PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

R J Larsen

Publications and source records attributed to R J Larsen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

Extracting twins from orientation imaging microscopy scan data.

Automated electron backscatter diffraction or orientation imaging microscopy (OIM) provides spatially specific measurements of crystallographic orientation. These measurements are typically collected on regular grids. By inspecting the misorientation between neighbouring measurements on the grid, potential twin boundaries can be identified. If the misorientation is within some given tolerance of a specified twin misorientation, the boundary separating the two measurements may be identified as a potential twin boundary. In addition, for a coherent twin, the twinning planes must be coincident with the grain boundary plane. As OIM scans are inherently two-dimensional, the scan data provide only limited information on the boundary plane. Thus, it is not possible to ascertain definitively whether the twinning planes are coincident with the boundary plane. Nonetheless, the alignment of the surface traces of the twinning planes with the trace of the boundary provides a partial indication of coincidence. An automated approach has been developed that allows data concerning both twin criterion to be extracted from OIM scans. Application of the methodology to deformed zirconium suggests that the twinning planes remain coherent during deformation. The methodology was also used to improve grain size distributions measured by OIM. These results more closely match those obtained by conventional metallography.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1999

Susceptibility to affect: a comparison of three personality taxonomies.

This study had three major goals: to clarify the relationships between Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies, to show that traits from these taxonomies predict differential sensitivities to emotional states, and to explore the relationship between sensitivity to an emotional state and how much that state is actually experienced. A factor analysis of traits from Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies resulted in three factors that were named reward sensitivity, impulsivity-thrill seeking, and punishment sensitivity. These factors predicted a global measure of affect, emotional reactions to a laboratory mood induction, and self-reported affect in daily life. Generally, reward sensitivity predicted positive, but not negative emotions, whereas punishment sensitivity predicted negative, but not positive emotions. Impulsivity-thrill seeking predicted few emotions in either context. Coherence among the relationships found across methodological contexts suggests that the traits that predict emotion susceptibilities in the laboratory similarly predict emotional experience in ongoing daily life.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Diurnal patterns of unpleasant mood: associations with neuroticism, depression, and anxiety.

The literature on symptoms of depression has included diurnal changes in mood. The morning-worse pattern is commonly mentioned. This pattern is often associated with endogenous or vegetative symptoms (e.g., weight and appetite loss, loss of pleasure, psychomotor retardation). However, depression researchers have also identified an evening-worse pattern of mood. This pattern is sometimes thought to be associated with milder depressive symptoms, and may characterize chronic dysthymia rather than clinical depression. The present study examines a nonclinical sample to test the hypothesis that an evening-worse diurnal pattern of mood would be associated with trait neuroticism, anxiety, and subclinical depressive symptoms. An experience sampling methodology was employed to assess mood three times a day for 60 consecutive days. This allowed us to calculate a reliable aggregate score for diurnal mood patterns. The evening-worse pattern was associated with many neurotic features, with scores on depression and anxiety measures, and with a cognitive style indicative of hopelessness. Discussion focuses on how an evening-worse diurnal pattern of mood may be indicative of mild subclinical depression, chronic dysthymia, or personality traits associated with negative affectivity.

Affect↗
PubMed1997

Facial asymmetry as an indicator of psychological, emotional, and physiological distress.

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is deviation from bilateral symmetry in morphological traits with asymmetry values that are normally distributed with a mean of 0. FA is produced by genetic or environmental perturbations of developmental design and may play a role in human sexual selection. K. Grammer and R. Thornhill (1994) found that facial FA negatively covaries with observer ratings of attractiveness, dominance, sexiness, and health. Using self-reports, observer ratings, daily diary reports, and psychophysiological measures, the authors assessed the relationship between facial FA and health in 2 samples of undergraduates (N = 101). Results partially replicate and extend those of K. Grammer and R. Thornhill (1994) and suggest that facial FA may signal psychological, emotional, and physiological distress. Discussion integrates the authors' findings with previous research on FA and suggests future research needed to clarify the role of FA in human sexual selection.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Repressive coping style and the experience and recall of emotion: a naturalistic study of daily affect.

Research shows that people characterized as repressors display inhibited recall for unpleasant memories. In this study, the relationship between repressive coping style and the recall of affect near the time of the experience was compared to delayed recall. An experience sampling technique was used to collect affect data twice daily for 4 weeks. Repressive coping style was found to be related to low levels of average daily unpleasant affect and lowered delayed recall of unpleasant affect. Unlike repressors, high anxious individuals overestimated unpleasant affect during delayed recall. Repressors did not exhibit isolation of the dominant unpleasant affect from nondominant unpleasant affect in daily reporting. The overall pattern of results suggests that the effect of repressive coping style is to diminish the encoding of all unpleasant affect, whereas trait anxiety appears to promote overestimation in the recall of unpleasant affect.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Affect intensity and individual differences in informational style.

Although individuals differ widely in the typical intensity of their affective experience, the mechanisms that create or maintain these differences are unclear. Larsen, Diener, and Cropanzano (1987) examined the hypothesis that individual differences in affect intensity (AI) are related to how people interpret emotional stimuli. They found that high AI individuals engaged in more personalizing and generalizing cognitions while construing emotional stimuli than low AI individuals. The present study extends these findings by examining cognitive activity during a different task-the generation of information to communicate about life events. Participants provided free-response descriptions of 16 life events. These descriptions were content coded for five informational style variables. It was found that the descriptive information generated by high AI participants contained significantly more references to emotional arousal, more focus on feelings, and more generalization compared to participants low in AI. These results are consistent with the notion that specific cognitive activity may lead to, or at least be associated with, dispositional affect intensity. In addition, the informational style variables identified in this study were stable over time and consistent across situations. Although men and women differ in AI, this difference becomes insignificant after controlling for informational style variation. Overall results are discussed in terms of a model of various psychological mechanisms that may potentially create or maintain individual differences in affect intensity.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Life after trauma: personality and daily life experiences of traumatized people.

In this study, we explored differences in personality and daily life experiences of traumatized (n = 26) versus nontraumatized (n = 30) college students. Study participants completed a variety of personality measures as well as a 28-day experience sampling study assessing daily activities, emotions, and physical health. Although not differing on general demographics, traumatized individuals reported more trait anxiety and lower self-esteem than nontraumatized individuals. They scored higher on Neuroticism, were more introverted, and were less emotionally stable than nontraumatized participants. Traumatized individuals also reported more cognitive disturbances, emotional blunting, and interpersonal withdrawal. They did not report being more depressed, but did endorse cognitive styles associated with heightened risk for depression. Earlier age of trauma was associated with more pathological outcomes: lower self-esteem and psychological well-being, more anxiety, more pessimism, and emotional constriction of positive mood. We compare this symptom profile to that of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1992

Neuroticism and selective encoding and recall of symptoms: evidence from a combined concurrent-retrospective study.

The association between Neuroticism (N) and elevated symptom reporting has been attributed to differences in the encoding but not in the recall of illness episodes. If high-N persons are selective only at the encoding of illness information, then retrospective reports should be no more exaggerated than concurrent reports. This study uses a concurrent-retrospective design to examine selectivity in concurrent and retrospective reports of symptoms. Concurrent daily reports gathered over 2 months were only moderately correlated with retrospective symptom reports covering the same time period. The direct path from N to recalled symptoms was larger than the indirect path from N through concurrent to recalled symptoms for 3 out of 4 symptoms. Discussion concerns implications of using recollection-based measures, suggestions for reducing selective memory effects, and explanations regarding how and why N relates to selective information processing about the self.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Personality and susceptibility to positive and negative emotional states.

Gray's (1981) theory suggests that extraverts and neurotics are differentially sensitive to stimuli that generate positive and negative affect, respectively. From this theory it was hypothesized that efficacy of a standard positive-affect induction would be more strongly related to extraversion than to neuroticism scores, whereas efficacy of a standard negative-affect induction would be more strongly related to neuroticism scores. Positive and negative affect was manipulated in a controlled setting, and the effectiveness of the mood induction was assessed using standard mood adjective rating scales. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that neurotic Ss (compared with stable Ss) show heightened emotional reactivity to the negative-mood induction, whereas extraverts (compared with intraverts) show heightened emotional reactivity to the positive-mood induction. Results corroborate and extend previous findings.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1991

Day-to-day physical symptoms: individual differences in the occurrence, duration, and emotional concomitants of minor daily illnesses.

Even minor illnesses represent significant events in the ongoing lives of most people. As such, daily event methodologies could be applied to the study of ongoing health and illness. When daily health is considered as a temporal process, it is possible to expand our formulation of the relation between personality and day-to-day health. We used a daily event approach to model three temporal parameters of day-to-day health: the occurrence rate of symptoms, the duration of symptoms, and the covariation of symptoms and moods over time. We then examine whether these three models of day-to-day health are related to personality variables commonly used in health psychology research. The occurrence of illness related most strongly to neuroticism, the duration of illness related most strongly to the trait of aggressive responding, and Type A behavior related to less unpleasant affect reported during episodes of respiratory infection, aches, and depressive symptoms. Results are discussed in terms of how alternative models of health/illness are made possible by the daily event perspective.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1990

Individual differences in entrainment of mood to the weekly calendar.

This study addressed two questions: Do daily fluctuations in mood exhibit a 7-day (circaseptum) cycle, and are there reliable individual differences in how entrained people's moods are to such a weekly cycle? Spectral analysis of daily mood over 84 occasions revealed a strong weekly rhythm in the temporal organization of mood in a sample of 74 undergraduates. A sine wave with a period of 7 days accounted for 40% of the variance in the daily mood data. Individual differences were also found in how entrained subjects' moods were to this weekly rhythm. We predicted that extraverts (compared with introverts) should be less entrained to a weekly cycle. Results suggest that the novelty- and sensation-seeking behavior of extraverts most likely serves to lessen the cyclical predictability of their day-to-day moods. The origin and psychological meaning of the 7-day week are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed1987

Cognitive operations associated with individual differences in affect intensity.

There are wide individual differences in the characteristic intensity of affective response to the same emotion-evoking event. The processes whereby individuals come to experience strong or mild emotional responses when exposed to the same affect-provoking stimuli are still unclear. In these studies, we propose that individual differences in affect intensity are associated with certain cognitive operations used during exposure to emotion-relevant stimuli. Specifically, cognitive operations that involve personalizing, generalizing, and selective abstraction were hypothesized to discriminate subjects high and low in affect intensity. Two studies replicated support for the hypothesis that subjects high on the affect-intensity dimension engage in more personalizing/empathic and more generalizing/elaborative cognitive operations than do subjects low on the affect-intensity dimension. The same cognitive operations discriminated groups high and low in affect intensity in response to both positive and negative emotional stimuli. Also, the cognitions that discriminated subjects high and low in affect intensity occurred only in response to affective stimuli; neutral stimuli did not evoke divergent cognitive operations for these two groups. Finally, a high degree of consistency was found in the use of emotion-relevant cognitive operations across positive and negative affective stimuli.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1986

Gender schema theory and sex role inventories: some conceptual and psychometric considerations.

In this study we assessed whether the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the PRF ANDRO are appropriate for investigations of gender schema theory (Bem, 1981a). Because these instruments were developed for entirely different theoretical purposes, it is important to empirically examine the validity of these measures for investigating the construct of gender schema. On the basis of the propositions of gender schema theory, we made several predictions about the psychometric properties that should be exhibited by a valid measure of this construct. Responses to the PRF ANDRO and the BSRI were factor analyzed separately for sex-typed and non-sex-typed groups. Results show consistent and theoretically predictable differences in the factor solutions of these two groups. The sex-typed or gender-schematic group obtained bipolar factors, with masculine items loading with one sign, whereas feminine items loaded with the other sign on each factor. Also, sex of subject loaded highly on almost every factor for this group. The non-sex-typed group, however, obtained few such distinctly dichotomous factors, and sex of subject loaded only on the weaker factors. Results are interpreted as providing support for the construct validity of at least the BSRI and the PRF ANDRO for use in researching the implications of this approach.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Intensity and frequency: dimensions underlying positive and negative affect.

Research on emotions and several happiness scales suggest that positive and negative affect are strongly inversely correlated. However, work on subjective well-being indicates that over time, positive and negative affect are independent across persons. In order to reconcile this inconsistency, two dimensions are proposed for personal affective structure: the frequency of positive versus negative affect and the intensity of affect. Subjects in three studies completed daily and momentary reports on their moods. In support of the intensity dimension, the correlations between positive and negative intensity were strong and positive in all three studies. The intensities of specific emotions across persons were also highly correlated. Across the three studies the frequency and intensity of affect varied independently. Although average levels of positive and negative affect showed low correlations, this relation became strongly inverse when intensity was partialed out. Thus the intensity dimension helps explain the relative independence of positive and negative affect. In addition, emotional intensity is offered as a new personality dimension that manifests interesting characteristics.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1985

The Satisfaction With Life Scale.

This article reports the development and validation of a scale to measure global life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Among the various components of subjective well-being, the SWLS is narrowly focused to assess global life satisfaction and does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness. The SWLS is shown to have favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability. Scores on the SWLS correlate moderately to highly with other measures of subjective well-being, and correlate predictably with specific personality characteristics. It is noted that the SWLS is Suited for use with different age groups, and other potential uses of the scale are discussed.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1984

Person x situation interactions: choice of situations and congruence response models.

Two models of Person x Situation interaction wee examined. The first model predicts that there is a relation between personality and the situations people naturally choose to be in; the second model predicts that when there is congruence between the situation and personality, a person will experience more positive and less negative affect. These models were investigated by using mood and activity reports gathered on 3,512 occasions sampled randomly from the everyday lives of 42 subjects. Situational dimensions were related to some but not all personality variables investigated. Need for order predicted choice of typical situations and extraversion correlated with time spent recreating socially. However, it was found that individuals did not spend more time in those settings where they experienced more positive emotions nor less time in those situations where they experienced more negative affect. In terms of the affect-congruence model, several predicted relations wee found, but several others did not reach significance. The failure of the affect-congruence model to be consistently supported was probably because the affect of individuals was relatively consistent across situations. The present results suggest that although some theoretically meaningful Person x Situation interactions do occur, they are not necessarily strong or easily predictable.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Temporal stability and cross-situational consistency of affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses.

Consistency and stability of feelings were examined in reports that were completed on 3,512 occasions randomly sampled from the lives of 42 subjects. The stability and consistency of responses depended on the situations, individuals, and responses involved. High degrees of consistency were unusual for single responses, although mean levels of responding tended to be both highly stable and consistent. The consistency and stability of variables covaried, suggesting a connective between the two. Persons who were more consistent across one pair of situations tended to be more consistent across other situational pairs. The results indicate that the question of whether personality consistency exists does not have a simple answer, and requires knowledge of the persons, situations, responses, and level of analysis involved.

Affect↗