There is growing interest in psychophysiological and neural correlates of psychopathology, personality, and other individual differences. Many studies correlate a criterion individual difference variable (e.g., anxiety) with a psychophysiological measurement derived by subtracting scores taken from two within-subject conditions. These subtraction-based difference scores are intended to increase...

The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was ...

Dreams are descirbed as "single-minded," meaning that they tend to be unaccompanied by other, simultaneous streams of thought and imagery. Four manifestations of single-mindedness are discussed: (1) the absence of a reflective awareness that one is dreaming while the dream is in progress; (2) the absence of alternative images and thoughts while attending to the primary dream content; (3) the te...

Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and shyness were examined as predictors of effortful control (EC) in a sample of 101 preschool-age children. Resting RSA was calculated from respiration and heart rate data collected during a neutral film; shyness was measured using parents', preschool teachers', and classroom observers' reports; and EC was measured using four laboratory tasks in addit...

Although parents and children are thought to influence one another's affect and behavior, few studies have examined the direction of effects from children to parents, particularly with respect to parental psychopathology. We tested the hypothesis that children's affective characteristics are associated with the course of mothers' depressive symptoms. Children's affect expression was observed du...

Many chemistry educators have adopted the process-oriented guided instructional learning (POGIL) pedagogy. However, it is not clear which aspects of POGIL are the most important in terms of actual learning. We compared 354 first-year undergraduate psychology students' learning in physiological psychology using four teaching methods: control, POGIL, POGIL without reporting [no report out (NRO)],...

OBJECTIVE Prior studies demonstrate that hostile persons respond to social stressors with heightened cardiovascular responses. This study examined the effects of individual differences in hostility and two experimentally manipulated social stressors on cardiovascular reactivity during marital interaction. METHODS Sixty couples participated in a discussion task under conditions of high or low ...