Objective-To address the mechanisms underlying hatha yoga's potential stress-reduction benefits, we compared inflammatory and endocrine responses of novice and expert yoga practitioners before, during, and after a restorative hatha yoga session, as well as in two control conditions. Stressors before each of the three conditions provided data on the extent to which yoga speeded an individual's physiological recovery.Methods-50 healthy women (mean age=41.32, range=30-65), 25 novices and 25 experts, were exposed to each of the conditions (yoga, movement control, and passive-video control) during three separate visits.Results-The yoga session boosted participants' positive affect compared to the control conditions, but no overall differences in inflammatory or endocrine responses were unique to the yoga session. Importantly, even though novices and experts did not differ on key dimensions including age, abdominal adiposity, and cardiorespiratory fitness, novices' serum IL-6 levels were 41% higher than those of experts across sessions, and the odds of a novice having detectable CRP were 4.75 times as high as that of an expert. Differences in stress responses between experts and novices provided one plausible mechanism for their divergent serum IL-6 data; experts produced less LPS-stimulated IL-6 in response to the stressor than novices, and IL-6 promotes CRP production. Conclusion-The ability to minimize inflammatory responses to stressful encounters influences the burden that stressors place on an individual. If yoga dampens or limits stress-related changes, then regular practice could have substantial health benefits. Keywords yoga; inflammation; psychoneuroimmunology; complementary medicine; IL-6; CRP Inflammation is a robust and reliable predictor of all-cause mortality in older adults (1). Proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and C-reactive protein (CRP) play a role in cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, periodontal disease, and frailty and functional decline (2-3). In addition, inflammation is now regarded as a risk factor for most cancers because of the Address correspondence to Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser, Ph.D., Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, Ohio State University College of Medicine, 460 Medical Center Boulevard, Columbus, OH 43210, USA;, Janice.KiecoltGlaser@osumc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. evidence that inflammation influences tumor promotion, survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastases (4). NIH ...

Despite increasing interest in and funding for financial literacy and financial education programs in the private and public sectors, the field of financial literacy still has a major obstacle to overcome: the lack of a widely disseminated measure of financial literacy, developed through rigorous psychometric analyses. In this article, we develop such a measure, focusing specifically on financial knowledge. Using item response theory (IRT), we analyze items from three national surveys, resulting in a psychometrically sound 20-item financial knowledge scale. By using IRT, the current analysis uses individuals' answers to inform which questions to include in the scale in the first place, rather than simply confirming relationships between these answers and other financially relevant outcomes post hoc. Widespread use of this index and the continued use of modern psychometric techniques would allow for the comparison of financial knowledge, measured consistently and reliably, across studies, populations, and programs.

Overall, data suggested that autism symptomatology can be explained statistically with a two-domain model. It also pointed to different symptoms susceptible to be helpful in linkage analyses. Implications of a two-factor model are discussed.

Marital stress has been associated with immune dysregulation, including increased production of interleukin-6 (IL-6). Attachment style, one's expectations about the availability and responsiveness of others in intimate relationships, appears to influence physiological stress reactivity and thus could influence inflammatory responses to marital conflict. Thirty-five couples were invited for two 24-hour admissions to a hospital research unit. The first visit included a structured social support interaction, while the second visit comprised the discussion of a marital disagreement. A mixed effect within-subject repeated measure model indicated that attachment avoidance significantly influenced IL-6 production during the conflict visit but not during the social support visit. Individuals with higher attachment avoidance had on average an 11% increase in total IL-6 production during the conflict visit as compared to the social support visit, while individuals with lower attachment avoidance had, on average, a 6% decrease in IL-6 production during the conflict visit as compared to the social support visit. Furthermore, greater attachment avoidance was associated with a higher frequency of negative behaviors and a lower frequency of positive behaviors during the marital interaction, providing a mechanism by which attachment avoidance may influence inflammatory responses to marital conflict. In sum, these results suggest that attachment avoidance modulates marital behavior and stress-induced immune dysregulation.

Item response theory (IRT) is a widely used measurement model. When considering its use in education, health outcomes, and psychology, it is likely to be one of the most impactful psychometric models in existence. IRT has many advantages over classical test theory-based measurement models. For these advantages to hold in practice, strong assumptions must be satisfied. One of these assumptions, local independence, is the focus of the work described here. Local independence is the assumption that, conditional on the latent variable(s), item responses are unrelated to one another (i.e., independent). Stated another way, local independence implies that the only thing causing items to covary is the modeled latent variable(s). Violations of this assumption, quite aptly titled local dependence, can have serious consequences for the estimated parameters. A new diagnostic is proposed, based on parameter stability in an item-level jackknife resampling procedure. We review the ideas underlying the new diagnostic and how it is computed before covering some simulated and real examples demonstrating its effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record