Caregiver burden and family functioning in different neurological diseases

Aim of this study is to examine caregiver burden and family functioning in different neurological conditions. Forty-two primary caregivers of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia (AD), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Acquired Brain Injuries (ABI) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) were administered scales for the evaluation of caregiver burden (CBI) and family functioning (FACES IV). Caregiver burden was overall high, with caregivers of patients with ALS and ABI having exceeded the CBI cut-off score for possible burn-out. The average scores of caregivers of patients with AD or other dementia and PD were close to the cut-off score, whereas those of caregivers of patients with MS were significantly lower than the others. Family cohesion, family satisfaction and the quality of family communication were associated with reduced levels of caregiver burden, whereas disengagement was associated with a higher burden. The data from the present study confirm that caregiver burden is a relevant issue in the context of neurological diseases, especially for those causing higher degrees of impairment. Significant correlations with family functioning emerged as well, highlighting the importance of studying and treating caregiver burden within the context of family relations.     

Coefficients of feasibility for ordinal response scales

Cronbach's alpha is systematically used in the social sciences to estimate internal consistency. However, this coefficient assumes the continuity of the variables and this assumption is not met by ordinal response items or Likert scales. This work shows two alternatives to the alpha coefficient, the ordinal alpha and beta coefficients. Both of them take into account the ordinal nature of the data. The new coefficients were applied to several scales and compared with the traditional estimation of alpha. This paper also shows how to estimate those coefficients.     

'Change of Mind' within and between nonconscious (masked) and conscious (unmasked) visual processing

We examined the updating of decisions made during visuo-motor processing when two sequentially presented stimuli, Prime1 and Prime2, primed discriminative responses to a following probe. In Experiment 1, the visibility of the two primes was suppressed or left intact by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of the stimuli immediately following them. In Experiment 2, the visibility of Prime2 was suppressed or left intact by varying its spatial separation from the following probe. We found (1) that Prime2 dominated the effects of Prime1; (2) that Prime2's updating was stronger when the Prime2-probe SOA was 200 as compared to 53 ms; and (3) that Prime2's updating was weaker when the Prime2-probe spatial separation was 58 as compared to 0 minarc. We conclude that these effects are due to an interaction of spatial attention and the state (conscious vs. nonconscious) of processing of Prime2.     

A Controlled Single-Case Treatment of Severe Long-Term Selective Mutism in a Child With Mental Retardation

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate the efficacy of combining two operant learning procedures—shaping and fading—for treating selective mutism. The participant was a 12-year-old boy with mental retardation presenting a severe long-term selective mutism. The treatment was aimed at increasing the loudness of his vocalizations in an increasingly social milieu. The treatment was conducted over the course of about 20 weeks, with four 15-minute sessions per week. A gradual increase in speech loudness was observed. Data indicated a close correspondence between the changes in speech loudness and the criteria for reinforcement successively applied by the therapist, thereby confirming the causal link between the child's progress and the changes in reinforcement contingencies. In addition, good generalization was noted during the stimulus fading phase. Six-month follow up showed that loudness of verbalizations was still satisfactory in the classroom despite a change of school and peer group. The impressive improvement of the child's verbal behavior shows that the implementation of a treatment package including both shaping and stimulus fading is a worthwhile therapeutic option, even in the case of severe long-term selective mutism associated with mental retardation.     

Even statisticians are not immune to misinterpretations of Null Hypothesis Significance Tests

We investigated the way experienced users interpret Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) outcomes. An empirical study was designed to compare the reactions of two populations of NHST users, psychological researchers and professional applied statisticians, when faced with contradictory situations. The subjects were presented with the results of an experiment designed to test the efficacy of a drug by comparing two groups (treatment/placebo). Four situations were constructed by combining the outcome of the t test (significant vs. nonsignificant) and the observed difference between the two means D (large vs. small). Two of these situations appeared as conflicting (t significant/D small and t nonsignificant/D large). Three fundamental aspects of statistical inference were investigated by means of open questions: drawing inductive conclusions about the magnitude of the true difference from the data in hand, making predictions for future data, and making decisions about stopping the experiment. The subjects were 25 statisticians from pharmaceutical companies in France, subjects well versed in statistics, and 20 psychological researchers from various laboratories in France, all with experience in processing and analyzing experimental data. On the whole, statisticians and psychologists reacted in a similar way and were very impressed by significant results. It must be outlined that professional applied statisticians were not immune to misinterpretations, especially in the case of nonsignificance. However, the interpretations that accustomed users attach to the outcome of NHST can vary from one individual to another, and it is hard to conceive that there could be a consensus in the face of seemingly conflicting situations. In fact, beyond the superficial report of “erroneous” interpretations, it can be seen in the misuses of NHST intuitive judgmental “adjustments” that try to overcome its inherent shortcomings. These findings encourage the many recent attempts to improve the habitual ways of analyzing and reporting experimental data.     

Wanted: real Children. about Innocence and Nostalgia in a Commodified Childhood

Today childhood takes place within amultimedia context where education, marketingand entertainment operate together in one bigmelting pot. Childhood is commodified, asituation not everybody seems happy with. Dueto increasing exposure with violence and sexualactivities, for example in children's games,children seem to lose the chance to be realchildren. In the discussions about thiscommodified childhood, innocence and nostalgiaseem omnipresent concepts. In this article wefirst analyse the discourse about the innocenceof childhood as presented by Neil Postman inhis bestseller ``The Disappearance ofChildhood.'' Here, childhood is seen as a periodwhich can mainly be characterised in terms of a``not yet.'' However, Postman's view on childhoodpresents only one side of the romanticcontinuum. The other side – in which the childappears as having a nature of her own – can beillustrated by ``On naïve and sentimentalpoetry,'' an essay written by Friedrich Schillerin 1795. Both opposing views on childhood canlead to a different interpretation of theinnocence of childhood. Finally, Schiller'sdichotomy – the naïve versus thesentimental poet – can be seen as a useful legup to the clarification of nostalgia whichseems to go hand in hand with the feeling ofthe loss of (one's own) childhood.     

Similarity relations among spoken words: The special status of rimes in English

This paper presents an analysis of the distribution of phonological similarity relations among monosyllabic spoken words in English. It differs from classical analyses of phonological neighborhood density (e.g., Luce &; Pisoni, 1998) by assuming that not all phonological neighbors are equal. Rather, it is assumed that the phonological lexicon has psycholinguistic structure. Accordingly, in addition to considering thenumber of phonological neighbors for any given word, it becomes important to consider thenature of these neighbors. If one type of neighbor is more dominant, neighborhood density effects may reflect levels of segmental representation other than the phoneme, particularly prior to literacy. Statistical analyses of the nature of phonological neighborhoods in terms ofrime neighbors (e.g.,hat/cat),consonant neighbors (e.g.,hat/hit), andlead neighbors (e.g.,hat/ham) were thus performed for all monosyllabic words in the Celex corpus (4,086 words). Our results show that most phonological neighbors are rime neighbors (e.g.,hat/cat) in English. Similar patterns were found when a corpus of words for which age-of-acquisition ratings were available was analyzed. The resultant database can be used as a tool for controlling and selecting stimuli when the role of lexical neighborhoods in phonological development and speech processing is examined.     

Distinguishing the cause and consequence of face inversion: The perceptual field hypothesis

I published a critical review of the face inversion effect (Rossion, 2008) that triggered a few reactions and commentaries by colleagues in the field ( [Riesenhuber and Wolff, 2009] and [83]). Here, I summarize my original paper and attempt to identify the source of both the agreements and disagreements with my colleagues, as well as other authors, regarding the nature of the face inversion effect. My view is that the major cause of the detrimental effect of inversion on an observer’s performance at individual face recognition is the disruption of a perceptual process. This perceptual process is makes and observer see the multiple features of a whole individual upright face at once. It also makes the percept of a given facial feature highly dependent on the location and identity of the other features in the whole face. The perceptual process is holistic because it is driven by a holistic face representation, derived from visual experience. Hence, an inverted face cannot be perceived holistically: the perceptual field of the observer is constricted for inverted faces, each facial feature having to be processed sequentially, independently, i.e. over a smaller spatial window than the whole face. Consequently, it is particularly difficult to perceive diagnostic cues that involve several elements over a wide space on an inverted face, such as long-range relative distances between features (e.g., relative distance between eyes and mouth), or diagnostic cues that are located far away from usual gaze fixation (e.g., mouth-nose distance or mouth shape when fixating between the eyes). These difficulties are mere consequences of face inversion - the cause being a loss of holistic perception-, and it does not follow that relative distances between internal features are necessarily particularly important to recognize faces, that they should be labeled “configural”, or should be given a specific status at the representational level. I argue that distinguishing the cause and consequence(s) of face inversion this way can provide a parsimonious and yet complete theoretical account of the face inversion effect.     

Failure to loose fear: The impact of cognitive load and trait anxiety on extinction

Exposure therapy is an effective technique for fear reduction. However, whether effective exposure requires attentional allocation to the feared situation remains a debated clinical issue. In the present study, the impact of attention allocation in extinction was investigated in an experimental conditioning study. Through a between-subjects manipulation of cognitive load, we created a condition in which participants could allocate their attention to the feared stimulus during extinction (low load condition), and a condition in which attentional allocation was impaired (high load condition). The influence of cognitive load on extinction was examined by comparing electrodermal responses and verbal ratings for the conditioned stimuli in the two extinction load conditions. The results show less successful extinction in the high load condition than in the low load condition. However, this effect was found only in low anxious participants, and it was prominent only on the skin conductance responses. The present results suggest that extinction is not automatic but requires cognitive resources.     

Effects of contrast polarity in paracontrast masking

The visibility of a target stimulus can be suppressed (inhibition) or increased (facilitation) during paracontrast masking. Three processes have been proposed to be involved in paracontrast masking: brief inhibition, facilitation, and prolonged inhibition (Breitmeyer et al., 2006). Brief inhibition is observed when the mask precedes the target at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) ranging from -10 to -30 msec, whereas prolonged inhibition is effective up to very large SOAs of -450 msec. Facilitation, enhancement in target visibility, can be observed at SOA values between -20 and -110 msec. We further investigated these processes by changing target-mask spatial separation and the contrast polarity of the mask. Our results show that (1) facilitation weakens when spatial separation between the target and mask is increased or when they have opposite contrast polarity, and (2) brief inhibition turns into facilitation for the opposite-polarity mask, whereas prolonged inhibition does not change significantly. These results suggest a fast inhibition mechanism realized in the contrast-specific center-surround antagonism of classical receptive fields for brief inhibition and a slower, higher level cortical processing that is indifferent to contrast polarity for prolonged inhibition.