A large body of evidence indicates that women are more likely than men to show unipolar depression. Five classes of explanations for these sex differences are examined and the evidence for each class is reviewed. Not one of these explanations adequately accounts for the magnitude of the sex differences in depression. Finally, a response set explanation for the sex differences in depression is proposed. According to this explanation, men are more likely to engage in distracting behaviors that dampen their mood when depressed, but women are more likely to amplify their moods by ruminating about their depressed states and the possible causes of these states. Regardless of the initial source of a depressive episode (i.e., biological or psychological) men's more active responses to their negative moods may be more adaptive on average than women's less active, more ruminative responses. The epidemiology of a disorder can provide important clues to its etiology. When a disorder only strikes persons from one geographical region, one social class, or one gender, we can ask what characteristics of the vulnerable group might be making its members vulnerable. A frequent finding in epidemiological studies of mental disorders is that women are more prone to unipolar affective disorders than are men (Boyd & Weissman, 1981; Weissman & Klerman, 1977). A number of different explanations have been proposed to account for women's greater vulnerability to depression. Previous reviews of these explanations (e.g., Weissman & Klerman, 1977) have been quite brief and uncritical. In this article, the evidence for sex differences in unipolar depression first is summarized, then the most prominent explanations proposed for these sex differences are discussed in detail. These explanations include those attributing the differences to the response biases of subjects, as well as biological, psychoanalytic, sex role, and learned helplessness explanations. Although most of the proposed explanations for sex differences in depression have received some empirical support, not one of them has been definitively supported and not one as yet accounts for the magnitude of sex differences in depression. In the final section of this article it is suggested that differences in the ways that men and women respond to their own depressive episodes, whatever the origin of these episodes, may be an important source of the sex differences observed in depression.

Sex differences in unipolar depression: evidence and theory.

This article reviews research on the evaluation of women and men who occupy leadership roles. In these experiments, the characteristics of leaders other than their sex were field constant, and the sex of the leader was varied. These experiments thus investigated whether people are biased against female leaders and managers. Although this research showed only a small overall tendency for subjects to evaluate female leaders less favorably than male leaders, this tendency was more pronounced under certain circumstances

Gender and the evaluation of leaders: A meta-analysis.

Conditioned place preference (CPP) continues to be one of the most popular models to study the motivational effects of drugs and non-drug treatments in experimental animals. This is obvious from a steady year-to-year increase in the number of publications reporting the use this model. Since the compilation of the preceding review in 1998, more than 1000 new studies using place conditioning have been published, and the aim of the present review is to provide an overview of these recent publications. There are a number of trends and developments that are obvious in the literature of the last decade. First, as more and more knockout and transgenic animals become available, place conditioning is increasingly used to assess the motivational effects of drugs or non-drug rewards in genetically modified animals. Second, there is a still small but growing literature on the use of place conditioning to study the motivational aspects of pain, a field of pre-clinical research that has so far received little attention, because of the lack of appropriate animal models. Third, place conditioning continues to be widely used to study tolerance and sensitization to the rewarding effects of drugs induced by pre-treatment regimens. Fourth, extinction/reinstatement procedures in place conditioning are becoming increasingly popular. This interesting approach is thought to model certain aspects of relapse to addictive behavior and has previously almost exclusively been studied in drug self-administration paradigms. It has now also become established in the place conditioning literature and provides an additional and technically easy approach to this important phenomenon. The enormous number of studies to be covered in this review prevented in-depth discussion of many methodological, pharmacological or neurobiological aspects; to a large extent, the presentation of data had to be limited to a short and condensed summary of the most relevant findings.

Measuring reward with the conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm: update of the last decade.

Measuring reward with the conditioned place preference paradigm: a comprehensive review of drug effects, recent progress and new issues.

The book Inequality by Christopher Jencks is in one sense an arid waste of somewhat confusing and misleading statistics between chapter one and chapter nine, and, in another sense, a destructive, unscientific critique of American education and families. Jencks' interpretation comes down hard on his basic feeling that "The crucial problem today is that relatively few people view income inequality as a serious problem; indeed the Nixon administration apparently convinced itself that income was too equally distributed in 1968 and that the rich needed additional incentives to get even richer . The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were only marginally better. Neither made any explicit effort to equalize incomes; the subject was hardly discussed. Instead reformers focused on equalizing opportunity." This view is probably correct but it is no excuse for an unscholarly, unscientific polemic against far from "peripheral institutions," which is Jencks' evaluation of the American schools. This book states

Inequality, A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America.

Cocaine use is associated with high levels of impulsive choice (preference for immediate over delayed rewards), but it is not clear whether cocaine use causes elevated impulsive choice, or whether elevated impulsive choice is solely a predisposing factor for cocaine use. This study examined the effects of prior cocaine self-administration on rats performing a delay discounting task commonly used to measure impulsive choice. Male Long-Evans rats were implanted with intravenous catheters, and following recovery, were trained to self-administer 30 mg/kg/day cocaine HCl (approx. 0.5 mg/kg/infusion) for 14 consecutive days (a control group received yoked intravenous saline infusions). Following three weeks of withdrawal, all rats were food-restricted and began training on the delay discounting task in standard operant chambers. On each trial, rats were given a choice between two levers. A press on one lever delivered a small food reward immediately, and a press on the other delivered a large food reward after a variable delay period. Rats that self-administered cocaine displayed greater impulsive choice (enhanced preference for the small immediate over the large delayed reward, as reflected by shorter indifference points) compared to controls, but were no different from controls on a "probabilistic discounting" task in which they chose between small certain and large uncertain rewards. These data suggest that self-administered cocaine can cause lasting elevations in impulsive choice, and that the high levels of impulsive choice observed in human cocaine users may be due in part to long-term effects of cocaine on brain function.

/pdf/self-administered-cocaine-causes-long-lasting-increases-in-1vw8n416gv.pdf

Self-administered cocaine causes long-lasting increases in impulsive choice in a delay discounting task.

Augmentation of cocaine hyperactivity in rats by systemic ghrelin

SUMMARY—Systematic research evaluating the separate and interacting impacts of neurotoxicants, micronutrients, and social environments on children's cognition and behavior has only recently been initiated. Years of extensive human epidemiologic and animal experimental research document the deleterious impact of lead and other metals on the nervous system. However, discrepancies among human studies and between animal and human studies underscore the importance of variations in child nutrition as well as social and behavioral aspects of children's environments that mitigate or exacerbate the effects of neurotoxicants.In this monograph, we review existing research on the impact of neurotoxic metals, nutrients, and social environments and interactions across the three domains. We examine the literature on lead, mercury, manganese, and cadmium in terms of dispersal, epidemiology, experimental animal studies, effects of social environments, and effects of nutrition.Research documenting the negative impact of le...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2005.00024.x

Neurotoxicants, Micronutrients, and Social Environments Individual and Combined Effects on Children's Development

Variations in dietary constituents such as carbohydrate are known to alter psychostimulant function in brain. Relatively few studies have examined the reinforcing effects of psychostimulants in subjects maintained on high-fat diets. The present experiment compared the rate of acquisition of an operant response for intravenous (i.v.) cocaine infusions (0.2 mg/kg) in rats fed either a chow-pellet diet or a 35.9% (by weight) high-fat diet for 45 days prior to cocaine self-administration testing. Rats maintained on a high-fat diet for 45 days exhibited diminished acquisition of cocaine self-administration, and this effect was not a function of dietary-induced obesity. The results suggest that prolonged exposure to a high-fat diet diminishes the efficacy of cocaine reinforcement.

Impairment of acquisition of cocaine self-administration in rats maintained on a high-fat diet.

This text covers a wide variety of topics, including steroid abuse in sport and fitness, women athletes as portrayed by the media, psychological testing, fitness, exercise adherence, homophobia in sports, and eating disorders. This scientific text discusses the theory, research, application of psychology in sport.

Jack R. Nation

Papers

Self-administered cocaine causes long-lasting increases in impulsive choice in a delay discounting task.

Augmentation of cocaine hyperactivity in rats by systemic ghrelin

Neurotoxicants, Micronutrients, and Social Environments Individual and Combined Effects on Children's Development

Impairment of acquisition of cocaine self-administration in rats maintained on a high-fat diet.

Sport psychology : an introduction