Gender-role identity after heart attack: Links with sex and subjective health status

Abstract

This paper compares the health status of 60 women and 60 men six months after suffering a myocardial infarction. Findings confirm previous reports of women having a poorer outcome compared with men at this period of rehabilitation. However, using a measure of gender-role orientation, it was found that masculinity was a better discriminator of outcome measures than sex alone. Higher levels of masculinity were associated with better health status for both women and men. Femininity was not related to differences in health status but was related to age in the total patient sample. On the assumption that gender-role orientation is a portrayal by the individual rather than a trait, the argument is made that women and men display masculinity through different articulations of fitness. The better or worse outcomes following heart attack variously affect the ability of men and women to signify in gender terms.     

Spatial distribution of attentional inhibition is not altered in healthy aging

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of attentional orienting that is indexed by slower responses to targets presented at previously attended locations. The purpose of this study was to examine adult age differences in the distribution of IOR to multiple locations. In three experiments, young adults (ages 18–30 years) and older adults (ages 60–87 years) completed an IOR task that varied in the number of simultaneous onset cues (one to seven) and the number of display locations (four or eight). Analyses were conducted to explore whether IOR patterns were most consistent with limited inhibitory resources, with regional distribution of inhibition, or with vector averaging of cues. The IOR effects were most consistent with vector averaging, such that multiple cues initiated a directional gradient of inhibition centered on the average direction of the cues. The IOR patterns varied minimally with age, consistent with the conclusion that older adults and young adults distributed inhibition in a similar manner.     

Developmental Improvements in Perceptual Restoration: Can Young Children Reconstruct Missing Sounds in Noisy Environments?

Young children are frequently exposed to sounds such as speech and music in noisy listening conditions, which have the potential to disrupt their learning. Missing input that is masked by louder sounds can, under the right conditions, be ‘filled in’ by the perceptual system using a process known as perceptual restoration. This experiment compared the ability of 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children, 9‐ to 11‐year‐old children and adults to complete a melody identification task using perceptual restoration. Melodies were presented either intact (complete input), with noise‐filled gaps (partial input; perceptual restoration can occur) or with silence‐filled gaps (partial input; perceptual restoration cannot occur). All age groups could use perceptual restoration to help them interpret partial input, yet perception was the most detrimentally affected by the presentation of partial input for the youngest children. This implies that they might have more difficulty perceiving sounds in noisy environments than older children or adults. Young children had particular difficulty using partial input for identification under conditions where perceptual restoration could not occur. These findings suggest that perceptual restoration is a crucial mechanism in young children, where processes that fill in missing sensory input represent an important part of the way meaning is extracted from a complex sensory world. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Noncanonical orientation without occlusion: Children's drawings of transparent objects

The use of a transparent model in a drawing task allows all the features of the model to remain visible whatever its orientation. N. H. Freeman (1980, Strategies of Representation in Young Children, New York/London, Academic Press) found that when drawing a transparent glass with its handle turned away, children made more canonical errors (drawing the handle at the side) than when drawing a similarly orientated opaque cup. According to Freeman being able to see the handle in a noncanonical orientation “triggers” a canonical representation of the object (N. H. Freeman 1980, p. 252). Two experiments are reported which investigated children's drawings of transparent objects. The drawings obtained from children between 4 and 7 years old produced two major findings. First, the tendency toward canonicality when drawing a glass with its handle turned away was significantly reduced when two glasses in differeing orientations were presented side by side. Second, the number of canonical errors was lower when the glass was filled with milk (thus hiding the handle). This latter finding confirms that of N. H. Freeman (1980). However, the first suggests that children use situationally appropriate information when drawing transparent objects in a way similar to that noted by A. M. Davis (1983, Contextual Sensitivity in Young Children's Drawings, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 35, 478–486) using opaque objects.     

It takes nine days to iron a shirt: the development of cognitive estimation skills in school age children.

Data are presented for 315 elementary school-aged children (K-11) who took the Biber Cognitive Estimation Test, a 20-item test with five estimation questions in each of four domains: quantity, time/duration, weight, and distance/length. Performance showed significant development yearly until around the age of nine years, with much slower development subsequently. No gender effects were found. Age and fund of knowledge correlated with overall test performance. Fund of information accounted for a large proportion of the variance in estimation skills for children 8 years and under, but not for children 9 years and older. Since estimation skills require retrieval and manipulation of relevant knowledge and inhibition of impulsive responding and are necessary in many everyday tasks, it was anticipated that this test may provide a useful measure of judgment and estimations and may correlate with other executive skills in school-aged children.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for individuals with visible differences: a systematic review of the empirical literature

The objective of this review was to systematically identify and evaluate all known studies testing empirically the efficacy of psychosocial intervention programmes for adults with visible differences. Twelve papers met the inclusion criteria. None of the papers demonstrated adequately the clinical effectiveness of the interventions. The review concluded that further research was needed to demonstrate adequately the effectiveness of existing interventions, and a greater number of Randomised Controlled Trials and experimental studies were required to increase the methodological validity of intervention studies.     

Supported Education Practitioners: Agents of Transformation?

Interviews with adult mental health in- and out-patients attending a psychiatric hospital-based supported education program, and their program staff and volunteers, demonstrated that while an informal program structure had initial success in increasing student confidence and independence, the subsequent expansion of the program requires formalizing it using adult and transformative education protocols to increase literacy gains. We argue that professional development in adult education showing the value of transformative learning for staff can complement their occupational therapy and mental healthcare training, so that the empowerment and identity transformation can be increased for these vulnerable students.     

Play with me at my speed: describing differences in the tempo of parent-infant interactions in the Lausanne Triadic Play paradigm in two cultures

The goal of the present study was to examine the tempo of triadic play in Swedish and American families through a comparison of 20 families from each culture. When infants were approximately 3 months old, families in both cultures participated in the Lausanne Triadic Play (LTP), a paradigm that facilitates the examination of the triad as a whole and an organization of its parts. All family play sessions were coded separately in Sweden and America using coding systems that had been developed in each country. Dynamics within the triadic play were compared across cultures, and also across coding systems. Results indicated that both coding systems described a distinct difference in the tempo of play between American and Swedish Families. Overall, although there were many similarities between countries, American families were found to have a faster pace in triadic play than Swedish families. This difference in tempo is explored in the data analyses and the discussion of this article.