Attitudes About Internet Support Groups Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 and their Parents

Youth with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) have multiple, complex symptoms associated with physical, social-emotional, and cognitive difficulties. In addition, caring for a child with NF1 can be extremely challenging for parents. Since research with other chronic illness populations suggests that social support, including internet support groups (ISGs), can be beneficial, this survey study aimed to determine the attitudes and preferences of adolescents and young adults with NF1 and parents of a child with NF1 regarding ISGs. Thirty patients and 30 caregivers completed a 24-item survey about ISGs. Many patients and parents are not aware of any ISGs for NF1, but are interested in using one in the future for a variety of reasons, including to get answers to their questions about NF1, to find out about research studies, and to discuss problems and concerns about NF1. Specific concerns of interest include physical, social-emotional, and cognitive aspects of NF1. ISGs have potential as a social support intervention within the NF1 community. ISGs for the NF1 population should include patients with NF1 (or parents of children with NF1) as well as a health professional, and both chat rooms and discussion boards likely would be well-received.     

On Some Generalizations of the Concept of Partition

There are well-known isomorphisms between the complete lattice of all partitions of a given set A and the lattice of all equivalence relations on A. In the paper the notion of partition is generalized in order to work correctly for wider classes of binary relations than equivalence ones such as quasiorders or tolerance relations. Some others classes of binary relations and corresponding counterparts of partitions are considered.     

Dynamics of alpha oscillations elucidate facial affect recognition in schizophrenia

Impaired facial affect recognition is characteristic of schizophrenia and has been related to impaired social function, but the relevant neural mechanisms have not been fully identified. The present study sought to identify the role of oscillatory alpha activity in that deficit during the process of facial emotion recognition. Neuromagnetic brain activity was monitored while 44 schizophrenia patients and 44 healthy controls viewed 5-s videos showing human faces gradually changing from neutral to fearful or happy expressions or from the neutral face of one poser to the neutral face of another. Recognition performance was determined separately by self-report. Relative to prestimulus baseline, controls exhibited a 10- to 15-Hz power increase prior to full recognition and a 10- to 15-Hz power decrease during the postrecognition phase. These results support recent proposals about the function of alpha-band oscillations in normal stimulus evaluation. The patients failed to show this sequence of alpha power increase and decrease and also showed low 10- to 15-Hz power and high 10- to 15-Hz connectivity during the prestimulus baseline. In light of the proposal that a combination of alpha power increase and functional disconnection facilitates information intake and processing, the finding of an abnormal association of low baseline alpha power and high connectivity in schizophrenia suggests a state of impaired readiness that fosters abnormal dynamics during facial affect recognition.     

‘You have to treat the person,not the mouth only’: UK dentists’ perceptions of communication in patient consultations

Effective communication between patients and health professionals is a key component of patient-centred care. Although there is a large body of literature focusing on doctor-patient communication, there has been limited research related to dentist-patient communication, especially presented from the dentists’ perspective. The aim of our study was to explore UK dentists’ perceptions of communication in their consultations, and the factors they perceive may influence this. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight dentists in UK dental NHS practices. Thematic analysis revealed three themes (‘Treating the whole person’, ‘Barriers to patient-centred communication’ and ‘Mutuality of communication’), which reflected the dentists’ perceptions of their own communication during consultations, the patients’ interaction skills, attitudes (and characteristics that may affect them), and external factors, such as time constraints, that can influence dentist-patients’ encounters. These in-depth accounts are valuable, in that we see what dentists perceive is important, obstructive and facilitative. They report using a patient-centred approach in their everyday dental practice; however this is often difficult due to factors such as time constraints. Although they emphasized that the patient has an active role to play in the communication process, it may be the case that they also need to play their part in facilitating this.     

Postpartale psychische Störungen

Any postpartum mental disorder in a mother can influence the mother-child relationship and communication and lead to the development of psychosomatic disorders or disorders of behavioral regulation with diagnostic status. These can have a long-term impact on the mother-child relationship and the child’s mental development. Based on research findings on mother-child interaction, the authors expound why including the child in treatment is crucial. Accordingly, possible contraindications for mother-infant treatment are described. Clinical parent-infant treatment practice is reviewed as an interdisciplinary and multiprofessional challenge and the necessity of adhering to minimum standards, beside adult psychiatric skills, of child psychiatric and developmental expertise in diagnostics and intervention for quality assurance.     

Long-term memory of hierarchical relationships in free-living greylag geese

Animals may memorise spatial and social information for many months and even years. Here, we investigated long-term memory of hierarchically ordered relationships, where the position of a reward depended on the relationship of a stimulus relative to other stimuli in the hierarchy. Seventeen greylag geese (Anser anser) had been trained on discriminations between successive pairs of five or seven implicitly ordered colours, where the higher ranking colour in each pair was rewarded. Geese were re-tested on the task 2, 6 and 12 months after learning the dyadic colour relationships. They chose the correct colour above chance at all three points in time, whereby performance was better in colour pairs at the beginning or end of the colour series. Nonetheless, they also performed above chance on internal colour pairs, which is indicative of long-term memory for quantitative differences in associative strength and/or for relational information. There were no indications for a decline in performance over time, indicating that geese may remember dyadic relationships for at least 6 months and probably well over 1 year. Furthermore, performance in the memory task was unrelated to the individuals’ sex and their performance while initially learning the dyadic colour relationships. We discuss possible functions of this long-term memory in the social domain.     

Cognitive Task Analysis for Implicit Knowledge About Visual Representations With Similarity Learning Methods

Visual representations are prevalent in STEM instruction. To benefit from visuals, students need representational competencies that enable them to see meaningful information. Most research has focused on explicit conceptual representational competencies, but implicit perceptual competencies might also allow students to efficiently see meaningful information in visuals. Most common methods to assess students’ representational competencies rely on verbal explanations or assume explicit attention. However, because perceptual competencies are implicit and not necessarily verbally accessible, these methods are ill‐equipped to assess them. We address these shortcomings with a method that draws on similarity learning, a machine learning technique that detects visual features that account for participants’ responses to triplet comparisons of visuals. In Experiment 1, 614 chemistry students judged the similarity of Lewis structures and in Experiment 2, 489 students judged the similarity of ball‐and‐stick models. Our results showed that our method can detect visual features that drive students’ perception and suggested that students’ conceptual knowledge about molecules informed perceptual competencies through top‐down processes. Furthermore, Experiment 2 tested whether we can improve the efficiency of the method with active sampling. Results showed that random sampling yielded higher accuracy than active sampling for small sample sizes. Together, the experiments provide the first method to assess students’ perceptual competencies implicitly, without requiring verbalization or assuming explicit visual attention. These findings have implications for the design of instructional interventions that help students acquire perceptual representational competencies.