Love styles and desire for closeness in romantic relationships.

This study investigated differences in love styles (i.e., eros, ludus, storge, pragma, agape, mania) associated with the romantic desire for closeness. Participants were 197 undergraduate students (M age = 19.8 yr., SD = 1.9; 92 men, 104 women) currently in a romantic relationship who completed a survey assessing their love styles and current desire for closeness with their partner (i.e., desired less closeness, the same level of closeness, or more closeness). Results indicated small significant differences in individuals' preferences for closeness with the eros and ludus love styles. Specifically, individuals who desired less closeness scored lower on eros love and higher on ludus love than partners who reported an ideal level of closeness or who desired more closeness.

Affective orientation and eating behavior: two studies of emotional, restrained, and external eating decisions.

Recent work on how emotions guide decisions stimulated two studies on relationships among emotional, restrained, and external antecedents of eating behavior and Affective Orientation. In Study 1 were 195 undergraduate students who completed the Affective Orientation-15 scale (Booth-Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield, 1996) and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Higher scores of trait Affective Orientation were associated with more emotional and restrained eating. Women scored higher on Affective Orientation than men and were more likely to engage in emotional and restrained eating. Study 2 replicated the research with 79 employed adults (M age=38 yr.). Results were similar in that Affective Orientation scores were related positively to similar eating patterns, and women scored higher than men on the psychosocial variables.

"If we didn't use humor, we'd cry": humorous coping communication in health care settings.

Folkman and Lazarus's transactional theory of emotion and coping was used to explain how humor influences job satisfaction among health care providers. One hundred forty-two nurses completed measures of humor orientation (HO), coping efficacy, job satisfaction, and open-ended questions about their use of humor to relieve job tensions. This produced 9 categories of producing humor and 8 types of work situations identified in which humor was used to cope. Nurses (21.4%) reported using humor the most often during "patient care" situations (e.g., providing medicines, moving patients, physical therapy, and so on). More than one third (38.66%) of the nurses reported using "word-play/language" as a humorous coping strategy. Higher HO was associated with higher ratings of humor effectiveness, greater self-perceived coping efficacy, and higher emotional expressivity. Path analysis demonstrated that, as the transactional theory would predict, trait HO influences job satisfaction through its effect on heightened coping efficacy. Study limitations include the use of self-report methods and the limited number of responses to the open-ended items. Subsequent research in this area should attempt to validate the categories identified in this study and determine the most effective means of coping. Researchers also should explore differences in health care providers' coping communication based on gender, years of experience, and profession.

Perceptions of health care providers' communication: relationships between patient-centered communication and satisfaction.

Specific communication practices of multiple professionals in health care settings can impact patient outcomes. This study, conducted at a large Children's Hospital, sought to determine the extent to which patient-centered communication (PCC) affected satisfaction with communication and with care itself. Parents of child patients (N = 195) reported on the communication practices of physicians, nurses, and hospital staff members during their most recent stay in the hospital. Surveys were completed on site. Health care providers' use of PCC behaviors, especially immediacy and perceived listening, was positively associated with satisfaction with care and with communication. In addition, PCC behaviors were perceived to be used more frequently with children in better health than with children with poorer health status.

Embedded health behaviors from adolescence to adulthood: the impact of tobacco.

Prevention of cancer risk behaviors before they become embedded in an individual's life is crucial. Health-related behaviors should be viewed for their embeddedness, critical aspects of which are (a) the complexity of the behavior itself; (.b) factors, both biological and psychological, within the individual communicator; (c) and external situational or sociocultural factors. The more extensively a behavior is embedded, the more difficult it will be to alter. Relative levels of embeddedness of the risk behavior and its entanglement with other nonrisky behaviors will evolve and change throughout one's life course. Smoking across the life span provides an excellent example of a thoroughly integrated, embedded behavior. How smoking is embedded with other behaviors changes from adolescence, where biological factors may be less salient and habit strength less pronounced, through adulthood, where habit strength is greater but health concerns are a more predictive factor. Researchers can produce more focused communication interventions by examining how health-endangering behaviors are embedded among benign behaviors or among other potentially dangerous behaviors. Ideally, the pattern of health behavior embeddedness should be analyzed prior to developing intervention communication strategies.