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Biomedical subjects

R O Frost

Publications and source records attributed to R O Frost.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1991

Romance and help-seeking among college women: "it hurts so much to care".

Although previous research shows that adult women in intimate relations tend to enjoy better health than women without partners, this study finds the opposite tends to be true for late adolescent women. We followed a college entering class prospectively for 4 years and measured romantic involvement and various aspects of health and illness behavior in a questionnaire. Health service use was determined from the medical record, and disaggregated into distress and health maintenance visits, as well as visits expressly for psychological counseling. First year students who were romantically involved had more physical symptoms, more medical visits, but not more counseling visits, than non-involved women. At senior year, they continued to have more health maintenance, more counseling, but not more distress visits, and they tended to experience greater interference in social role performance due to illness when compared to non-involved women. When several mediators of the relationship between romantic involvement and health service use were controlled-number and intensity of physical symptoms, sexual activity, stress in the relationship, and social network characteristics--the differences persisted. Romance appears to motivate help-seeking among late adolescent women for reasons that are not easily explained empirically. Recent work on adolescent women's development offers theoretical leads that can guide future investigations.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Checking behavior in a threatening situation.

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether compulsive checking was associated with greater checking behavior and slower performance in a personally relevant and potentially threatening task. Students in an abnormal psychology class completed the Maudsley Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory and the Everyday Checking Behavior Scale early in the semester. One month later during the first examination they were asked to record the number of times they went over (checked) each exam question after first answering it. The amount of time taken by subjects to complete this and the final exam was also recorded. The MOCI-check subscale and ECBS were correlated with the number of answer checks. MOCI-check scores were also correlated with the time taken to complete each exam. It was suggested that the characteristic of indecisiveness may be responsible for these relationships.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Memory deficits in compulsive checkers: replication and extension in a clinical sample.

Thirteen checkers and twelve noncheckers, identified on the basis of their responses to the checking subscale of the Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory (MOCI; Rachman and Hodgson, 1980), were recruited from a sample of 99 consecutive admissions to the outpatient department of a community mental health center. Consistent with our previous research with nonclinical samples of college students (Sher et al., 1983, 1984), checkers were found to show deficits in memory, especially recall for recently completed actions, compared to noncheckers. This result demonstrates the replicability of our previous findings across different types of samples and implicates deficits in memory for actions as a potentially important determinant of checking behavior. Assessment of spontaneous imagery associated with the anamnestic process suggested that checkers utilized less imagery, especially visual imagery, when recalling biographical information. Additional measures collected at the time of testing indicated that checkers were more neurotic and reported more psychological distress than noncheckers.

Adult↗