The Neuropsychology of HIV/AIDS in Older Adults

Highly active antiretroviral therapy is allowing increasing numbers of adults to age with HIV. The neuropsychological effects of aging with HIV are reviewed through three types of studies. First, the separate effects of HIV and aging on cognition are examined in studies that compare younger adults with HIV with neurologically normal older adults. Second, studies examine the impact of aging within samples of adults with HIV only. Third, providing the most critical evidence, are studies that assess cognition in younger and older adults with HIV relative to younger and older adults without HIV. In general research findings are inconclusive. Large individual differences among older adults with HIV as well as co-factors (APOE4 and detectable viral load) may account for inconsistent findings in the literature. A subgroup of older adults with HIV may be at greater risk for cognitive impairment, especially in attention functioning.     

Counselling as a culture of healing

While clearly upholding the value of the helping professions, this article presents an analysis of alleged shortcomings of present forms of counselling and therapy. Arguments are presented for a New Look in counselling. Counselling, it is claimed, would benefit from redefinition as a culture of healing. It should be conceptualised as a cultural practice rather than as a scientific undertaking. Drawing on new intellectual resources would help re-align counselling epistemologically and practically in order to achieve sensibility in the face of social and historical transformations which have taken place in the second half of this century and which continue radically to alter both social life and our ways of understanding social life.     

Reactions to Feedback in Goal Choice and Goal Change Processes1

Two laboratory studies were conducted to test the effects of reactions to feedback on propensity to change an initial self-selected performance goal. In Study 1, the performance of 228 subjects on a word search task was manipulated by varying puzzle difficulty. In Study 2, two-dimensional goals (i.e., time and quantity) were first assigned and then chosen by 75 subjects. In Study 1, satisfaction with performance and self-efficacy predicted goal change beyond the effects of past performance. Subjects lower in both satisfaction and self-efficacy tended to lower initial goals, whereas those higher in either or both variables tended to raise them. In a post-hoc analysis, goal-performance discrepancies and motivational force interacted to explain satisfaction with performance for subjects experiencing negative feedback. This result was replicated in Study 2 for self-selected quantity goals. In Study 2, satisfaction with performance explained goal choice beyond the effects of past performance for initial time goals and final quantity goals. Trade-offs in the selection of dual goals occurred, with subjects selecting a difficult goal on one dimension and an easy goal on the other. Suggestions for future research and practice on self-regulation of goals and performance are provided.     

Book reviews

Perspectives on Quantum Reality: Non‐Relativistic, Relativistic, and Field‐Theoretic, Rob Clifton, Ed., 1996. Dordrecht, The Netherlands Kluwer Academic Publishers, xi + 243, US$112.00, ISBN 0–7923–3812‐X

Reconstruction of Scientific Theory Change (Russian title: Rekonstrukcija Processa Smeni Fundamentalnih Nauchnih Teorii), Rinat M. Nugayev, 1989. Kazan, Kazan University Press, 208 pp., ISBN: 5–7464–0240–0

The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Jagdish Mehra, 1994. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. xxxii + 630, US$19.95 (Pbk), ISBN 0 19 853948 (Hbk), ISBN 0 19 851887 0 (Pbk)     

CONTINGENT EXERCISE: A MILD BUT POWERFUL PROCEDURE FOR SUPPRESSING INAPPROPRIATE VERBAL AND AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

Two single-subject experiments were conducted in public school classrooms for severely emotionally disturbed children. Both experiments investigated the effects of a treatment requiring a child to exhibit a simple exercise task after a verbal or aggressive response, using reversal and multiple-baseline designs. The independent variable, contingent exercise, required standing up and sitting on the floor five to ten times contingent on an inappropriate behavior. It was found that contingent exercise was easy to carry out, and following it, the child quickly returned to the learning task that had been interrupted by the inappropriate behavior. The contingent exercise procedure required a minimum of prompting or manual guidance. Although contingent exercise was not topographically related to the inappropriate response, it decreased those responses dramatically. The results suggested that contingent exercise was not only more powerful than DRO but also could be administered independently. It was concluded that contingent exercise may constitute an alternative procedure that can be used by therapists confronted with severely abnormal behaviors. It would appear to be particularly relevant in settings where procedures such as timeout and painful consequences find restricted use. Finally, a number of guidelines have been proposed as a safeguard against the misuse of this mild but powerful procedure.     

The Counselor—An Agent of What Change?

Goals in counseling must be clarified before the means of obtaining them can be determined. Success or failure can only be evaluated if these goals are stated in observable behavioral terms. The goals must be directly related to the problem or problems stated by the client. It is the initial responsibility of the counselor to help the client clarify these problems and subsequent behavioral goals through such means as discussion of the feelings of the client and the facts surrounding specific problem situations, and possibly through observation and psychometric evaluation. If the defined goals are within the bounds of the counselor's ethical standards as well as those of his profession, then means can be identified to bring about problem solution.     

Assessing Safety Behaviors in Fear of Storms: Validation of the Storm-Related Safety Behavior Scale

With the exception of one self-report questionnaire assessing storm fear severity (Nelson et al. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 36(1), 105–114, 2014), there are few brief published assessment tools to measure the cognitive, behavioral, and physical manifestations of storm fear. A principal feature of phobic disorders is the use of safety behaviors to alleviate distress. Safety behaviors are believed to perpetuate anxiety by preventing the disconfirmation of feared outcomes (Salkovskis Behavioural Psychotherapy, 19(1), 6–19, 1991). To date, no studies have examined the use of safety behaviors in storm fear. The purpose of the current research was to develop and validate the Storm-Related Safety Behavior Scale (SRSBS; Vorstenbosch and Antony 2017), a 24-item self-report scale that measures safety behavior use in adults with a fear of storms. Two studies examined the (1) factor structure, internal consistency, validity, and test-retest reliability of the SRSBS, as well as the frequency with which specific safety behaviors were endorsed; and (2) ability of the SRSBS to differentiate between a group of adults with low and high fear of storms after exposure to a virtual thunderstorm. Factor analysis revealed that the SRSBS is best captured by one factor. Results provided preliminary evidence of convergent and discriminant validity, as well as test-retest reliability. Finally, significant group differences were found between participants with high versus low fear of storms following a virtual thunderstorm. These findings demonstrate the value of the SRSBS for assessing safety behavior use.     

The role of attention in eye-movement awareness

People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time. Can this be explained as a lack of attention to the objects we fixate? Here, we elicited eye-movement errors using the classic oculomotor capture paradigm, in which people tend to look at sudden onsets even when they are irrelevant. In the first experiment, participants were able to report their own errors on about a quarter of the trials on which they occurred. The aim of the second experiment was to assess what differentiates errors that are detected from those that are not. Specifically, we estimated the relative influence of two possible factors: how long the onset distractor was fixated (dwell time), and a measure of how much attention was allocated to the onset distractor. Longer dwell times were associated with awareness of the error, but the measure of attention was not. The effect of the distractor identity on target discrimination reaction time was similar whether or not the participant was aware they had fixated the distractor. The results suggest that both attentional and oculomotor capture can occur in the absence of awareness, and have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between attention, eye movements, and awareness.     

Metaphoric advertisement comprehension: The role of the cerebral hemispheres

Currently little is known about how implicit processes (i.e., cognitive processes that consumers are unaware of) are utilized as consumers read metaphoric advertisements. The field of cognitive neuroscience can help marketers better understand consumers' implicit processing by examining how each cerebral hemisphere uniquely contributes during metaphoric advertisement comprehension. A right hemisphere advantage has been demonstrated during metaphoric language processing; however, it is unclear how each hemisphere of the brain processes metaphors used in advertisements. This study combines the fields of marketing and cognitive neuroscience to investigate the hemispheric processing of metaphoric advertisements. Through the use of the divided visual field paradigm, participants read metaphor, literal, or neutral slogans and responded to related target words presented to either the left visual field‐right hemisphere or the right visual field‐left hemisphere. As predicted, there was a right hemisphere advantage, compared to the left hemisphere, for metaphoric slogans. Additionally, greater facilitation was evident in the right hemisphere for literal slogans compared to metaphoric slogans. Metaphoric messages were also remembered better than literal ones. These findings provide an in‐depth account of how consumers implicitly process messages, suggesting an important role of the right hemisphere during the comprehension of both metaphoric and literal messages. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.