Guarding against threatening HIV prevention messages: an information-processing model.

Previous research has suggested that fear-provoking HIV prevention messages can lead to defensive coping strategies among sexually active students who encounter such messages. An information-processing model of defensive responses is proposed that identifies and operationally defines four mediating processes--attention avoidance, blunting, suppression, and counterargumentation--that may lead to the rejection or denial of threatening health messages. Attention avoidance occurs when people indiscriminately avoid all messages; blunting is the use of distraction to avoid only threatening information in the message. Suppression occurs when people try to stop thinking about the information and avoid forming inferences about its self-relevance; counterargumentation is the biased assessment that follows comprehension and arises along with self-relevant elaboration. Situational influences on people's choice of defensive coping strategy are considered, and implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The effectiveness of a short form of the Household Food Security Scale.

OBJECTIVES: On the basis of an 18-item Household Food Security Scale, a short form was developed to assess financially based food insecurity and hunger in surveys of households with and without children. METHODS: To maximize the probability that households would be correctly classified with respect to food insecurity and hunger, 6 items from the full scale were selected on the basis of April 1995 Current Population Survey data. RESULTS: The short form classified 97.7% of households correctly and underestimated the prevalence of overall food insecurity and of hunger by 0.3 percentage points. CONCLUSIONS: The short form of the Household Food Security Scale is a brief but potentially useful tool for national surveys and some state/local applications.

Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

People are generally unaware of the operation of the system of cognitive mechanisms that ameliorate their experience of negative affect (the psychological immune system), and thus they tend to overestimate the duration of their affective reactions to negative events. This tendency was demonstrated in 6 studies in which participants overestimated the duration of their affective reactions to the dissolution of a romantic relationship, the failure to achieve tenure, an electoral defeat, negative personality feedback, an account of a child's death, and rejection by a prospective employer. Participants failed to distinguish between situations in which their psychological immune systems would and would not be likely to operate and mistakenly predicted overly and equally enduring affective reactions in both instances. The present experiments suggest that people neglect the psychological immune system when making affective forecasts.

Ironic effects of trying to relax under stress.

Two studies found that intentional relaxation under conditions of mental load or stress produces ironic increases in skin conductance level (SCL). In Experiment 1, participants instructed to relax under the high mental load of rehearsing a long number had higher SCL than those instructed to relax under low load, and tended to have higher SCL than those under high load not instructed to relax. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to relax or were not so instructed while they answered questions described either as measures of IQ or as unimportant. Those in the more loading and stressful situation who were asked to relax had greater SCL during the questions than those not asked to relax.