The meaning people assign to physical sensations can have profound implications for their physical and psychological health. A predominant research question in somatic interpretation asks if it is more adaptive to distract one's attention away from a potentially unpleasant sensation or to focus one's attention on it. This question, however, has yielded equivocal answers. Many apparent ambiguities in this research can be traced to a failure to distinguish the content of a person's attention from its mere direction or degree. A model of somatic interpretation is discussed, incorporating not only perceptual focus but also the attributions, goals, coping strategies, and prior hypotheses of the perceiver, thus delineating the psychobiological conditions under which various attentional strategies should be adaptive. In contrast to the prevailing concern with when and why somatic distraction doesn't "work," this conceptual analysis also considers when and why somatic attention does. Theoretical and methodological issues are discussed, as is the potential utility of somatic attention in cardiac rehabilitation and multiple sclerosis.

The study demonstrates that the rebound effect of thought suppression (Wegner, 1989) has an analog in the experience of somatic discomfort. During a cold-pressor pain induction, 63 Ss were instructed either to concentrate on their room at home (distraction), to pay close attention to their hand sensations (monitoring), or to remove awareness of those sensations from mind (suppression). Two min of postpressor pain ratings showed that monitoring produced the most rapid recovery from the pain and that suppression produced the slowest. Suppression also contaminated the interpretation of a subsequent somatic stimulation; later in the experimental hour, Ss who had suppressed their cold-pressor discomfort rated an innocuous vibration as more unpleasant than did other Ss. The strategies are discussed for their necessarily distinct processes of goal evaluation and their possibly differential drain on perceived coping capacities.

This experiment tested the hypothesis that perceived self-inefficacy in exercising control over cognitive stressors activates endogenous opioid systems. Subjects performed mathematical operations under conditions in which they could exercise full control over the cognitive task demands or in which the cognitive demands strained or exceeded their cognitive capabilities. Subjects with induced high perceived self-efficacy exhibited little stress, whereas those with induced low perceived self-efficacy experienced a high level of stress and autonomic arousal. Subjects were then administered either an inert saline solution or naloxone, an opiate antagonist that blocks the analgesic effects of endogenous opiates, whereupon their level of pain tolerance was measured. The self-efficacious nonstressed subjects gave no evidence of opioid activation. The self-inefficacious stressed subjects were able to withstand increasing amounts of pain stimulation under saline conditions. However, when endogenous opioid mechanisms that control pain were blocked by naloxone, the subjects were unable to bear much pain stimulation. This pattern of changes suggests that the stress-induced analgesia found under the saline condition was mediated by endogenous opioid mechanisms and counteracted by the opiate antagonist. There is a growing body of evidence that the ability to exercise control over potential stressors is a critical factor in the activation of different neurophysiological systems. Exposure to stressors without controlling efficacy activates neurotransmitters, stress-related hormones, and impairs various cellular components of the immune function (Bandura, Taylor, Williams, Mefford, & Barchas, 1985; Coe & Levine, in press; Maier, Laudenslager, & Ryan, 1985). Exposure to the same stressful events with controlling efficacy has few neurochemical effects. These findings are based mainly on experimentation with animals involving uncontrollable physical stressors. Stressors take diverse forms and can produce different patterns of physiological activation. This places certain limitations on extrapolation of conclusions across species and stressors. Research into the neurochemical effects of inefficacious control therefore needs to be broadened and extended to events and psychological processes that have high ecological relevance to human coping. Uncontrollable physical stressors are not only stressful, but also inflict some physical trauma that can activate a variety of complicating physiological processes. Most of the important stressors with which humans have to cope involve

Two studies demonstrate that making a volunteer decision by doing something results in more commitment to it than making the identical decision by doing nothing. Undergraduates were asked to volunteer for a university committee (Study l a) or a sex and AIDS awareness education project (Study 2) and indicated their choice either by affirming it on two items or by skippping two items that affirmed the opposite choice. Subjects who responded actively were more extreme in the degree of their decision than passive respondents. This effect persevered over 6 weeks (Study lb) and had behavioral consequences (Study 2). Attributional analyses in both studies suggest that active and passive choice may result in unique construals of oneself and of the decision: Active agreement results in citing more types of reasons for one's decision, and active refusal heightens one's perceived resistance to social influence.