Deriving benefits from stressful events: the role of engagement in meaningful work and hardiness.

This research explored the relationship between the meaningfulness of work, personality hardiness, and deriving long-term benefits from a stressful event. U.S. soldiers participating in a peacekeeping mission to Bosnia completed measures assessing the meaning of their work and personality hardiness midway through a 1-year deployment (mid-deployment) and completed a measure of deriving benefits from the deployment 4-5 months after it was over (postdeployment). Structural equation modeling revealed that personality hardiness was associated with being engaged in meaningful work during the deployment, which was strongly associated with deriving benefits from the deployment months after it was over. Enriching experiences were also associated with deriving benefits from the deployment. Discussion focuses on the linkages between personality processes, meaningful work, and deriving benefits from a stressful experience.

Stress and health during medical humanitarian assistance missions.

The present research examined stress and health among service members deployed on a medical humanitarian assistance mission to Kazakstan. Team members were surveyed before and during their deployment. Team members underestimated how much stress they would experience in terms of isolation and inability to help the local population. Team members also used less adaptive coping mechanisms than anticipated and showed elevations in alcohol and cigarette consumption. Despite these negative experiences, reports of depression and physical symptoms did not increase during the deployment. This may have been a function of team members being personally involved in important and relevant work during the humanitarian operation.

Depression and the explanation of events that happen to self, close others, and strangers.

Depressive and nondepressive college students attributed causality for positive and negative events that happened to either themselves, a close other, or a typical student. Depressives made less optimistic attributions than nondepressives when explaining events that happened to themselves. However, depressives and nondepressives generally made similar attributions about others; both groups were optimistic when explaining events that happened to their best friend or romantic partner and less optimistic when explaining events that happened to the typical student. The results indicate that depressives do not treat close others as extensions of the self, at least in terms of their attributional patterns. Furthermore, depressives were aware of the extent to which their attributions benefitted or harmed the desired identity of the actor.

The triangle model of responsibility.

Responsibility acts as a psychological adhesive that connects an actor to an event and to relevant prescriptions that should govern conduct. People are held responsible to the extent that (a) a clear, well-defined set of prescriptions is applicable to an event (prescription-event link); (b) the actor is perceived to be bound by the prescriptions by virtue of his or her identity (prescription-identity link); and (c) the actor is connected to the event, especially by virtue of appearing to have personal control over it (identity-event link). Studies supported the model, showing that attributions of responsibility are a direct function of the combined strengths of the 3 linkages (Study 1) and that, when judging responsibility, people seek out information that is relevant to the linkages (Study 2). The model clarifies prior multiple meanings of responsibility and provides a coherent framework for understanding social judgment.

Visual-motor coordination and intelligence as predictors of reading, mathematics, and written language ability.

Previous research on the relationship between visual-motor coordination and academic achievement has been equivocal and has frequently not included controls for the effect of intelligence on achievement. In the present study, scores on three tests of children's visual-motor coordination correlated moderately to highly with scores on a test of reading, mathematics, and written language for a sample of 44 elementary school children referred for learning difficulties. Multiple regression analyses indicated that visual-motor coordination scores accounted for little unique achievement test score variance when IQs were included in the equations.

Social blushing.

This article reviews theory and research regarding the physiology, situational and dispositional antecedents, behavioral concomitants, and interpersonal consequences of social blushing and offers a new theoretical account of blushing. This model posits that people blush when they experience undesired social attention. Puzzling questions involving blushing in solitude, the phenomenology of blushing, types of blushing, and blushing in dark-skinned people are discussed.

On threat of shock as an elicitor of anxiety: a methodological note.

The effects of anxiety on the eyeblink component of the human startle response were measured in 32 college students. The manipulation of threat of shock was not successful in eliciting anxiety, suggesting that, while threat of shock can increase anxiety, this increase is not inevitable, illustrating the importance of a manipulation check of the effectiveness of the threat.