Cognitive performance in older adults with stable heart failure: Longitudinal evidence for stability and improvement

Cognitive impairment is prevalent in heart failure (HF), though substantial variability in the pattern of cognitive impairment is found across studies. To clarify the nature of cognitive impairment in HF, we examined longitudinal trajectories across multiple domains of cognition in HF patients using latent growth class modeling. 115 HF patients completed a neuropsychological battery at baseline, 3-months and 12-months. Participants also completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II). Latent class growth analyses revealed a three-class model for attention/executive function, four-class model for memory, and a three-class model for language. The slope for attention/executive function and language remained stable, while improvements were noted in memory performance. Education and BDI-II significantly predicted the intercept for attention/executive function and language abilities. The BDI-II also predicted baseline memory. The current findings suggest that multiple performance-based classes of neuropsychological test performance exist within cognitive domains, though case-controlled prospective studies with extended follow-ups are needed to fully elucidate changes and predictors of cognitive function in HF.     

Meaning as inter-connectedness: theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence

Researchers interested in the study of eudaimonic well-being have devoted increasing efforts in the attempt to define and understand meaning as a core resource fostering human development and successful adaptation to environmental demands. Conceptual models and empirical findings highlighted the pivotal role of relationships and connectedness in the construction and enhancement of meaning throughout life. In this paper connectedness is discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence developed within the natural and social sciences. The cross-disciplinary emphasis on the substantial role of inter-connectedness in shaping living systems and human communities will be highlighted. Taking into account these interdisciplinary convergences and empirical evidence obtained from the psychological investigation of the sources and structure of meaning, three levels of connectedness will be identified, namely proximal, distal and symbolic. A comprehensive framework will be proposed, in which inter-connectedness is considered a crucial aspect of the prominent sources of meaning in daily life, as well as the core essence of meaning itself. This approach offers the possibility to explore meaning from a unifying perspective, overcoming disciplinary boundaries and opening new research avenues.     

Grief in Comparison: Use of Social Comparison Among Cold Case Homicide Survivors

The current qualitative study examines the use of social comparison among cold case homicide survivors as a method of defining their grief. Twenty-four cold case homicide survivors completed in-depth interviews about the trauma of living with an unsolved homicide. Survivors compared themselves to individuals coping with non-homicidal deaths and fellow homicide survivors. Results indicate survivors of unsolved homicides utilize downward elevation, lateral comparison, and upward contacts in their journey of grief and coping. The direction and type of comparison can have both positive and negative effects on the survivors' views of self and progress made towards emotional recovery. Implications are discussed.     

Service job lawyers are happier than money job lawyers,despite their lower income

Giving too much emphasis to extrinsic values and too little emphasis to intrinsic values is known to depress well-being. But is simply working in an extrinsic job also risky, even if that job delivers the money? We compared 1414 ‘Money’ (extrinsic) lawyers, 1145 ‘Service’ (intrinsic) lawyers, and 3415 ‘Other’ lawyers as to their income, values, well-being, and drinking behavior. Although service lawyers had much lower incomes, they also experienced more well-being and less negative affect compared to money lawyers, and drank less and less often. ANCOVAs showed that the intrinsic vs. extrinsic job-type effects were independent of rated intrinsic vs. extrinsic values, current income, years of work experience, and class rank at graduation, suggesting that the job-contexts themselves were operative. We discuss the difficult choice that pre-professional students face, between two versions of the American dream: one emphasizing wealth and status, and the other, service and personal development.     

Alignment to visual speech information

Speech alignment is the tendency for interlocutors to unconsciously imitate one another’s speaking style. Alignment also occurs when a talker is asked to shadow recorded words (e.g., Shockley, Sabadini, & Fowler, 2004). In two experiments, we examined whether alignment could be induced with visual (lipread) speech and with auditory speech. In Experiment 1, we asked subjects to lipread and shadow out loud a model silently uttering words. The results indicate that shadowed utterances sounded more similar to the model’s utterances than did subjects’ nonshadowed read utterances. This suggests that speech alignment can be based on visual speech. In Experiment 2, we tested whether raters could perceive alignment across modalities. Raters were asked to judge the relative similarity between a model’s visual (silent video) utterance and subjects’ audio utterances. The subjects’ shadowed utterances were again judged as more similar to the model’s than were read utterances, suggesting that raters are sensitive to cross-modal similarity between aligned words.     

Feast your eyes: hunger and trait reward drive predict attentional bias for food cues

Appraisal theories of emotion predict that the relevance of a stimulus to a person's needs and goals influences attentional allocation. We used a modified visual probe task to examine the influence of hunger and trait reward drive on food-related attentional bias. Both hunger and trait reward drive predicted degree of attentional "disengagement" from food images at short (100 ms), but not long (500, 2,000 ms) stimulus durations. Effects of hunger were found for both bland and appetizing foods, while effects of reward drive were restricted to appetizing foods. Our findings extend previous research showing delayed "disengagement" from threat-related stimuli, suggesting that both organismic- and goal-relevance are key biasing factors in attentional competition.     

Differential Decline of Verbal and Visuospatial Processing Speed Across the Adult Life Span

The present study compared the age-related decline in verbal and visuospatial processing speed in 131 participants aged 18 to 90 years. Participants performed four verbal and four visuospatial tasks. Age differences in processing speed were compared at the group and individual levels. For the group-level analyses, participants were divided into a young adult group and six older groups subdivided by decade. The mean verbal and visuospatial response times (RTs) for each group were regressed on the corresponding RTs of the young adult group. The slope of the visuospatial regression was greater than that for the verbal regression at all ages, and the difference between the visuospatial and verbal slopes increased with each decade. For the individual-level analyses, a verbal and a visuospatial processing-time coefficient (Hale & Jansen, 1994) was obtained for each individual, and these values were then regressed on age. Verbal processing time increased linearly by approximately 50% while visuospatial processing time increased exponentially by approximately 500% from 18 to 90 years. Taken together, the results at both the group and the individual level demonstrate that aging affects visuospatial processing to a much greater extent than verbal processing.     

Contested,constructed home(lands): Diaspora,postcolonial studies and Zionism

During the past decade, historians and social scientists have begun extensively to research the issue of philanthropy and charities in general, and that of Jewish philanthropy in particular. This paper reviews some of the main characteristics of philanthropic activity of the Jewish elite in post-emancipation Europe (1791–1878) and especially in Britain. Elite philanthropy was not the only form of philanthropy in the Jewish community. Middle-class philanthropy was another form, and traditional charitable activities constituted a third form. This paper focuses solely on elite philanthropy in England between c.1850–c.1880. Moses Montefiore and Lionel de Rotshchild were two of the most influential leaders of the Anglo-Jewish philanthropic elite. The paper deals mostly with the activities of these leaders of the Jewish community in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.     

Confronting Deep Moral Disagreement: The President's Council on Bioethics,Moral Status,and Human Embryos

The report of the President's Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, addresses the central ethical, political, and policy issue in human embryonic stem cell research: the moral status of extracorporeal human embryos. The Council members were in sharp disagreement on this issue and essentially failed to adequately engage and respectfully acknowledge each others' deepest moral concerns, despite their stated commitment to do so. This essay provides a detailed critique of the two extreme views on the Council (i.e., embryos have full moral status or they have none at all) and then gives theoretical grounding for our judgment about the intermediate moral status of embryos. It also supplies an account of how to address profound moral disagreements in the public arena, especially by way of constructing a middle ground that deliberately pays sincere respect to the views of those with whom it has deep disagreements.