<p>Forskning har indikerat att individer med högt välbefinnande är bättre på att bemöta stress. Syftet med föreliggande studie var att undersöka vilka faktorer som skiljer individer med högt välbefinnande från dem med lågt välbefinnande, samt om deltagarna med högt välbefinnande har en bättre förmåga att hantera stress samt balansera krav och kontroll. 184 personer, varav de flesta kvinnor, har fått fylla i Ryff Psychological Well-being scale, Perceived Stress Scale och Job Content Questionnaire för att mäta välbefinnande, upplevd stressnivå och balansen mellan krav och kontroll. Två grupper skapades, en med lågt (n=20) och en med högt välbefinnande (n=20). Det framkom att gruppen med lågt välbefinnande ansåg sig ha signifikant lägre kontroll än gruppen med högt välbefinnande (p=.015). En avgörande faktor för ett högt välbefinnande verkar vara kontroll då olika teorier och resonemang ofta kretsar kring vikten av just detta begrepp.</p>

<p>Som sociala varelser är vi människor ständigt i rörelse och utsätts för nya intryck. Mentala föreställningar om omvärlden hjälper till att spara tid och energi istället för att processa samma information om igen. Detta leder till kategoriseringar, stereotyper och i förlängningen fördomar. Denna undersökning har sökt kartlägga en grupp bestående av 23 rekryterare och deras attityder gentemot kandidater av annan etnisk bakgrund. Attityderna har mätts dels genom att de fått genomföra Implicit Association Test (IAT) samt även fyllt i en enkät. IAT mäter omedvetna attityder och reaktionstid gentemot olika stimuli. Resultat har här redovisats på en skala från 0-3 poäng och jämförts med en kontrollgrupp bestående av 25 studenter. Studien har varit explorativ och utgått från möjligheten att rekryterarna skulle uppvisa ett genomsnittligt högre resultat på IAT än studenterna. Förutom testresultatet från IAT har även beräkningar gjorts på ålder, antal års erfarenhet av rekrytering och korrelationer mellan enkätsvaren och IAT-resultat. Resultatet visar att det inte förelåg någon signifikant skillnad mellan grupperna och en förklaring till detta kan vara det låga deltagarantalet.</p>

<p>Marklund, P. (2004). Shared component processes in working memory and long-term memory: Insights from functional brain imaging. Department of Psychology, Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå SwedenRecent findings from functional neuroimaging studies have shown pronounced similarities in the functional brain activity patterns associated with tests of various cognitive functions. This thesis investigates shared component processes in working memory and declarative long-term memory. Study 1 showed a common pattern of increased activity in four anatomically distinct regions in prefrontal cortex during three tests each of working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory. Such similarities may reflect shared demands on working-memory processes across all tests or increased demands on attentional mechanisms. Study 2 was designed to dissociate these possibilities by measuring sustained and transient brain activity during tests of working memory, long-term memory and sustained attention. The results provided support for the notion that one basis for overlapping activations is increased attentional demands, but some activity seems to reflect cognitive control related to mnemonic processes. Taken together, the results indicate that it is critical for taxonomies of cognitive functions to consider similarities in underlying cognitive and associated neurobiological component processes.</p>

<p>The role of gaze control in episodic recognition was investigated in two studies. In Study 1, participants encoded human faces inverted or upright, with or without eye movements (Experiment 1) and under sorting or rating tasks (Experiment 2) respectively. At test, participants indicated their recollective experience with R(emember) responses (explicit recollection) orK(now) responses (familiarity based recognition). Experiment 1 showed that face inversion and occlusion of eye movements reduced levels of explicit recollection as measured by R responses. In Experiment 2, the relation between recollective experience and perceptual reinstatement wasexamined. Whereas the study instructions produced no differences in terms of eye movements, R responses were associated with a higher proportion of refixations than K responses.In Study 2, perceptual consistency was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants studied scenes under different concurrent tasks. Subsequently, their recognition memory was examined in a R / K test. Executive load produced parallel effects on eye movements and R responses. Furthermore, R responses were associated with a higher proportion ofrefixations than K responses. However, number of fixations was correlated with refixations.Experiment 2 corroborated these results and controlled for number of fixations.Together, these studies suggest that visual episodic representations are supported by perceptual detail, and that explicit recollection is a function of encoding and retrieving those details. To this end, active gaze control is an important factor in visual recognition.</p>

<p>Although consciousness has been studied since the beginning of the history of psychology, how the brain implements consciousness is seen as one of the last great mysteries. This thesis investigates neural correlates of consciousness by measuring brain activity while specific contents of consciousness are defined and maintained. Study 1 showed that distinct but similar brain regions are activated for the initial creation of a percept and for sustaining that percept over time. Specifically, frontal and parietal regions were activated during both temporal aspects of consciousness. Study 2 investigated the generality of this activation pattern for consciousness in different sensory modalities, and showed that frontal regions were commonly activated for visual and auditory awareness whereas posterior activity was modality specific. However, frontal andparietal regions were jointly activated for both modalities during sustained perception. These results indicate that frontal regions interact with posterior, sensory-specific regions to instantiate a conscious percept. The percept is then maintained by a more general network including frontal and parietal regions.</p>

<p>This thesis investigates adaptive shifts between different cognitive processes in multiple-cue judgment tasks. At least two qualitatively and quantitatively different cognitive strategies can be identified: one process in which abstraction and integration of cue-criterion relations form the basis for the judgment (Einhorn, Kleinmutz & Kleinmutz, 1979) and one which is based onsimilarity comparisons between a probe and similar exemplars stored in memory (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1984; Nosofsky & Johanssen, 2000). Within the framework of a proposed model of judgment, Σ, these processes are regarded as complementary means to deal with a proposed capacity limitation of our cognitive architecture; in situations of unaidedabstraction and integration of information we are forced to handle pieces of information in an additive and linear manner. Predictions by Σ concern which of the two processes that will dominate judgments in different judgment tasks. In a judgment task where the underlying combination rule is additive and linear we are able to abstract and integrate information on how cues relate to a criterion and produce judgments that are consistent with the combination rule. In a judgment task where the underlying combination rule is multiplicative we are not able to abstract and integrate this information, and we are therefore induced to use a strategy of exemplar memory. Two studies test these predictions. In Study 1 the results confirm that in an additive judgment task cue abstraction was induced, while exemplar memory was induced in amultiplicative task. These results were replicated in Study 2, where a more complex judgment task was used. The results reported in this thesis provide tentative support for the idea of an adaptive division of labor between cue abstraction and exemplar memory as a function of the task, an ability we are equipped with to cope with a cognitive architecture only allowingelaboration of information in an additive and linear manner.</p>

<p>A particular field in research on judgment and decision making (JDM) is concerned with realism of confidence in one’s knowledge. An interesting finding is the so-called format dependence effect which implies that assessment of the same probability distribution generates different conclusions about over- or underconfidence bias depending on the assessment format. In particular,expressing a belief about some unknown quantity in the form of a confidence interval is severely prone to overconfidence as compared to expressing the belief as an assessment of a probability. This thesis gives a tentative account of this finding in terms of a Naïve Sampling Model (NSM;Juslin, Winman, & Hansson, 2004), which assumes that people accurately describe their available information stored in memory but they are naïve in the sense that they treat sample properties as proper estimators of population properties. The NSM predicts that it should be possible to reducethe overconfidence in interval production by changing the response format into interval evaluation and to manipulate the degree of format dependence between interval production and interval evaluation. These predictions are verified in empirical experiments which contain both general knowledge tasks (Study 1) and laboratory learning tasks (Study 2). A bold hypothesis,that working memory is a constraining factor for sample size in judgment which suggests that experience per se does not eliminate overconfidence, is investigated and verified. The NSM predicts that the absolute error of the placement of the interval is a constant fraction of interval size, a prediction that is verified (Study 2). This thesis suggests that no cognitive processing bias(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) over and above naivety is needed to understand and explain the overconfidence bias in interval production and hence the format dependence effect.</p>

<p>The present thesis investigates the psychometric properties and clinical relevance of the Resource Oriented Body Examination and its capacity to provide a useful assessment tool in patients whose symptoms appear to contain associations between psychological and physical problems.Our aims were to find out if an early version of the Resource Oriented BodyExamination, ROBE I, could be reduced into a shorter version, labelled ROBE II. We also wanted to know if ROBE II would treat the variation of items in the different subscales in a way that provided for discrimination between groups of patients with psychosomatic, musculoskeletal and schizophrenic disorders compared to a group of non-patients. A total of 198 subjects were body examined with a ROBE I protocol. The sample data were entered into a separate factor analysis for each domain. Principal components with varimaxrotations were used, and the first two factors for each domain were extracted. The original 254 variables were reduced to 144, constituting an instrument for body examination, ROBE II, with 10 subscales. All subscales showed satisfactory internal consistency. Within all but one of the domains the subscales showed acceptable intercorrelation. All subscales disclosed information of body patterns relevant for tracing psychosomatic symptoms inaccordance with the Norwegian Psycho Motor Physiotherapy (NPMP). The subscales of ROBE II distinguished bodily characteristics of patients with psychosomatic, musculoskeletal and schizophrenic disorders. Another research question in this study was: how do patients with stress-related behaviorand somatoform disorders assess their symptoms and self-image compared to healthy individuals, and how are these assessments related to bodily resources, assessed with a physiotherapeutic body examination?The test group (n=31) consisted of consecutive patients referred to a treatment center specializing in psychosomatic problems. Significant differences (p≤0.01) were found between the test and comparison groups (n=22) on all but two of the ten subscales of the Resource-Oriented Body Examination (ROBE II). This was also the case for all the subscales of The Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) (comparison groups n=52), and for all but three of the eight clusters of the Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) (comparison groups n=52). For the patient group, the ROBE II subscale Increased respiratory control correlated significantly with the SCL-90 subscales that measures Angerhostility,Phobic anxiety, Paranoid ideation, with the Personality Severity Index (PSI) andwith the SASB clusters Daydreaming and self-neglect, Self-indictment and oppression with r’s between 0.38 and 0.50. Body examination with ROBE II might provide a useful assessment tool in patients whose stress-related problems appear to contain associations between psychological and physical problems.</p>

<p>This thesis investigates the cognitive processes and representations underlying human judgment in a multiple-cue judgment task. Several recent models assume that people have several qualitatively distinct and competing levels of knowledge representations (Ashby, Alfonso-Reese, Turken, & Waldron, 1998; Erickson & Kruschke, 1998; Nosofsky, Palmeri, & McKinley, 1994; Sloman, 1996). The most successful cognitive models in categorization and multiple-cue judgment are, respectively, exemplar-based models and rule-based models. Study 1 investigated if the different theoretical conclusions in categorization and multiple-cue judgment derive from genuine differences in the processes, or are accidental to the different research methods. The results revealed large individual differences and a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction when the criterion is changed from a binary to a continuous variable, and especially for a probabilistic criterion. People appear to switch between qualitatively distinct processes in the two tasks. In Study 2, we expected learning in dyads to promote explicit rule-based thinking as a consequence of verbalization (social abstraction effect) and performance to improve due to the larger joint exemplar knowledge base (exemplar pooling effect). Study 2 suggests that dyads perform better, making more accurate judgments than participants working alone, but we failed to detect any difference in the representation of knowledge. When working in dyads, we can store more exemplars in memory together that leads to more efficient exploitation of memory and exemplar retrieval dominates the judgments. In contrast to earlier research, dyads surpassed the combined base-line level defined by the aggregated performance by members of the dyad working alone. Taken together, the results of these studies indicate that the differences that characterize typical categorization and multiple- cue judgment tasks are conducive of qualitatively different cognitive processes.</p>

<p>This thesis consists of two studies, in which gender differences in nasal chemosensory function are investigated. The first study assesses odor identification ability in a populationbased sample, varying from 45 to 90 yrs, screened for cognitive impairment and severe olfactory dysfunction. Results show that women are generally better than men at identifying odors, but there is no significant interaction of gender by age. Although odoridentification is influenced by semantic memory and cognitive speed, these cognitivefactors are unlikely to cause the observed gender difference in odor identification. The second study investigates chemosensory perception in men and women by assessing eventrelatedbrain potentials, and perceptual ratings for an odorant, which varies inconcentration and olfactory/irritating properties. The results display a generally larger cortical response in women than in men, beginning from about 350 ms after stimulus onset. Women report higher perceived intensity and npleasantness at the highest stimulus concentration, and a steeper psychophysical function, than do men. The results indicatethat stronger cortical responses of nasal chemosensory stimuli provide a neural basis for stronger supra-threshold perception in women than in men, which might enhance odor identification performance. The nature and causes of these gender-differences in nasal chemosensory function are discussed.</p><p>This thesis for the licenciate degree is based on the following studies:Larsson, M., Nilsson, L-G., Olofsson, J.K., & Nordin, S. (2004). Demographic and cognitive predictors of odor identification: Evidence from a population-based study.Chemical Senses, 29, 547-554.Olofsson, J.K., & Nordin, S. (2004). Gender differences in chemosensory perception andevent-related potentials. Chemical Senses, 29, 629-637.</p>