A PYD-based sports mentorship intervention improved healthy adolescents' mental well-being, psychological assets, physical fitness, and physical activity levels.

No abstract

Although psychosocial stress has been linked to clinical asthma outcomes, controlled, laboratory paradigms that test associations between psychosocial stress and markers of airway inflammation in humans are lacking. There is also little known about how individual background characteristics may affect variability across individuals in asthma-relevant inflammatory and pulmonary responses to stress. The goals of this study were to investigate the effects of a laboratory stress paradigm on markers of airway inflammation and pulmonary function in children with asthma, and to determine why some children are more biologically responsive to stress. 38 children physician-diagnosed with asthma, and 23 healthy control children (M age = 15 years) engaged in a conflict discussion task with a parent. Pulmonary function (FEV 1 ) was measured before and immediately after the task. Airway inflammation (indicated by exhaled nitric oxide, FeNO) was measured before and 45 minutes after the task (to minimize effects from spirometry). Parents were interviewed about family socioeconomic status (SES: income and occupation). In children with asthma only, there was an inverse association of SES with change in FeNO levels in response to the conflict task, meaning that as SES declined, greater increases in FeNO were observed No changes in FEV 1 were found in response to the conflict task. This study suggests that lower SES children with asthma may be more vulnerable to heightened airway inflammation in response to stress.

Do people have insight into the validity of their first impressions or accuracy awareness? Across two large interactive round-robins, those who reported having formed a more accurate impression of a specific target had (a) a more distinctive realistically accurate impression, accurately perceiving the target's unique personality characteristics as described by the target's self-, parent-, and peer-reports, and (b) a more normatively accurate impression, perceiving the target to be similar to what people generally tend to be like. Specifically, if a perceiver reported forming a more valid impression of a specific target, he or she had in fact formed a more realistically accurate impression of that target for all but the highest impression validity levels. In contrast, people who generally reported more valid impressions were not actually more accurate in general. In sum, people are aware of when and for whom their first impressions are more realistically accurate.

Objectives An implicit measure of early-life family conditions was created to help address potential biases in responses to self-reported questionnaires of early-life family environments. We investigated whether a computerized affect attribution paradigm designed to capture implicit, affective responses (anger, fear, warmth) regarding early-life family environments was a) stable over time, b) associated with self-reports of childhood family environments, c) able to predict adult psychosocial profiles (perceived social support, heightened vigilance), and d) able to predict adult cardiovascular risk (blood pressure) either alone or in conjunction with a measure of early-life socioeconomic status. Method Two studies were conducted to examine reliability and validity of the affect attribution paradigm (Study 1, N = 94) and associated adult psychosocial outcomes and cardiovascular risk (Study 2, N = 122). Results Responses on the affect attribution paradigm showed significant correlations over a 6-month period, and were moderately associated with self-reports of childhood family environments. Greater attributed negative affect about early-life family conditions predicted lower levels of current perceived social support and heightened vigilance in adulthood. Attributed negative affect also interacted with early-life socioeconomic status to marginally predict resting systolic blood pressure, such that those individuals high in early-life SES but who had implicit negative affect attributed to early-life family conditions had SBP levels that were as high as individuals low in early-life SES. Conclusions Implicit measures of early-life family conditions are a useful approach for assessing the psychosocial nature of early-life environments and linking them to adult psychosocial and physiological health profiles.