Health Related Quality of Life in Children with Congenital Heart Disease

Health-related quality of life in children with congenital heart disease (CHD) was compared to that of healthy children. Furthermore, agreement between child and parent reports was examined. In addition, differences in quality of life related to the severity of CHD were evaluated. One hundred children with CHD aged between 8-18 years and their parents answered a health-related quality of life-questionnaire during their visit to the paediatric cardiology outpatient department. CHD children reported reduced motor functioning and autonomy compared to healthy children. Parents of children with CHD reported their children to have a reduced quality of life in the domains of: motor functioning, autonomy and cognitive functioning. Agreement between child and parent reports was moderate. Children systematically reported lower health related quality of life on the domain of positive emotions than did parents. Health related quality of life in children with CHD appeared not to be influenced by severity of the disease. In conclusion, regardless of the severity of the disease, children with CHD reported their health related quality of life on several domains to be lower than that of healthy children. This means that on several domains, the emotional impact of problems in health status is greater for children with CHD than for healthy children. When CHD patients visit the clinic, it is important that physicians actively ask patients as well as parents about the child's motor functioning, autonomy and cognitive functioning. Children with problems in these domains can then be identified, and psychological interventions can take place at an early stage.     

Seeing is a verb

This commentary on ‘The interaction of attention and action: From seeing action to acting on perception’ by Humphreys et al. (2010) considers selection‐for‐action in relation to the role of parietal cortex corollary discharge in the ‘mastery of sensori‐motor contingencies’ that O'Regan and Noe (2001) suggest gives rise to visual awareness.     

The level of frontal-temporal beta-2 band EEG synchronization distinguishes anterior cingulate cortex from other frontal regions

Recent findings indicate that complex cognitive functions are organized at a global level in the brain and rely on large-scale information processing requiring functional integration of multiple disparate neural assemblies. The critical question of the integration of distributed brain activities is whether the essential integrative role can be attributed to a specific structure in the brain or whether this ability is inherent to the cognitive network as a whole. The results of the present study show that mean values of the running correlation function in frontal-temporal EEG pairs with one electrode in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are significantly higher than the same values in other frontal-temporal pairs. These findings indicate a particular role of the ACC in large-scale communication, which could reflect its unique integrative functions in cognitive processing.     

Big Five personality traits,job satisfaction and subjective wellbeing in China

This paper examines the effect of the Big Five personality traits on job satisfaction and subjective wellbeing (SWB). The paper also examines the mediating role of job satisfaction on the Big Five–SWB relationship. Data were collected from a sample of 818 urban employees from five Chinese cities: Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Dalian, and Fushun. All the study variables were measured with well‐established multi‐item scales that have been validated both in English‐speaking populations and in China. The study found only extraversion to have an effect on job satisfaction, suggesting that there could be cultural difference in the relationships between the Big Five and job satisfaction in China and in the West. The study found that three factors in the Big Five—extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—have an effect on SWB. This finding is similar to findings in the West, suggesting convergence in the relationship between the Big Five and SWB in different cultural contexts. The research found that only the relationship between extraversion and SWB is partially mediated by job satisfaction, implying that the effect of the Big Five on SWB is mainly direct, rather than indirect via job satisfaction. The study also found that extraversion was the strongest predictor of both job satisfaction and SWB. This finding implies that extraversion could be more important than other factors in the Big Five in predicting job satisfaction and SWB in a “high collectivism” and “high power distance” country such as China. The research findings are discussed in the Chinese cultural context. The study also offers suggestions on the directions for future research.     

当代“马克思研究”：国家理论的新进展（续）——各种探讨、争论点和议程

近年来，虽然人们对于那些从理论上说明国家的、具有更多的神秘色彩和抽象色彩的方式兴趣越来越小，但是，对于各种国家和国家权力的实质性研究却呈现出突破性的发展。即使对因此而出现的献的一小部分进行回顾也是不可能的，但是，我们仍然有必要提到其中的五个论题——这五个论题促进了我们上面讨论的这些探讨的对立。     

Our Immigration and Human Rights Work Group in Action: Psychoanalysts Evaluating Asylum Seekers,Trauma and Family Devastation

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the story of a family of four refugees from Central America seeking asylum in the United States, and of the experience of a group of psychoanalysts, members of the New York University Postdoctoral Program Immigration and Human Rights Work Group, who evaluated each member of the family and wrote affidavits in support of their applications for asylum. The work described provides an example of how clinicians can apply their skills and understandings outside the consulting room to address the dire needs of refugees who have fled from their homes. We discuss the process of refugees seeking asylum and the role of a psychological evaluation in the asylum process. We elaborate on the content and process of the evaluations of each member of the family with a focus on the trauma suffered and its sequelae on two school-aged children, their adolescent aunt, and their courageous and protective mother. We also address the analysts’ experience of doing psychological evaluations and writing affidavits for asylum seekers who have experienced trauma.     

Prior knowledge and exemplar frequency

New concepts can be learned by statistical associations, as well as by relevant existing knowledge. We examined the interaction of these two processes by manipulating exemplar frequency and thematic knowledge and considering their interaction through computational modeling. Exemplar frequency affects category learning, with high-frequency items learned more quickly than low-frequency items, and prior knowledge usually speeds category learning. In two experiments in which both of these factors were manipulated, we found that the effects of frequency are greatly reduced when stimulus features are linked by thematic prior knowledge and that frequency effects on single stimulus features can actually be reversed by knowledge. We account for these results with the knowledge resonance model of category learning (Rehder & Murphy, 2003) and conclude that prior knowledge may change representations so that empirical effects, such as those caused by frequency manipulations, are modulated.     

In the mood to face the facts: When a positive mood promotes systematic processing of self-threatening information

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that a positive mood can increase attendance to, and systematic processing of, threatening health information, particularly when the information is self-relevant. In Study 1, a positive mood increased differentiation between strong and weak arguments in a threatening health message about RSI only for participants who had received false feedback regarding their high vulnerability to RSI. Mood had no effects under conditions of low vulnerability. In Study 2, a positive mood speeded up responses to self-threatening words—compared with neutral words—for smokers who had just read a threatening health message about smoking. The authors conclude that fostering a positive mood may promote attendance to and systematic processing of information that threatens the self, and hence contribute to the success of health campaigns targeted at individuals who are vulnerable to specific health risks.

Context Effects on Musical Chord Categorization: Different Forms of Top‐Down Feedback in Speech and Music?

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top-down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the expected stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower-level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains.