Mounting evidence indicates that chronic stressors and depressive symptoms contribute to morbidity and mortality from cardiac disease. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms responsible for these effects or about why depressive symptoms and cardiac disease co-occur so frequently. In this article we outline a novel model that seeks to address these issues. It asserts that chronic stressors activate the immune system in a way that leads to persistent inflammation. With long-term exposure to the products of inflammation, people develop symptoms of depression and experience progression of atherosclerosis, the pathologic condition that underlies cardiac disease.

In addition to fight-or-flight, humans demonstrate tending and befriending responses to stress—responses underpinned by the hormone oxytocin, by opioids, and by dopaminergic pathways. A working model of affiliation under stress suggests that oxytocin may be a biomarker of social distress that accompanies gaps or problems with social relationships and that may provide an impetus for affiliation. Oxytocin is implicated in the seeking of affiliative contact in response to stress, and, in conjunction with opioids, it also modulates stress responses. Specifically, in conjunction with positive affiliative contacts, oxytocin attenuates psychological and biological stress responses, but in conjunction with hostile and unsupportive contacts, oxytocin may exacerbate psychological and biological stress responses. Although significant paradoxes remain to be resolved, a mechanism that may underlie oxytocin's relation to the health benefits of social support may be in view.

Within the last two decades, evidence from many laboratories has converged to indicate the cognitive basis for dyslexia: Dyslexia is a disorder within the language system and, more specifically, within a particular subcomponent of that system, phonological processing. Converging evidence from a number of laboratories using functional brain imaging indicates that there is a disruption of left-hemisphere posterior neural systems in child and adult dyslexic readers when they perform reading tasks. The discovery of a disruption in the neural systems serving reading has significant implications for the acceptance of dyslexia as a valid disorder—a necessary condition for its identification and treatment. Brain-imaging findings provide, for the first time, convincing, irrefutable evidence that what has been considered a hidden disability is "real," and these findings have practical implications for the provision of accommodations, a critical component of management for older children and young adults attending postsecondary and graduate programs. The utilization of advances in neuroscience to inform educational policy and practices provides an exciting example of translational science being used for the public good.

The belief that people are in control of desired outcomes, including those associated with aging, is a hallmark of American culture. Nevertheless, older adults are less likely than the young to believe there are things that can be done to control aging-related declines in areas such as memory. Within age groups, individual differences in control beliefs are related to cognitive performance, health, and well-being. Mechanisms linking perceived control and positive outcomes include adaptive behaviors such as strategy use and physical activity. There is some evidence that control beliefs can be modified in later life, as illustrated in an intervention for fear of falling. Further work is needed to examine the antecedents of perceived control in later life and the implications of control beliefs in other aging-related domains.

Race stereotypes can lead people to claim to see a weapon where there is none. Split-second decisions magnify the bias by limiting people's ability to control responses. Such a bias could have important consequences for decision making by police officers and other authorities interacting with racial minorities. The bias requires no intentional racial animus, occurring even for those who are actively trying to avoid it. This research thus raises difficult questions about intent and responsibility for racially biased errors.

Extensive recent research has begun to unravel the more implicit or automatic cognitive mechanisms in addiction. This effort has increased our understanding of some of the perplexing characteristics of addictive behaviors. The problem, often, is not that substance abusers do not understand that the disadvantages of continued use outweigh the advantages; rather, they have difficulty resisting their automatically triggered impulses to use their substance of abuse. Existing interventions may help to moderate these impulses. In addition, new techniques aimed at directly modifying implicit cognitive processes in substance abuse are being developed.

The acquisition of language has long stood as a challenge to general learning accounts, leading many theorists to propose domain-specific knowledge and processes to explain language acquisition. Here we review evidence that analogical comparison is instrumental in language learning, suggesting a larger role for general learning processes in the acquisition of language.

Although people generally appear optimistic about the future, they shift from optimism under certain circumstances. Drawing from a recent review of the literature, we describe how both optimism and shifts from optimism serve the common goal of preparedness, which includes a readiness to deal with setbacks and a readiness to take advantage of opportunities. Shifts from optimism occur in response to available information and to the possibility that things may not turn out as hoped. People tend to shift from optimism when feedback is anticipated in the near future, when the outcome is important, when negative outcomes are easily imagined, and when the outcomes are uncontrollable. In addition, people with low self-esteem shift from optimism more readily than do people with high self-esteem. Finally, both optimism and shifts from optimism have unique benefits in terms of preparedness.

The philosopher David Hume's conclusion that causal induction is solely based on observed associations still presents a puzzle to psychology. If we only acquired knowledge about statistical covariations between observed events without accessing deeper information about causality, we would be unable to understand the differences between causal and spurious relations, between prediction and diagnosis, and between observational and interventional inferences. All these distinctions require a deep understanding of causality that goes beyond the information given. We report a number of recent studies that demonstrate that people and rats do not stick to the superficial level of event covariations but reason and learn on the basis of deeper causal representations. Causal-model theory provides a unified account of this remarkable competence.

Processes of selective attention and emotion operate together in prioritizing thoughts and actions. Abundant evidence suggests that emotionally salient stimuli and affective states can determine how visual attention is allocated. However, the brain regions mediating the effects of attention and emotion include shared and reciprocally connected structures. This raises an intriguing question about a reciprocal effect: Does attention also influence emotional responses? Here we review a series of studies that show that indeed it does. The results indicate that attention has a negative affective impact for otherwise neutral visual stimuli (abstract patterns and unfamiliar faces) that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited during the performance of a task. Finding that selective attention has distinct affective consequences for visual stimuli represents a new, fundamental discovery about the relation between the two main systems of prioritization in the human brain.

This article provides an overview of recent research on peer victimization in school that highlights the role of the ethnic context—specifically, classrooms' and schools' ethnic composition. Two important findings emerge from this research. First, greater ethnic diversity in classrooms and schools reduces students' feelings of victimization and vulnerability, because there is more balance of power among different ethnic groups. Second, in nondiverse classrooms where one ethnic group enjoys a numerical majority, victimized students who are members of the ethnic group that is in the majority may be particularly vulnerable to self-blaming attributions. The usefulness of attribution theory as a conceptual framework and ethnicity as a context variable in studies of peer victimization are discussed.

Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described as "the affect heuristic." This article traces the development of this heuristic and discusses some of the important ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk.