Pediatric do-not-attempt-resuscitation orders and public schools: a national assessment of policies and laws

Some children living with life-shortening medical conditions may wish to attend school without the threat of having resuscitation attempted in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest on the school premises. Despite recent attention to in-school do-not-attempt-resuscitation (DNAR) orders, no assessment of state laws or school policies has yet been made. We therefore sought to survey a national sample of prominent school districts and situate their policies in the context of relevant state laws. Most (80%) school districts sampled did not have policies, regulations, or protocols for dealing with student DNARs. A similar majority (76%) either would not honor student DNARs or were uncertain about whether they could. Frequent contradictions between school policies and state laws also exist. Consequently, children living with life-shortening conditions who have DNARs may not have these orders honored if cardiopulmonary arrest were to occur on school premises. Coordinated efforts are needed to harmonize school district, state, and federal approaches in order to support children and families' right to have important medical decisions honored.     

Communication strategies to promote spiritual well-being among people with dementia

Declining communication skills in dementia threaten a person's sense of self. Building on enduring capabilities, pastoral visitors can significantly enhance spiritual well-being through the use of individualized, person-centered strategies. This article outlines the primary spiritual needs of older adults with dementia and some general strategies to improve communication based on enduring abilities. Detailed examples illustrate how these personhood-centered strategies can meet spiritual needs by connecting with individuals with dementia through life stories and through helping them to participate in religious life.     

Update Semantics of Security Protocols

We present a model-theoretic approach for reasoning about security protocols, applying recent insights from dynamic epistemic logics. This enables us to describe exactly the subsequent epistemic states of the agents participating in the protocol, using Kripke models and transitions between these based on updates of the agents’ beliefs associated with steps in the protocol. As a case study we will consider the SRA Three Pass protocol and discuss the Wide-Mouthed Frog protocol.     

Overt and relational aggression and perceived popularity: developmental differences in concurrent and prospective relations

Relations of overt and relational aggression with perceived popularity among children and early adolescents were examined in 2 studies (Ns = 607 and 1,049). Among older youths, positive concurrent relations found between overt aggression and perceived popularity became nonsignificant when relational aggression was controlled, whereas positive associations found between relational aggression and perceived popularity held when overt aggression was controlled. Aggression and perceived popularity were not positively related for the younger participants. The 2nd study also examined the temporal ordering of these relations over 6 months. For older girls, positive relations between relational aggression and perceived popularity were bidirectional. For older boys, relational aggression did not predict increased perceived popularity, but perceived popularity predicted increased relational aggression. Implications for intervention are discussed.     

What's in a (neutral) face? Personality disorders, attachment styles, and the appraisal of ambiguous social cues

Attachment theory suggests that borderline, avoidant, and schizoid personality disorders are differentially associated with anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The variations of insecure attachment in these disorders, in turn, might influence how others are perceived or appraised. To test these ideas, 176 college students completed questionnaires measuring attachment styles and personality disorder features, and each rated 10 emotionally neutral faces on 18 bipolar appraisal dimensions. As expected, borderline personality was associated with anxious attachment, avoidant personality was associated with anxious and avoidant attachment, and schizoid personality was weakly associated only with avoidant attachment. Furthermore, path analyses showed that borderline and avoidant personality features were associated with anxious attachment, which in turn related to negative face appraisals (e.g., tendencies to rate faces as less friendly and more rejecting). Discussion highlights the potential of simultaneously studying biases in social information processing and attachment disturbances among individuals with personality disorders.     

Why distinctive information reduces false memories: evidence for both impoverished relational-encoding and distinctiveness heuristic accounts

Two accounts explain why studying pictures reduces false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995). The impoverished relational-encoding account suggests that studying pictures interferes with the encoding of relational information, which is the primary basis for false memories in this paradigm. Alternatively, the distinctiveness heuristic assumes that critical lures are actively withheld by the use of a retrieval strategy. When participants were given inclusion recall instructions to report studied items as well as related items, they still reported critical lures less often after picture encoding than they did after word encoding. As the impoverished relational-encoding account suggests, critical lures appear less likely to come to mind after picture encoding than they do after word encoding. However, the results from a postrecall recognition test provide evidence in favor of the distinctiveness heuristic.     

Training parents to implement pediatric feeding protocols

Four different multicomponent training packages were evaluated to increase the treatment integrity of parents implementing pediatric feeding protocols. In Study 1 we exposed 3 parents to a training package that consisted of written protocols (baseline), verbal instructions, therapist modeling, and rehearsal training. Results suggested that the package was successful in increasing treatment integrity of the feeding protocols to high levels. Study 2 investigated three different parent-training packages comprised of components used in Study 1. Two parents were exposed to written protocols, verbal instructions, and modeling; 2 parents were exposed to written protocols, verbal instructions, and rehearsal; and 2 parents were exposed to written protocols and verbal instructions. Results of Study 2 showed that each parent-training package produced very high treatment integrity. Follow-up data in the clinic and home for 5 participants suggested that the results were durable for up to 3 months. These results demonstrate a first step in the transfer and application of research findings into routine clinical practice because we evaluated several methods for training parents to implement behavioral feeding protocols, and we demonstrated that these methods resulted in high levels of treatment integrity in a controlled clinical setting.     

An examination of the value of the generation effect for learning new material

The generation effect involves an improvement in memory when learners must complete or modify materials. Several researchers have suggested that this effect involves enhanced access to learners' existing memory representations; therefore, the effect should be less effective with meaningless, low meaningful, or unfamiliar material. In the present study, the authors conducted 4 experiments in which legal nonwords were used, and they found no generation effect. In another 2 experiments in which familiar clichés were contrasted with new sentences and with unfamiliar sentences from textbooks, the results showed a greatly reduced generation effect for the new, unfamiliar material. Those findings suggest that memory strategies that depend on the generation effect will have limited effectiveness when they are applied to new or unfamiliar material.