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Biomedical subjects

A H Winefield

Publications and source records attributed to A H Winefield.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Psychological correlates of the level of alcohol consumption in young adults.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the psychological condition of young adults who drank no alcohol, moderate, or excessive amounts of alcohol. DESIGN: Subjects from a longitudinal study of the school-to-work transition supplied information by postal questionnaire, and others matched for age were interviewed. PARTICIPANTS: A sample of adults of average age 24 years. The 483 in the longitudinal study had been students at 12 metropolitan high schools in 1980, and had been followed annually from then until 1988; the 111 who were interviewed were mature-aged university students. Sex ratios and the proportion employed were similar in the two samples. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The General Health Questionnaire was used to measure psychological disturbance in both samples, and alcohol consumption was measured by self-report in terms of number of glasses of beer, wine, spirits and fortified wine taken during the preceding week. RESULTS: Higher levels of disturbance were shown by men who drank excessively in the first study, and who abstained from alcohol in the second study. The latter result was related to the poorer health of abstainers. Women showed no psychological differences according to level of alcohol consumption. CONCLUSIONS: The inconsistent results for men in the two studies suggest that research methodology influences results in ways that are important for researchers in this field to take into account. The lack of disturbance in moderate drinkers of both samples indicates the social acceptability of responsible alcohol consumption in Australia, and supports efforts to educate the public and their medical advisors so that well-informed decisions can be made about alcohol use.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Psychological attributes of young adult smokers.

To study the psychological aspects of cigarette-smoking in community adults, we examined longitudinal data from a sample of young people (from age 15 to 23 years). Questions on smoking behavior had been asked during the last five years of the study, and information on self-esteem, depressive affect, negative mood, hopelessness, psychological disturbance, locus of control, social alienation and health was also available. Current smokers in the last year of the study had differed from nonsmokers nine years previously by having more external locus of control and now were less likely to report their health as excellent. Most smokers also drank alcohol, but cigarette consumption did not differ for drinkers and nondrinkers. Contrary to expectations, current smokers showed no distinctive psychological attributes, and those who started or stopped smoking were similarly undistinctive in psychological terms. Results suggest that efforts to stress the self-destructive or antisocial nature of tobacco use have not been accepted by the smokers in this age group (M = 23.6 yr.).

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Suicidal ideation: its enduring nature and associated morbidity.

A longitudinal study between 1980 and 1988 of school leavers entering adulthood examined suicidal ideation 4 and 8 years after an initial battery of psychological tests. The report of suicidal ideation during their lives was significantly associated with measures of depression, self-esteem and locus of control 8 years previously. It was also associated with those measures as well as anomie, hopelessness and scores on the General Health Questionnaire 4 years previously. These associations were not as strong for subjects whose suicidal ideation had been present in the most recent 6 months, or for those who acknowledged having attempted suicide. No fewer than 40% of subjects who acknowledged suicidal ideation when examined in 1984 denied ever having had suicidal ideation during their lives when re-examined in 1988. This raises doubts about the validity of such studies. Although these findings provide data that confirm the enduring nature of suicidal ideation and its continuing morbidity, they do not give confidence that any screening of schoolchildren could actually predict those who will attempt suicide. Such studies cannot replace full clinical assessment of individual suicidal subjects.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

The stability of attributional style and its relation to psychological distress.

A group of yound adults completed the Attributional Style Questionnaire and measures of depressive affect and hopelessness on two occasions separated by a time interval of three years. Attributional style was demonstrated to be relatively stable over this time period, and was correlated with the measures of psychological well-being. Specifically, those who scored highest on depressive affect and hopelessness attributed good outcomes more externally and less stably, and attributed bad outcomes to relatively more stable and global causes. In contrast to the hopelessness model of depression, however, multiple regression analyses showed that depressive attributions were not antecedent to increased psychological distress; nor were they a consequence. Furthermore, negative life-events did not contribute to the prediction. It was concluded that the data are most consonant with Brewin's (1985) symptom model, in which depressive attributions are a concomitant or symptom of depression but have no causal impact on the onset or course of the disorder.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1991

The psychological impact of unemployment and unsatisfactory employment in young men and women: longitudinal and cross-sectional data.

Data are presented from the seventh wave of a longitudinal study of school-leavers that commenced in 1980. Four groups were compared: satisfied employed, dissatisfied employed, unemployed and full-time tertiary students. The groups differed initially with respect to only one background variable, teacher-rated academic potential, and did not differ on any of the psychological measures of well-being. In general, the unemployed and dissatisfied employed groups displayed poorer psychological well-being than the satisfied employed and student groups on a range of measures. The longitudinal data suggested that this was because the two disadvantaged groups showed smaller improvements than the others, rather than any deterioration. The results also suggested that for the males unemployment was worse than unsatisfactory employment, but that for the females unsatisfactory employment was worse than unemployment.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Frustration-instigated behavior and learned helplessness.

This paper compares Seligman's recent work on learned helplessness with N. R. F. Maier's work on frustration-instigated behavior published some 30 years ago. Some striking similarities are noted between the two approaches, and it is concluded that some of the differences are more apparent than real and that the learned helplessness model could provide an explanation for the "abnormal fixations" reported by Maier.

Animals↗
PubMed1976

Successive visual reversal learning in rats as a function of amount of training per reversal and reduced spatial cues.

An experiment is reported which examined the effects of varying amounts of training per reversal over successive brightness discrimination reversals in rats, in a situation which reduced visual cues to spatial position. The results were similar to those of studies showing that amount of training affects successive reversal improvement on spatial problems but no differences were observed as a result of varying the cues for spatial position. The latter finding failed to confirm the result of a recent experiment in which a learning criterion was employed rather than a fixed-trials procedure.

Animals↗