Women’s Perceptions of the Personal and Family Impact of Genetic Cancer Risk Assessment: Focus Group Findings

Women with a personal or family history of breast or ovarian cancer are increasingly presenting for genetic cancer risk assessment (GCRA). To explore the personal and family impact of GCRA, four focus groups were conducted of women seen for risk assessment. Participants were 22 primarily non-Latina White women with a personal or family history of breast or ovarian cancer. Analysis of the data identified new themes related to balancing time to assimilate risk information with the need to make timely healthcare decisions, physicians’ lack of sufficient genetic knowledge, and concern for daughters regardless of the daughters’ age. Other themes related to protecting others, knowledge as empowerment, reassessing personal attribution of cancer risk, managing uncertainty, reappraising body image, and experiencing divergent family responses to communication of cancer risk and healthcare decisions. Understanding the personal and family impact of GCRA may enable genetics professionals to tailor their counseling efforts to better meet the needs of these women. Additional research is needed to extend these findings and identify interventions to support positive outcomes of GCRA.     

The effects of bilingualism on toddlers' executive functioning

Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals’ extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined whether this advantage is observed in 24-month-olds who have had much less experience in language production. A battery of executive functioning tasks and the cognitive scale of the Bayley test were administered to 63 monolingual and bilingual children. Native bilingual children performed significantly better than monolingual children on the Stroop task, with no difference between groups on the other tasks, confirming the specificity of bilingual effects to conflict tasks reported in older children. These results demonstrate that bilingual advantages in executive control emerge at an age not previously shown.     

Gender Differences in Smoking Cessation

In recent years researchers have paid particularly close attention to factors that might differentially influence smoking cessation outcomes in men and women. The present paper reviews empirical findings on gender differences in smoking cessation with focus on 1) nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), 2) depression and anxiety factors, 3) post-cessation weight gain and body-shape concerns, 4) post-cessation withdrawal, and 5) the importance of social support during smoking cessation. The findings call for research to examine the effects of 1) booster sessions following the discontinuation of NRT, 2) depression-prevention interventions for smokers with a history of depression, 3) strategies to prevent weight gain and reduce concerns about weight gain, 4) initiating treatment early in the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, and 5) social support variables in promoting or hindering smoking cessation success.     

Is the area measure a historical anomaly?

Green's well-known area theorem establishes an equivalence between the area under the yes-no ROC curve and the percent correct of an unbiased observer in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task with equivalent stimuli. In this article, we show that this conversion from yes-no detection data to hypothetical performance in a 2AFC task is unnecessary: The same yes-no detection data that are used to compute the area statistic can always be used to compute the percent correct of an unbiased observer in the yes-no detection task itself. We also show that the ROC curve may not be the ideal graphical device for many investigators. A more natural representation of the difficulty of a discrimination task is obtained by plotting the distribution of the posterior betting odds under equal base rates, which can be estimated from their distributions under unequal base rates. Finally, unlike the area measure and other traditional detection theory statistics, both the yes-no percent correct measure and the odds distributions generalize in an obvious and direct way to classification paradigms with more than two responses (e.g., identification).     

The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.     

Hearing by eye: how much spatial degradation can be tolerated?

In the McGurk effect (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976 Nature 264 746-748), illusory auditory perception is produced if the visual information from lip movements is discrepant from the auditory information from the voice. A study is reported of the tolerance of the effect to varying levels of spatial degradation (videotaped images of a speaker's face were quantised by a mosaic transform). The illusory effect systematically decreased with an increase in the coarseness of the spatial quantisation. However, even with the coarsest level (11.2 pixels/face) the illusion did not completely disappear. In addition, those participants who did not experience the illusion nevertheless showed the effects of auditory-visual interaction in their clarity ratings of the auditory stimulus. It is concluded that auditory-visual interaction in visible speech perception is based on relatively coarse-spatial-scale information.     

The Impact of Clients’ and Therapists’ Characteristics on Therapeutic Alliance and Outcome

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - This article investigates distances between therapists and their clients in their experience of the therapeutic alliance across the duration of the...     

What ends a worry bout? An analysis of changes in mood and stop rule use across the catastrophising interview task

This paper reports the results of two experiments designed to test predictions from the mood-as-input hypothesis about the factors that contribute to the ending of a worry bout. Experiment 1 looked at changes in self-reported mood across a catastrophising interview task. Experiment 2 investigated whether there were any changes in stop rule deployment between the beginning and end of a catastrophising interview task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that worriers tended to show increases in negative mood and decreases in positive mood over the course of catastrophising. In Experiment 2, participants exhibited a significant shift away from endorsing the use of 'as many as can' stop rules and a significant increasing tendency to endorse the use of 'feel like continuing' stop rules over the course of catastrophising. These results suggest that worriers exhibit increases in negative mood across the worry bout, but shift from the use of 'as many as can' to 'feel like continuing' stop rules. Mood-as-input hypothesis predicts that if high worriers ask the question "do I feel like continuing?" in the context of increasing negative mood, this will imply that the activity is no longer enjoyable or profitable and should be terminated. The results are discussed in the context of mood-as-input accounts of pathological worrying and the therapeutic implications of these findings are reviewed.     

Interpolation and Amalgamation; Pushing the Limits. Part II

This is the second part of the paper [Part I] which appeared in the previous issue of this journal.