BACKGROUND: Obesity is a serious health condition that also a risk factor for socio-emotional challenges and medical problems. Preliminary evidence suggests obesity may also be associated with difficulty in accurately identifying emotions, particularly negative emotions. In addition, poor emotion recognition has been linked to weaker executive functioning skills, which is a common challenge in obesity. The direct relationship between body mass index (BMI) and emotion recognition is poorly understood in young adults and warrants further exploration. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that 1) after controlling for sociodemographic, clinical, and executive functioning variables and that 2) BMI would be negatively associated with emotion recognition accuracy for negative emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, and fear) but not positive emotions. METHODS: Using a subset of the Human Connectome Project dataset (N=799), we conducted a hierarchal linear regression (HLR) to test the relationship between overall emotion recognition and the following predictors, adding in steps: 1) sociodemographic and clinical variables, 2) executive functioning variables, and 3) BMI. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, BMI was not significantly associated with overall emotion recognition accuracy. Instead, Hispanic ethnicity, greater cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort task), and larger working memory (List Sorting Working Memory Test) was associated with better overall emotion recognition accuracy. Similarly, these same dimensions, as well as being female, was associated with better negative emotion recognition accuracy. / Psychology

The topic of exposure to childhood adversity has comprehensively been explored, and the effects of childhood trauma can undoubtedly impact a person on a lifelong continuum, still, investigation is unceasingly conducted. Much research has yet to be done when considering early adversity's outcomes on various stages throughout life and just how reoccurring consequences from early trauma may impair regulatory abilities and executive functioning beyond childhood. Research objective is to discover how early adversity influences later executive functions in conjunction to heuristics and the effects of hypervigilance in a college student populace. This study aims to examine the several variable differences from internal beliefs to external actions when considering the discrepancies between those with adversity to those without, and what factors may play a key role in harboring resilience through a quantitative experimental study. The importance of creating awareness for those impacted by early adversity is vital for building advocacy within society. The proposed study can potentially provide knowledge towards issues related to the influence of early adversity in Adulthood. Parallel to analyzing how early adversity impacts later life, examining student populations can provide findings that help depict in what ways the related factors influence trajectory both in academia and personal development and what role education may play.

Few studies exist examining the relationship between self-reported stress and cognitive function in healthy nonpsychiatric older adults, and even less studies have examined whether high levels of self-reported stress accelerate the cognitive decline found in normal late-aging populations. A group of older nonpsychiatric adults, ages 54 years and above, were asked to complete three measures assessing their self-perceived stress over the past month, past year, and their lifetime. Sixty-one adults between the ages of 54 and 88 (52% female) participated in a second phase in which neuropsychological tasks were administered to assess three cognitive domains; memory, learning, and executive functioning. A hierarchical regression examined each of the three domain scores to explore whether self-perceived acute and chronic stress, after covaring for state anxiety, was related to neuropsychological performance. No statistically significant regressions were found, which was predicted for the learning domain, but contrary to the hypotheses for the memory and executive functioning domain. The potential influence of age in this study was explored in a series of ANOVAs examining the interactions between the three stress measures with state anxiety and age on the three cognitive domains. A statistically significant interaction was found between age and perceived lifetime stress when examining the memory domain score. In the young-old participants an increase in stress showed a non-significant relationship with a decrease in memory performance, while in the older-old participants the opposite non-significant tendency was found. The current study also partially replicated an earlier report of a relationship between an increase in recent self-reported stress and a decrease in performance on a specific divided attention task, and extended this finding to include older adults. While the majority of the study's hypotheses were not supported, these preliminary findings provide the field with interesting areas to explore in future studies.

Demographics indicate that the United States and many other industrialized nations are currently experiencing what is called the ¡°graying¡± of the workforce (Hayslip & Panek, 1993). Today the majority of the workers in many companies are in the age groups of 40-44 and 45-49 years. However, by the year 2010, the largest proportion of workers will probably be in the age groups of 55-59 and 60-64 years (Ilmarinen, 1995). Thus, a growing concern of employers in the near future will be the assignment of older workers to specific job tasks and responsibilities (Williams & Crumpton, 1996) as well as other issues pertinent to the employment of older workers. As workers age they typically experience physiological and psychological changes which must be estimated to minimize the mismatch between their capabilities and job demands as well as to prevent work related injuries such as over exertion injuries. Early identification of declines in work ability and implementation of ergonomic interventions are key to sustaining older and more experienced workers in the workplace (Williams et al., 1996). If preventive measures are not taken, older employees are likely to experience a decline in work capacities (Ilmarinen, 1994). Therefore, reliable and valid measures of one¡¯s ability to perform physical work activities are essential for preventing work-related injuries. Hence, the focus of this research project is to develop a diagnostic tool that can be used by employers to estimate their workers¡¯ ability to perform daily work activities. Specifically, the Williams Work Estimator (W2E) is designed to provide information concerning workers¡¯ ability to perform physical work activities such as lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling, etc. A field research study involving 32 employees at a beer distribution warehousing facility was conducted to evaluate the following attributes of the W2E: (a) test-retest reliability, (b) concurrent criterion validity, and (c) predictive validity. Test-retest reliability of the W2E was assessed using Pearson correlation coefficients. The overall correlation coefficients obtained on both the task evaluation (.64) and the self-evaluation (.58) were near minimal acceptable levels (.60 or greater) for each job task evaluated. In addition, the W2E ranged from 50 to 100% accurate when identifying persons who had experienced a work-related injury within the past year. Findings of this research study suggest the W2E represents a promising new tool for assessing work capability and deserves further study to improve reliability and validity.

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