Objective Personality dimensions are known to predict mortality and other health outcomes, but almost no research has assessed the effects of changes in personality traits on physical and mental health outcomes. In this article, we examined the effects of changes in the Big Five personality dimensions on health as assessed by the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36). Method Respondents were 11,105 Australian adults aged 2079 years (52.7% female). Latent difference score modeling was used to examine whether personality change over a 4-year period was associated with mental and physical health, and whether these effects were moderated by birth cohort. Results Increases in Conscientiousness and Extraversion were found to be associated with improved mental and physical health, whereas increased Neuroticism was linked with poorer health. The nature of these associations varied significantly by birth cohort. Conclusion The findings have implications for understanding how changes in personality traits over time are related to health, and could be used to aid the development of effective health promotion strategies targeted to specific personality traits and birth cohorts.

Word frequency and word concreteness are language attributes that have been shown to independently influence the recall of items in verbal short-term memory (STM). It has been argued that such effects are evidence for the action of long-term memory knowledge on STM traces. However, research to date has not investigated whether these variables interact in serial recall. In two experiments, we examined the behavior of these variables under factorial manipulation and demonstrated that the effect of word frequency is dependent on the level of concreteness of items. Serial recall performance is examined with reference to two explanatory approaches: Walker and Hulme's (1999) dual-redintegration account and language-based models of STM. The data indicate that language-based models are more compatible with the observed effects and challenge the view that frequency and concreteness effects in STM are the products of distinct mechanisms.

BackgroundAdolescent mental health is characterized by relatively high rates of psychiatric disorders and low levels of help-seeking behaviors. Existing mental health programs aimed at addressing these issues in adolescents have repeated inconsistent results. Such programs have generally been based on techniques derived from cognitive behavioral therapy, which may not be ideally suited to early intervention among adolescent samples. Positive psychology, which seeks to improve well-being rather than alleviate psychological symptoms, offers an alternative approach. A previous community study of adolescents found that informal engagement in an online positive psychology program for up to 6 weeks yielded significant improvements in both well-being and depression symptoms. However, this approach had not been trialed among adolescents in a structured format and within a school setting.ObjectiveThis study examines the feasibility of an online school-based positive psychology program delivered in a structured format over a 6-week period utilizing a workbook to guide students through website content and interactive exercises.MethodsStudents from four high schools were randomly allocated by classroom to either the positive psychology condition, "Bite Back", or the control condition. The Bite Back condition consisted of positive psychology exercises and information, while the control condition used a series of non-psychology entertainment websites. Both interventions were delivered online for 6 hours over a period of 4-6 weeks during class time. Symptom measures and measures of well-being/flourishing and life satisfaction were administered at baseline and post intervention.ResultsData were analyzed using multilevel linear modeling. Both conditions demonstrated reductions in depression, stress, and total symptom scores without any significant differences between the two conditions. Both the Bite Back and control conditions also demonstrated significant improvements in life satisfaction scores post intervention. However, only the control condition demonstrated significant increases in flourishing scores post intervention.ConclusionsResults suggest that a structured online positive psychology program administered within the school curriculum was not effective when compared to the control condition. The limitations of online program delivery in school settings including logistic considerations are also relevant to the contradictory findings of this study.Trial RegistrationAustralian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN1261200057831; https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=362489 (Archived by Webcite at http://www.webcitation.org/6NXmjwfAy).

This paper examines whether changes in personality traits influenced life satisfaction (LS). This involved investigating whether these associations were moderated by age and mediated by hedonic balance (i.e., positive and negative affect). Participants included 11,104 Australian adults aged 18-79. years, with data available from two time points (baseline and 4-year follow up). Latent difference score modeling indicated that increased neuroticism was associated with lower LS, whereas increased extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were associated with higher LS. These relationships were moderated by age, and were less evident in older adults. Hedonic balance partially mediated the relationships between change in neuroticism and extraversion with LS. These findings provide important insights into longitudinal associations between personality change and LS. Abstract This paper examines whether changes in personality traits influenced life satisfaction (LS).This involved investigating whether these associations were moderated by age and mediated by hedonic balance (i.e., positive and negative affect). Participants included 11,104Australian adults aged 18-79 years, with data available from two time points (baseline and 4-year follow up). Latent difference score modeling indicated that increased neuroticism was associated with lower LS, whereas increased extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were associated with higher LS. These relationships were moderated by age, and were less evident in older adults. Hedonic balance partially mediated the relationships between change in neuroticism and extraversion with LS. These findings provide important insights into longitudinal associations between personality change and LS.2

Clarkson, Larissa, The phonological neighbourhood effect on short-term memory for order, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, 2013. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3841The phonological neighbourhood effect on short-term memory for order A AbstractVerbal short-term memory and long-term memory were once thought to be distinct processes, with short-term memory responsible for the maintenance and manipulation of verbal information in the immediate consciousness, and long-term memory responsible for storage of words and associated information over the lifespan.However, more recent research has suggested that the processes are intrinsically linked. The ability to learn novel items suggests that short-term memory is able to contribute to long-term memory, and recent findings also indicate that long-term memory has an influence on short-term memory. Typically, long-term memory is thought to assist the recall of items from short-term memory through a late stage redintegration process but does not influence the serial ordering of items in memory.More recently, one long-term memory variable, phonological neighbourhood density has been shown to influence memory for order in an immediate serial recall task with lists containing both large and small phonological neighbourhood words. This result has implications for the locus of the link between long-term memory and short-term memory, and is indicative of a link occurring earlier than assumed by most models of short-term memory. The aim of this thesis was to replicate evidence that phonological neighbourhood density is a variable that is sensitive to order processing and to identify the conditions under which this sensitivity appears. In a series of experiments, the effect of phonological neighbourhood density on memory for order was examined using tasks that varied in their requirement to recall order information or item information. Memory for order was better for words from large neighbourhoods than from small neighbourhoods, for pure lists but not for mixed lists in a task that reduces the requirement to remember item information, namely serial reconstruction. Further experiments using this paradigm revealed that this result was not due to differences in word lengths between large and small stimuli sets nor due to differences in reaction time to the items at output, and could not be attributed to different processes underlying immediate serial recall and serial reconstruction. The difference in memory for order between large-and small-phonological neighbourhood lists was found to disappear under conditions of articulatory suppression, suggesting that sub-vocal articulation acts as an intermediary between long-term memory and short-term memory. Finally, a second long-term memory variable, word frequency, was examined and was also shown to influence memory for iii order. This is indicative of a general long-term memory effect on short-term memory for order that has not been identified previously in the literature. These results are disc...

Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high-and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists of pure frequency. This pattern has been argued to arise from the development of a network of activated long-term representations of list items that support the redintegration of all list items in a nondirectional and nonspecific way. More recently, it has been proposed that the frequency effect might be a product of the coarticulation of items at word boundaries and their influence on rehearsal rather than a consequence of memory representations. The current work examines recall performance in mixed lists of an equal number of high-and low-frequency items arranged in contiguous segments (i.e., HHHLLL and LLLHHH), under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions, to test whether the effect is (a) nondirectional and (b) dependent on articulatory processes. These experiments demonstrate that neither explanation is satisfactory, although the results suggest that the effect is mnemonic. A language-based approach to short-term memory is favored with emphasis on the role of speech production processes at output.

No abstract

We carried out a series of experiments on verbal short-term memory for lists of words. In the first experiment, participants were tested via immediate serial recall, and word frequency and list set size were manipulated. With closed lists, the same set of items was repeatedly sampled, and with open lists, no item was presented more than once. In serial recall, effects of word frequency and set size were found. When a serial reconstruction-of-order task was used, in a second experiment, robust effects of word frequency emerged, but set size failed to show an effect. The effects of word frequency in order reconstruction were further examined in two final experiments. The data from these experiments revealed that the effects of word frequency are robust and apparently are not exclusively indicative of output processes. In light of these findings, we propose a multiple-mechanisms account in which word frequency can influence both retrieval and preretrieval processes.Keywords Serial recall . Reconstruction of order . Verbal short-term memory . RedintegrationOne of the most well-known techniques for studying verbal short-term memory is to present a short list of words to a person and then get the person to report back the words in the order in which they were presented. This is known as the immediate serial-recall task. To perform well in the task, participants must remember both the actual words (i.e., the items) and the order in which the words occurred. Many models of short-term memory, as defined relative to immediate serial recall, incorporate distinct mechanisms for maintaining the two types of information (e.g., Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007;Brown, Preece, & Hulme, 2000;Burgess & Hitch, 1992;Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002;Henson, 1998;Page & Norris, 1998), and it has been suggested that different brain regions are involved in dealing with these two forms of memory (Majerus, 2009). In this vein, attempts have been made to establish whether different factors differentially influence memory for item versus order information. For example, it has often been suggested that the deleterious effect of having similar-sounding words within a list selectively disrupts memory for the order of the items (e.g., Baddeley, 1986).In order to align the effects of other variables with the operations of specific mechanisms in models of memory, other tasks have also been used, and the present concerns are with something known as the order reconstruction task. In this task, the to-be-remembered (TBR) words that have just been presented are re-presented at test in a new random order, and the participant attempts to reconstruct the order of the words' presentation. A simple assumption is that the order reconstruction task is nothing other than a test of item order information, or, as Whiteman, Nairne, and Serra (1994) stated, the reconstruction task Bprovides a relatively pure index of position memory^ (pp. 276-277).To investigate such a possibility, Whiteman et al. (1994) manipulated word frequency-a variable that reflects item k...