Heart rate variability and drawing impairment in hypoxemic COPD

We studied 54 patients with hypoxemic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Mini Mental State Examination and the Mental Deterioration Battery were used for neuropsychological assessment. Heart rate variability (HRV) was assessed based on 24-h Holter ECG recording. Mann–Whitney test was used to compare HRV parameters of patients performing normally or abnormally on individual neuropsychological tasks. Spearman’s rho was used to investigate the correlations between HRV parameters and neuropsychological scores, indexes of health status or COPD severity. Patients with defective performance at copying drawings with landmarks (CDL) test (N = 23) had lower very low frequency (VLF) power with respect to patients with normal performance (N = 31) (24 h: median 213; interquartile range 120–282 vs. 309; 188–431 ms², p = 0.043; daytime: 202; 111–292 vs. 342; 194–397 ms², p = 0.039). The CDL score correlated with the VLF power (24 h: ρ = 0.27, p = 0.049; daytime: ρ = 0.30, p = 0.028), and the normalized low frequency/high frequency (LF/HF) ratio (24 h: ρ = 0.27, p = 0.05; daytime: ρ = 0.33, p = 0.015). Sympathetic modulation decreased for increasing severity of COPD. In conclusion, drawing impairment correlates with depressed sympathetic modulation in patients with COPD, and both might be indexes of COPD severity.     

Discrimination and Women’s Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Control

Perceived discrimination is a stressor, related to both negative physical and mental health outcomes. Utilizing a sample of 259 undergraduate females from the northeast region of the U.S., the present study examined a model that tested the direct, indirect, and mediated relations among perceived sexist discrimination, psychological distress, self-esteem, and sense of personal control. Path analysis of the model indicated that (a) perceived sexism was related to greater psychological distress, with personal control partially mediating this link and (b) perceived sexism was not related to self-esteem. The path model accounted for 28% of the variance in self-esteem and 37% of the variance in psychological distress. Implications of the findings for women’s health are discussed.     

Learning as a possible sign of non-reflective consciousness in persons with a diagnosis of vegetative state and pervasive motor impairment

A diagnosis of vegetative state represents a serious predicament, which basically precludes/minimizes rehabilitation perspectives. Reliability of the assessment approach in these situations is of paramount importance, but not easy to achieve. In recent studies, a learning assessment procedure has been suggested as a supplement in the diagnostic process and assessed with eight patients. The procedure involves an ABABCB sequence in which A represents baseline phases with no stimulation available, B intervention phases with stimuli delivered contingently on target responses, and C a control condition. This condition involves stimulation presented non-contingently. The patients’ ability to associate responding with environmental stimuli and thus increase such responding during the B phases, and reduce it during the A and C phases, may be considered a sign of learning. Learning might be viewed as representative of forms of concrete knowledge and presumably basic levels of consciousness. Preliminary results indicate that (a) signs of learning may appear in patients with a previous diagnosis of vegetative state and (b) the presence of those signs may require a revision of their diagnostic label and a reappraisal of their rehabilitation perspectives.     

Consumer decision making and aging: A commentary

Yoon, Cole and Lee's review suggests two strategies to address elderly individuals' limitations in processing information and decision making. One is accommodation, which entails designing information processing and judgment tasks so that they are compatible with the elderly's resource limitations. The other strategy involves stimulating self-regulation. Here the premise is that elderly individuals often have the resources necessary to engage in a task, but only activate them in response to explicit directions. We discuss whether this observation reflects older individuals' inability to activate self-regulation strategies spontaneously, or their purposive rationing of their limited resources so they remain available for more profound activities.     

ACQUISITION OF MANDS AND TACTS WITH CONCURRENT ECHOIC TRAINING

Previous studies have identified a number of effective teaching procedures to increase verbal behavior in individuals with developmental disabilities. However, few studies have evaluated modifications of treatment procedures when children fail to acquire communication skills. In the present investigation, a 4‐year‐old boy with autism failed to acquire unprompted mands and tacts during mand‐only and tact‐only training. Results indicated that combining echoic training with mand or tact training increased unprompted manding and tacting.     

Does visual speech information affect word segmentation?

We present an experiment in which we explored the extent to which visual speech information affects learners’ ability to segment words from a fluent speech stream. Learners were presented with a set of sentences consisting of novel words, in which the only cues to the location of word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. They were exposed to this language through the auditory modality only, through the visual modality only (where the learners saw the speaker producing the sentences but did not hear anything), or through both the auditory and visual modalities. The learners were successful at segmenting words from the speech stream under all three training conditions. These data suggest that visual speech information has a positive effect on word segmentation performance, at least under some circumstances.     

The smart gut: Tracking affective associative learning with measures of “liking”, facial electromyography, and preferential looking

We demonstrate here that initially neutral items can acquire specific value based on their associated outcomes, and that responses of physiological systems to such previously meaningless stimuli can rapidly reflect this associative history. Each participant participated in an associative learning task in which four neutral abstract pictures were each repeatedly paired with one of four foods that varied in valence and magnitude. Over the course of learning, participants’ “liking” ratings of and preferences for each picture came to reflect the value of the food with which it was paired. The abstract pictures also elicited physiological responses characteristic of the foods with which they were paired, including changes in facial electromyography (EMG) and preferential looking. A logistic modeling procedure showed that learning parameters, such as the rate at which participants learned the values associated with the pictures, were similar across food outcomes of different value.     

Born from lament: The theology and politics of hope in Africa. Emmanuel Katongole. Grand Rapids,MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2017. 294 pp.

It is acknowledged and well documented that Christianity is rapidly changing from being the religion of Europe and North America to a religion of South America, Africa, and Asia. Of the three regions, Africa is experiencing the fastest Christian growth. This paper examines one of the many Christian denominations and movements that are participating in that growth in Africa, namely Lutheranism. Reasons behind the steady expansion, challenges faced, and the implications of the rise of Lutheranism in Africa will be highlighted.     

A Task Analysis of Client Re-engagement: Therapeutic De-escalation of High-Conflict Coparents

Parents who are engaged in protracted conflict following a divorce are often referred to coparenting therapy. Episodes of intense conflict are common during these therapy sessions and often result in coparents disengaging from the therapist while they engage in escalating conflict with each other, potentially disrupting their progress in therapy. The purpose of this study was to identify how therapists successfully re-engage clients in the session. To understand this process, 24 disengagement events (12 successful and 12 unsuccessful) from 13 cases were analyzed using a task analytic approach. The sample included coparent dyads referred by the judicial system to a high-conflict coparenting therapy program. Task analysis was used to create a model of how re-engagement unfolds in treatment. The empirical model that resulted has five phases: (1) disengagement from the therapeutic process, (2) disruption of the conflict, (3) de-escalating the most escalated coparent, (4) de-escalating the other coparent, and (5) therapist buffered re-engagement. Successful episodes of re-engagement tended to have therapists who remained active throughout the conflict episode, used structuring interventions aimed at disrupting and then regulating the most escalated partner, blocked attempts to re-engage in conflict, and then repeated this process with the less escalated partner. Additional interventions that promote therapeutic re-engagement are described for each phase, and implications for clinicians and researchers are discussed.     

Age-related Assessment of Postural Control Development: A Cross-sectional Study in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

The aim of this study was to outline an age-dependent range of posturography measures obtained from healthy children. One hundred and fifty healthy 4–18-year-old children underwent video Head Impulse Test and static posturography testing. Surface, length and power spectra values were compared between each group of pupils and 32 healthy adults. As well as a significant (p?<?0.025) increase in surface and length, when compared to healthy adults, increased values within the low/middle frequency domain and within the high frequency domain were also observed in 4–13 and 4–7-year-old children, respectively. In conclusion, although the nature of postural control development remains largely undetermined, this study represents a first attempt to outline an age-dependent normal range of the relative contribution of inputs in typically developing children.