Repression and response bias during an affective memory recognition task

Pregnancy Activity Levels and Impediments in the Era of COVID-19 Based on the Health Belief Model: A Cross-Sectional Study

Physical activity (PA) and exercise benefit both the mother and the fetus. Many pregnant women avoid or severely limit PA, leading to complications before and after delivery. This study elucidated the precise effect of each moderator variable on prenatal physical activity (PPA) by examining demographic factors, the PPA-related health belief level (HBL), and the current PPA level. The health belief model (HBM) in conjunction with the international prenatal physical activity questionnaire was used. The HBL in pregnant parous women (PPW) (3.42) was significantly higher than that in nonpregnant nulliparous women (NNW) (3.06). The PPA level in pregnant nulliparous women (PNW) (5.67 metabolic equivalent-hours per week (MET-h/week)) was lower than in the PPW (6.01 MET-h/week). All HBM dimensions (except for perceived barriers) were positively correlated with exercise expenditure in both PNW and PPW. According to the regression tree, participants in PNW aged ≤ 23 years with annual household incomes > CNY 100,001−150,000 had the highest energy expenditure (10.75 MET-h/week), whereas participants in PPW with a perceived benefit score of >4 had the highest energy expenditure (10 MET-h/week). The results demonstrated that the HBL in all groups was acceptable, whereas the PPA level was lower than the recommended PA level. In both PPW and PNW, the HBL was most strongly correlated with exercise expenditure. There is an urgent need to organize public-interest courses to alleviate household expenditure, raise the HBL about PPA in pregnant and NNW, and ensure personal health in the context of COVID-19.

Sampling Conscious Thought: Influences of Repression—Sensitization and Reporting Conditions

Because of growing evidence that persons classified psychometrically as repressors may be at risk in terms of physical as well as mental health this study explored the ongoing thought processes of repressors, true low anxious, and high anxious individuals. A combination of high and low scores on manifest anxiety and defensiveness scales served to identify the three groups. It was hypothesized that thought samples of individuals in the three groups would reflect a bipolar repression-sensitization continuum. To investigate the possible influence of impression-management, approximately equal members of males and females ( N-32) were assigned to two between-Ss reporting conditions designed to yield expectations of safety (Anonymity) or fear of public evaluation (Disclosure-threat). Content analyses of thought reports by trained judges revealed that thoughts in the Disclosure-threat condition were more emotional, more concerned with others, involved less fantasy, and were reported as being more difficult to control. The three personality categories did not produce significant main effects on thought quality, but did interact with the reporting conditions. Analyses of simple one-way effects for each personality category independently indicated that the high anxious participants had more emotional and difficult to control thoughts in the Disclosure-threat condition, while the repressor and low anxious participants showed no differences. The possible implications of these results in distinguishing competing explanations of the repression-sensitization phenomenon are discussed.

Anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory: the moderating effect of list composition and semantic-similarity effects

Individuals with high anxiety show bias for threatening information, but it is unclear whether this bias affects memory. Recognition memory studies have shown biases for recognising and rejecting threatening items in anxiety, prompting the need to identify moderating factors of this effect. This study focuses on the role of semantic similarity: the use of many semantically related threatening words could increase familiarity for those items and obscure anxiety-related differences in memory. To test this, two recognition memory experiments varied the proportion of threatening words in lists to manipulate the semantic-similarity effects. When similarity effects were reduced, participants with high trait anxiety were biased to respond "new" to threatening words, whereas when similarity effects were strong there was no effect of anxiety on memory bias. Analysis of the data with the drift diffusion model showed that the bias was due to differences in processing of the threatening stimuli rather than a simple response bias. These data suggest that the semantic similarity of the threatening words significantly affects the presence or absence of anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory. The results indicate that trait anxiety is associated with a bias to decide that threatening stimuli were not previously studied, but only when semantic-similarity effects are controlled. Implications for theories of anxiety and future studies in this domain are discussed.

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.

Styles of inhibiting emotional expression: distinguishing repressive coping from impression management

Although repressors' avoidant coping style seems genuinely defensive, an alternative hypothesis is that repressors are actually distress-prone impression managers who provide "socially desirable" verbal reports. To establish discriminant validity, 30 repressors and 30 self-identified impression managers participated in a timed phrase-completion task. Half of the subjects were encouraged to be emotionally expressive and half to be restrained. Repressors were highly defensive regardless of the social demand, and impression managers only managed to match the repressors' level of distancing during the first segment of the inhibitive condition. Repressors were as physiologically reactive when they made defensive claims as they were when they made more negative disclosures to others. Moreover, when confronted, only the repressors denied that their heart rate elevations might be related to their emotional responses. These findings suggest that repressors' limited emotional expression is more determined by defenses against awareness of affect than by self-presentational concerns.