Biomedical subjects

T B Murdock

Publications and source records attributed to T B Murdock.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1995

Grade-level differences in the social value of effort: implication for self-presentation tactics of early adolescents.

Differences in fourth, sixth, and eighth grade (10-, 12-, and 14-year-old) students' willingness to portray themselves as diligent to their popular peers and teachers and their perceptions of the social value of effort and ability ascriptions were examined. The results revealed that the fourth- and sixth-grade students desired to portray themselves as effortful to teachers and peers, whereas the eighth graders were more reluctant to convey to their popular peers than teachers that they study hard. Consistent with these findings, the fourth graders perceived high effort to increase teacher approval as well as popularity among peers, whereas the eighth graders viewed diligence as facilitating teacher approval but low effort expenditure as improving peer popularity. Reasons for youngsters' changing notions of the social value of achievement ascriptions and their self-presentation tactics in school are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1991

Processing of threat-related information in rape victims.

We investigated selective processing of threat information in persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by using a modified Stroop procedure. Subjects were 15 rape victims with PTSD, 13 rape victims without the disorder, and 16 nontraumatized control subjects. They were asked to name the color of four types of words: specific threat (rape-related) words, general threat (related to physical harm and death) words, neutral words, and nonwords. Rape victims with PTSD evidenced a longer response latency for color naming of rape-related words than for other target-word types. Response latencies of non-PTSD victims and nonvictim control subjects did not differ across word types. Possible mechanisms underlying the selective processing of threat material are considered, and clinical implications are discussed.

Cognition↗

PubMed1991

Treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in rape victims: a comparison between cognitive-behavioral procedures and counseling.

Rape victims with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; N = 45) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: stress inoculation training (SIT), prolonged exposure (PE), supportive counseling (SC), or wait-list control (WL). Treatments consisted of nine biweekly 90-min individual sessions conducted by a female therapist. Measures of PTSD symptoms, rape-related distress, general anxiety, and depression were administered at pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up (M = 3.5 months posttreatment). All conditions produced improvement on all measures immediately post-treatment and at follow-up. However, SIT produced significantly more improvement on PTSD symptoms than did SC and WL immediately following treatment. At follow-up, PE produced superior outcome on PTSD symptoms. The implications of these findings and direction for treatment and future research are discussed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1989

Anxious mood and memory.

Influenced by Bower (Am. Psychol. 36, 129-148, 1981) and Lang (Anxiety and the Anxiety Disorders, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J., 1985), we tested three hypotheses concerning anxious mood and memory: (1) the mood state dependent hypothesis which states that memory retrieval will be greater when mood at encoding and at recall are the same than when they are different: (2) the encoding mood congruent hypothesis which states that information semantically related to mood at encoding is retrieved more readily than information unrelated to mood at encoding; and (3) the recall mood congruent hypothesis which states that information semantically related to mood at recall is retrieved more readily than information unrelated to mood at recall. We induced anxiety in speech anxious students by informing them that they would be delivering a speech during the experiment. Mood could be either anxious or nonanxious at encoding, recall, both, or neither. Hence, there were four groups: Anxiety-Anxiety, Anxiety-Nonanxiety, Nonanxiety-Anxiety, and Nonanxiety-Nonanxiety. Subjects were asked to rate the self-descriptiveness of anxiety (e.g. NERVOUS) and nonanxiety adjective (e.g. POLITE) during the encoding phase, and to recall them later. Anxious mood was measured by self-report scales and by heart rate. No support was obtained for any of the three hypotheses. However, post-hoc analyses indicated that anxiety words were recalled least often in subjects whose heart rate increased from encoding to recall. This suggests that attention to threat information may diminish in aroused nonclinical subjects.

Adult↗