Can organisational safety climate and occupational stress predict work-related driver fatigue?

Road crashes are a significant cause of work-related injury and death. Driver fatigue is thought to cause 20–30% of fatal crashes. The current study utilised a survey to examine the relationship between safety climate, occupational stress and work-related driver fatigue. Drivers (n = 219) from two government organisations responded to items from the job-related tension scale [Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., & Snoek, J. D. (1964). Organisational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing], safety climate questionnaire [Glendon, A., & Litherland, D. (2001). Safety climate factors, group differences and safety behaviour in road construction. Safety Science, 39, 157–188] and purpose-designed items on fatigue-related behaviour. Outcome measures were current self-reported, fatigue-related behaviour and self-reported ‘near (crash) misses’ during the previous 6 months. Together, occupational stress and safety climate predicted fatigue-related behaviour, accounting for 29% of the variance over and above that explained by control variables. Further, logistic regression revealed occupational stress and safety climate to be significant predictors of fatigue-related near misses. Safety climate emerged as a stronger predictor of both fatigue-related behaviour and near misses than occupational stress. Results suggest that organisations can play a part in improving the safety-related behaviours of their workforce through attention to safety climate and occupational stress.     

Reactivation-dependent amnesia for appetitive memories is determined by the contingency of stimulus presentation

Previously acquired aversive and appetitive memories are not stable and permanent. The reactivation of such memories by re-exposure to training stimuli renders them vulnerable to disruption by amnestic agents such as the noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist (+)-5-methyl-10,11-dihydro-SH-dibenzo{a,d}cyclohepten-5,10-imine maleate (MK-801). However, relatively little is known about the parameters that influence the reactivation process. Here, we show that the method of stimulus presentation during memory reactivation is of great importance. Male Lister Hooded rats were trained to acquire a lever press response that delivered a sucrose reward paired with a light conditioned stimulus (CS). The CS-sucrose association was then reactivated through re-exposure to the CS, either contingently upon the lever press response, or noncontingently in the absence of instrumental responding. Systemic administration of MK-801 (0.1 mg/kg) at the time of memory reactivation resulted in amnesia, and hence a reduction in subsequent sucrose seeking induced by, and dependent upon, presentation of the CS, only when the memory was reactivated contingently. Therefore, stimuli may have to be presented in the same manner at memory reactivation as during learning in order to render a previously acquired memory vulnerable to disruption. These results have important implications for the potential translational use of glutamatergic treatments in conjunction with targeted memory reactivation.     

Child versus parent reports of parenting practices: implications for the conceptualization of child behavioral and emotional problems

This study examined parent and child reports of parenting practices separately to predict child and parent reports of child externalizing and internalizing features, as well as delinquent activity. Participants included 98 children (51 male, 47 female) from a community sample, aged 9-15 at the beginning of the study. Results revealed that child reports of parenting practices were significantly correlated with a greater number of indices of delinquency and conduct problems than were parent reports. Child reports of parenting also showed some association with delinquency at three yearly follow-ups, whereas parent reports did not. Finally, reports of negative parenting from both informants were concurrently related to internalizing characteristics. Implications for child assessment and planning interventions for children and parents are discussed.     

Augustine,Arendt, and Anthropy

Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing to this anthropic principle; that without a spectator there could be no world; a profound connection is made between the ‘cosmic jackpot’ of life in the universe and the uniquely human activity that takes place in the political realm. By making this connection we suggest that solutions present themselves to a central puzzle arising in Arendt’s thought: namely, what it is that people actually do in the political realm. The first solution directly addresses the issue of content: what people talk about in Arendt’s public space. The second addresses the importance of ‘maintaining’ a space of appearances. The third considers the effect of participating in and observing the public domain. Consequently, we conclude that, for Arendt, action is nothing less than the activity of ‘world-making.’     

ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF STIMULUS EQUIVALENCE PROCESSES

Research reported here concerns neural processes relating to stimulus equivalence class formation. In Experiment 1, two types of word pairs were presented successively to normally capable adults. In one type, the words had related usage in English (e.g., uncle, aunt). In the other, the two words were not typically related in their usage (e.g., wrist, corn). For pairs of both types, event‐related cortical potentials were recorded during and immediately after the presentation of the second word. The obtained waveforms differentiated these two types of pairs. For the unrelated pairs, the waveforms were significantly more negative about 400 ms after the second word was presented, thus replicating the “N400” phenomenon of the cognitive neuroscience literature. In addition, there was a strong positive‐tending wave form difference post‐stimulus presentation (peaked at about 500 ms) that also differentiated the unrelated from related stimulus pairs. In Experiment 2, the procedures were extended to study arbitrary stimulus—stimulus relations established via matching‐to‐sample training. Participants were experimentally näive adults. Sample stimuli (Set A) were trigrams, and comparison stimuli (Sets B, C, D, E, and F) were nonrepresentative forms. Behavioral tests evaluated potentially emergent equivalence relations (i.e., BD, DF, CE, etc.). All participants exhibited classes consistent with the arbitrary matching training. They were also exposed also to an event‐related potential procedure like that used in Experiment 1. Some received the ERP procedure before equivalence tests and some after. Only those participants who received ERP procedures after equivalence tests exhibited robust N400 differentiation initially. The positivity observed in Experiment 1 was absent for all participants. These results support speculations that equivalence tests may provide contextual support for the formation of equivalence classes including those that emerge gradually during testing.     

Post-learning infusion of anisomycin into the anterior cingulate cortex impairs instrumental acquisition through an effect on reinforcer valuation

The integrity of the rodent anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is essential for various aspects of instrumental behavior, but it is not clear if the ACC is important for the acquisition of a simple instrumental response. Here, it was demonstrated that post-session infusions of anisomycin into the rat ACC completely prevented the acquisition of instrumental responding. The experimental use of post-session intracranial infusions of plasticity inhibitors is assumed to affect local consolidation of plasticity, but not behavioral task performance. However, in associative appetitive conditioning, post-session intracranial infusion of pharmaco-active compounds could actually interfere with subsequent task performance indirectly through retrospective effects on the valuation of ingested rewards. Thus, it was subsequently demonstrated that the intracranial infusion of anisomycin into the ACC after sucrose pellet consumption significantly reduced subsequent pellet consumption, suggesting that the infusion of anisomycin into the ACC produced conditioned taste avoidance. In the third experiment, an innovative procedure was introduced that dissociated the effects of intracranial infusions after conditioning sessions on task-learning and unconditioned stimulus valuation. With this procedure, the infusion of anisomycin into the ACC after instrumental sessions did not affect instrumental reinforcer valuation or the acquisition of instrumental responding, suggesting that plasticity in the ACC is not necessary for the acquisition of instrumental behavior.The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in the rodent brain is the area of association cortex that is most intimately associated with movement control, as it has direct corticospinal projections to motor neurons (Miller 1987) and is intricately connected with motor and premotor cortex (Brecht et al. 2004; Wang et al. 2008), and movement-related discharges in motivated tasks have been observed in the ACC (Jung et al. 1998; Kargo et al. 2007). On the basis of these findings, the ACC has been described as the limbic motor cortex (Craig 2003). Indeed, it has been demonstrated that neural activity in the ACC codes for performed actions and observed appetitive outcomes (Lapish et al. 2008), suggesting that the ACC could be important for instrumental conditioning. However, it is currently unclear whether the role of the ACC in instrumental conditioning is restricted to relatively complex instrumental tasks with response conflict (Lapish et al. 2008) and high response efforts (Rudebeck et al. 2006), or whether it extends generally to the acquisition of a simple appetitively motivated instrumental response as well. For example, it has been reported that the acquisition of instrumental responding under variable ratio 2 schedule of reinforcement was impaired after presession intra-ACC infusions of the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist AP-5 (McKee et al. 2007).However, the practical investigation of the neural basis of learning is complicated by what can be considered as “side effects” of manipulations that are intended to interfere selectively with learning mechanisms. Both pretraining lesions and presession infusions of pharmacological agents into specific brain regions can produce interference with basic task performance in addition to impairing task-related learning. This problem can be overcome by the use of infusions of pharmacological agents after a behavioral conditioning session, specifically to target the consolidation of learning. Positive effects of post-session intracranial infusions of protein synthesis inhibitors such as anisomycin (Rosenblum et al. 1993), or NMDA, and dopamine receptor antagonists such as AP-5 or SCH 23390 (Dalley et al. 2005) on the acquisition of conditioned responses can be interpreted more confidently in terms of interference with learning, at least when combined with negative effects in delayed-infusion control groups. Certainly, positive effects of post-session infusions on learning in the absence of effects of delayed control infusions cannot be attributed to interference with task performance.Nevertheless, post-session intracranial infusions may still cause confounding effects on conditioned behavior in appetitive conditioning experiments, by changing the valuation of the unconditioned stimulus (US), or reward, in subsequent sessions. Such manipulations could reduce the valuation of rewards either through interference with consolidation or reconsolidation of the sensory or motivational properties of the US (Wang et al. 2005; Pedroza-Llinás et al. 2009), which would lead to persistent neophobia, or through retrospective devaluation of the task reward through the post-ingestion induction of an aversive state. Neither effect would be expected to be apparent in delayed-infusion control conditions. Furthermore, considering that animals typically earn far fewer rewards in conditioning sessions than they would maximally consume if rewards were freely available, such effects would not necessarily be visible in terms of consumption of earned rewards and unaffected latencies to collect rewards.In view of these considerations, the effect of the infusion of anisomycin into the rat ACC after instrumental sessions on the acquisition of conditioned responding was investigated. Based on the obtained results, it was further investigated whether the infusion of anisomycin into the ACC after free consumption of a novel reward would affect subsequent pellet consumption. Finally, a third experiment was conducted that introduced an innovative procedure that was designed to dissociate the effects of intracranial infusion of protein synthesis inhibitors after conditioning sessions on task-learning and US valuation.     

Measuring depression at the end of life: is the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale a valid instrument?

Depression at the end of life is a common mental health issue with serious implications for quality of life and decision making. This study investigated the reliability and validity of one of the most frequently used measures of depression, the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D) in 422 patients with terminal cancer admitted to a palliative care hospital. The HAM-D demonstrated high reliability and concurrent validity with depression diagnosis, based on Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, non-patient research version (SCID-I/NP Depression Module). Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses generated an area under the curve of .91, indicating high sensitivity and specificity. The HAM-D strongly correlated with several measures of distress (e.g., hopelessness, desire for hastened death, and suicidal ideation). Factor analysis generated 4 factors (anxiety, depressed mood, insomnia, and somatic symptoms), accounting for 42% of the variance. Implications for assessing depression in this population are discussed.     

The pleasure is momentary…the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault

The effects of pornography, whether violent or non-violent, on sexual aggression have been debated for decades. The current review examines evidence about the influence of pornography on sexual aggression in correlational and experimental studies and in real world violent crime data. Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent, and violent pornography is comparatively rare in the real world. Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.     

Statutory reform is associated with improved court practice: results of a tri-state comparison

PURPOSE: This study investigates the impact of statutory reform in adult guardianship on court practice. METHODS: Case files for 298 cases of adult guardianship were reviewed in three states with varying degrees of statutory reform: MA (no reform), PA (major amendments in 1992), and CO (full re-enactment of statute per UGPPA in 2000). Five court practices associated with progressive statutory reform were studied: (1) diversion to less restrictive alternatives; (2) minimal and appropriate use of emergency procedures; (3) presence of the alleged incapacitated person at the hearing; (4) use of functional evaluation; (5) use of limited orders. RESULTS: CO more frequently utilized all five practices, whereas PA used diversion to less restrictive alternatives and less frequent emergency procedures, but not other practices. MA files rarely showed evidence for use of any of these reforms. IMPLICATIONS: Statutory reform may improve court practice. More study of the effects of reform on court practices, and the vulnerable adults served by these courts, is needed.