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Socioemotional Selectivity And Psychological Health In Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patients And Caregivers: A Longitudinal, Dyadic Analysis, Suzanne C. Segerstrom, Edward J. Kasarskis, David W. Fardo, Philip M. Westgate

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective: Socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that as the end of life approaches, goals and resources that provide immediate, hedonic reward become more important than those that provide delayed rewards. This study tested whether these goal domains differentially affected psychological health in the context of marital dyads in which one partner had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a life-limiting disease.

Design: ALS patients (N = 102) being treated in three multidisciplinary clinics and their spouses (N = 100) reported their loneliness, financial worry and psychological health every 3 months for up to 18 months.

Main …

Intraindividual Variability In Cortisol: Approaches, Illustrations, And Recommendations, Suzanne C. Segerstrom, Sandra E. Sephton, Philip M. Westgate

Psychology Faculty Publications

Most of the variance in diurnal cortisol is attributable to intraindividual variability (IIV), defined as relatively short-term, reversible changes. Multiple methods for measuring IIV have been proposed, and some have already been applied to cortisol IIV. In the present review, measurement methods are described and applied to simulated cortisol data with known underlying differences in IIV and to real cortisol data from first-year law students. More slope variance and more residual or net variance were well captured by their individual standard deviations. Explorations of reliability suggested that 10 slopes and 50 residuals result in reliable and stable estimates of the …