed. Additional results revealed that the moderating effects of semantic integration are not mediated by explicit integration strategies. Participants who received incidental learning instructions and so reported very low levels of episodic integration, still exhibited the same benefits of semantic integration. Finally, it was also shown that increasing the use of explicit integration strategies by increasing the study time, also reduced the RIF effect. The results of the current set of studies reveal that failure to control for pre-existing associations may account for variability in the RIF phenomenon. The results also suggest that the memory system is adaptive to the needs of the organism, in that it operates to keep related memories that are necessary for cognition active, but suppresses interfering memories