Distressed in the queue? Psychophysiological and behavioral evidence for two alternative car-following techniques.

BACKGROUND: Nature offers numerous examples of animal species exhibiting harmonious collective movement. Unfortunately, the motorized Homo sapiens sapiens is not included and pays a price for it. Too often, drivers who simply follow other drivers are caught in the worst road threat after a crash: congestions. In the past, the solution to this problem has gone hand in hand with infrastructure investment. However, approaches such as the Nagoya Paradigm propose now to see congestion as the consequence of multiple interacting particles whose disturbances are transmitted in a waveform. This view clashes with a longlasting assumption ordering traffic flows, the rational driver postulate (i.e., drivers' alleged propensity to maintain a safe distance). Rather than a mere coincidence, the worldwide adoption of the safety-distance tenet and the worldwide presence of congestion emerge now as cause and effect. Nevertheless, nothing in the drivers' endowment impedes the adoption of other car-following (CF) strategies. The present study questions the a priori of safety-distance, comparing two elementary CF strategies, Driving to keep Distance (DD), that still prevails worldwide, and Driving to keep Inertia (DI), a complementary CF technique that offsets traffic waves disturbances, ensuring uninterrupted traffic flows. By asking drivers to drive DD and DI, we aim to characterize both CF strategies, comparing their effects on the individual driver (how he drives, how he feels, what he pays attention to) and also on the road space occupied by a platoon of DD robot-followers. METHODS: Thirty drivers (50% women) were invited to adopt DD/DI in a driving simulator following a swinging leader. The design was a repeated measures model controlling for order. The CF technique, DD or DI, was the within-subject factor. Order (DD-DI / DI-DD) was the between-subjects factor. There were four blocks of dependent measures: individual driving performance (accelerations, decelerations, crashes, distance to lead vehicle, speed and fuel consumption), emotional dimensions (measures of skin conductance and self-reports of affective states concerning valence, arousal, and dominance), and visual behavior (fixations count and average duration, dwell times, and revisits) concerning three regions of the driving scene (the Top Rear Car -TRC- or the Bottom Rear Car -BRC- of the leading vehicle and the surrounding White Space Area -WSA). The final block concerned the road space occupied by a platoon of 8 virtual DD followers. RESULTS: Drivers easily understood and applied DD/DI as required, switching back and forth between the two. Average speeds for DD/DI were similar, but DD drivers exhibited a greater number of accelerations, decelerations, speed variability, and crashes. Conversely, DI required greater CF distance, that was dynamically adjusted, and spent less fuel. Valence was similar, but DI drivers felt less aroused and more dominant. When driving DD visual scan was centered on the leader's BRC, whereas DI elicited more attention to WSA (i.e., adopting wider vision angles). In spite of DI requiring more CF distance, the resulting road space occupied between the leader and the 8th DD robot was greater when driving DD.

The relationship between perceived emotional intelligence and depressive symptomatology: the mediating role of perceived stress.

This study investigated the mediating role of perceived stress in the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence and depressive symptoms in adolescence. A total of 661 high school Spanish students participated in the study. The analyses indicated that the effects of each of the perceived emotional intelligence sub-scales (namely, Attention, Clarity and Repair) on depressive symptomatology were partially mediated by perceived stress. Specifically, the mediating effect was negative for Clarity and Repair, but positive for attention. The analysis also showed that the direct effects were positive for all sub-scales. These results suggest that the promotion of stress management skills may be core in the development of prevention and treatment programs for depression in adolescents, and possibly more beneficial than the promotion of emotion regulation skills. Our findings, along with previous evidence, suggest that emotional attention, as measured in the present study, may be targeting a pathological type of attention.

School Violence towards Peers and Teen Dating Violence: The Mediating Role of Personal Distress.

School violence towards peers and teen dating violence are two of the most relevant behaviour problems in adolescents. Although the relationship between the two types of violence is well established in the literature, few studies have focused on mediators that could explain this empirical relationship. We departed from the evidence that relates anger, emotional distress and impaired empathy to teen dating violence and juvenile sexual offending, to explore the role of personal distress, i.e., a self-focused, aversive affective reaction to another's emotion associated with the desire to alleviate one's own, but not the other's distress; as a possible mechanism linking school violence towards peers and teen dating violence in a sample of Spanish adolescents. We also explored the prevalence of emotional and physical teen dating violence, both occasional and frequent, and the differences between boys and girls. A total of 1055 adolescents (49.2% boys and 50.8% girls) aged between 11 and 17 years (M = 14.06, SD = 1.34) who had had at least one romantic relationship within the last year, completed measures of school violence towards peers, teen dating violence, and personal distress. Statistical analyses revealed that occasional and frequent teen dating violence (both physical and emotional) was more frequent in girls than in boys, and that personal distress functioned as a partial mediator, with an overall model fit higher for boys than girls: in boys, partial mediation occurred for both physical and emotional teen dating violence; in girls, partial mediation occurred only for physical violence. The interpretation of the results is tentative given the novel nature of the study, and points to the evidence of the emotional costs of school violence and the importance of emotion and behavior regulation to undermine the social costs of personal distress.

Transactional Links between Teacher-Adolescent Support, Relatedness, and Aggression at School: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Study.

This study examines the reciprocal effects between two school-based relationships within the classroom-namely, perceived teacher support and relatedness with classmates-and school aggression (overt and relational) across two courses of secondary education. Participants were 654 adolescents (48% boys), who were assessed in three waves: first, at the beginning of the academic year (T0), second, at the end of the same academic year (T1), and third, at the beginning of the next academic year (T2) (Mage wave 1 = 13.98 years). Autoregressive cross-lagged modeling was applied. Results show a protective effect of relatedness against relational aggression in both genders. Moreover, we observed a protective effect of perceived teacher support at the beginning of the course for later school aggression as well as a risk effect if this perceived teacher support is maintained throughout the course. These effects were observed in relation with gender-atypical forms of aggression (overt in girls and relational in boys). Finally, aggression had negative consequences for relatedness in girls and for teacher support through the mediation of relatedness in boys. Gender differences and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The influence of comparison between similar stimuli on the effectiveness of their unique features.

Four groups of rats received stimulus pre-exposure under conditions intended to produce different opportunities for stimulus comparison to occur. Groups AX/BX-L and AX/BX-S received alternating presentations of two compound flavors (AX and BX); the interval between these presentations was long (24 h) for group AX/BX-L, and short (5 min) for group AX/BX-S. Groups AX-L and AX-S matched groups AX/BX-L and AX/BX-S in their pre-exposure conditions except that they received presentations of water rather than presentations of BX. The effective salience of one of the unique stimulus features (A) was then assessed by using this flavor as a conditioned stimulus in a flavor-aversion procedure. It was found that aversion to A was learned about more readily after pre-exposure to AX and BX than after pre-exposure just to AX. However, there was no indication that the rate of conditioning to A was affected by the temporal interval between the presentations of AX and BX. These findings challenge the notion that stimulus comparison engages a process responsible for an increase in the salience of the unique stimulus features, but can be accommodated by the salience modulation mechanism proposed by Hall [Hall, G., 2003. Learned changes in the sensitivity of stimulus representations: associative and nonassociative mechanisms. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 56, 43-55].

A comparison of the effects of discriminative and Pavlovian inhibitors and excitors on instrumental responding.

In two experiments, the effects of Pavlovian or discriminative conditioned inhibitors on operant responding were investigated in rats. Experiment 1 found that a Pavlovian conditioned inhibitor for food suppressed food-reinforced lever pressing more than a non-differentially trained control stimulus did. Experiment 2 demonstrated that an operant discriminative inhibitor produced greater suppression of lever pressing than a Pavlovian conditioned inhibitor. Experiment 2 also found that compounding an operant discriminative stimulus (SD) for food-reinforced responding with another SD for food-reinforced responding resulted in more additive summation than when an SD was compounded with a Pavlovian conditioned excitor for food. The results of these experiments support two-factor theories that postulate that incentive and response discriminative processes summate algebraically when the processes are inhibitory or excitatory.

Spanish Validation of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth (AFQ-Y).

Psychological inflexibility (PI) refers to the overarching and nonadaptive avoidance of thoughts and feelings. PI is a transdiagnostic process that is present in numerous psychopathologies, such as anxiety and mood disorders, addictive behaviors, and chronic pain, as presented by American adults and adolescents. Despite the high rates of depression and depressed mood among Spanish and Latino adolescents and the observed relation between PI and adjustment problems at this age, an instrument assessing PI in Spanish-speaking adolescents is lacking. In this study, we assessed the psychometric properties of a Spanish adaptation of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth with 483 students from Spain (mean age 13.89 years). The Spanish Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth proved to be a two-factor psychometrically sound instrument. Total PI scores correlated positively with depression and negatively with satisfaction with life. The predictive validity results showed cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance to be two interrelated but distinct processes that characterize PI.

Treatment-seeking precipitators in problem gambling: analysis of data from a gambling helpline.

Although research on treatment precipitators for problem gambling is scarce, telephone surveys have consistently shown that financial and emotional problems resulting from problem gambling are the factors which recovered or active gamblers most frequently report as treatment precipitators. The present study sought to build on previous evidence by analyzing the demographic and gambling-related information provided by gamblers calling the helpline operated by the New Mexico Council on Problem Gambling and receiving a referral to private counseling. Specifically we examined the differences between the callers who initiated treatment with a private counselor after receiving the referral (n = 223), and those who were likewise referred to counseling but did not attend the first appointment (n = 231). The 2 groups could only be distinguished by the fact that the therapy-initiating group cited family or financial problems as the reason for calling the helpline. Further analyses revealed that helpline staff also had an influence on counseling initiation. These findings, along with other differences between groups call for further research on the most effective ways of targeting problem gamblers who call a helpline so as to facilitate their progression to the action stage of change.

DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF A FOOD-BASED CONDITIONED INHIBITOR ON FOOD- OR COCAINE-SEEKING BEHAVIOR.

The present experiment compared the effects of a food-based conditioned inhibitor on food seeking vs. cocaine seeking behavior. In two groups of rats, the A+/AB- Pavlovian conditioned inhibition procedure was used to create a conditioned inhibitor for food. Then, for one group of rats (Food-Food Group), a click stimulus was established as an operant discriminative stimulus (S(D)) for food-reinforced lever pressing. In the other group (Food-Cocaine Group), the click was established as an S(D) for cocaine self-administration. In testing, the putative inhibitor for food was simultaneously presented with the click for the first time in both groups. In the Food-Food Group, the food-based inhibitor suppressed responding occasioned by the click significantly more than did a neutral control stimulus. In contrast, in the Food-Cocaine Group, there was no difference in the amount of suppression produced by the food-based inhibitor and the control stimulus. These results suggest that the effects of food-based Pavlovian conditioned inhibitors are specific for food-motivated behavior and do not easily transfer to cocaine-motivated behavior.