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Buffering Stress with Optimism
Everything from traffic to tests can cause us to “freak out,” yet some people naturally handle stress better than others. Joëlle Jobin, 2012 APSSC Student Research Award winner, wanted to see if being an optimist or a pessimist could change the way stress affects individuals. When we stress out, our bodies release cortisol, a steroid hormone from the adrenal gland. Too much cortisol can have an adverse effect. Jobin and Carsten Wrosch, both from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, tested the association among stress, cortisol, and the buffering effect of optimism.
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Challenges and Successes in Dissemination of Evidence-Based Treatments for Posttraumatic Stress: Lessons Learned From Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Each year, millions of individuals experience a trauma -- whether it is a car accident, an assault, an injury, or a natural disaster. Although many individuals recover from a traumatic event, others go on to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) -- an anxiety disorder characterized by severe and persistent stress reactions in response to the trauma. The individual and societal effects of PTSD are great; therefore, it is imperative to treat PTSD using the best and most effective methods available, as backed by psychological science. In this report, Edna B. Foa (University of Pennsylvania), Seth J. Gillihan (University of Pennsylvania), and Richard A.
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Like Humans, Chimpanzees Know What They Know
Metacognition -- the ability to think about thinking -- is a cognitive skill that we use every day in recognizing what we know, and what we don’t know. Though metacognition was once thought to be a skill unique to humans, a new study published in Psychological Science suggests that chimpanzees may share this ability. Psychological scientist Michael Beran of Georgia State University and colleagues tested metacognition in three language-trained chimpanzees. All three chimpanzees had been trained from an early age to use symbols to request and label objects, actions, locations, and individuals. And they could respond to requests by humans using those symbols.
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Darby Saxbe
University of Southern California http://dornsife.usc.edu/nestlab What does your research focus on? I am fascinated by how social interconnections, particularly within families, shape our bodies and brains. For example, are spouses’ cortisol levels coordinated? How do early family environments influence youths’ neural and physiological reactivity? Dreaming up lab acronyms may be the academic’s version of doodling your future spouse’s surname in your journal.
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A Milestone for CPS
April marks a one-year milestone for APS’s newest journal Clinical Psychological Science! CPS provides a venue for cutting-edge research across a wide range of conceptual views, approaches, and topics. Since CPS Editor Alan E. Kazdin, Yale University, and his editorial team started accepting submissions in April 2012, CPS has been making news.
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Kristen M. Kennedy
The University of Texas at Dallas http://bbs.utdallas.edu/people/detail.php5?i=1061 What does your research focus on? I am most generally interested in brain-behavior relationships as we age, or the cognitive neuroscience of aging. Specifically, I study how changes to the brain’s structure with age correspond to the changes we see in cognition as we age. Interestingly, there is not a one-to-one relationship in this process because our brains are malleable to cope with the biological effects of aging, and our cognitive strategies may also re-arrange to cope with decrements to brain structure.
