Short report: correlates of functional disability with disease activity in elderly patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) prevalence increases with age and old people are special patient population. The recognition of functional disability related to RA could be challenging in elderly patients because aging itself and potential co-morbid disease may also cause functional disability. In this study, we aimed to look at the correlation between disease activity and functional disability in elderly RA patients. Elderly RA patients, ≥65 years old at their routine visits were included in the study. The composite ‘disease activity score’ in 28 joints (DAS-28) was used to determine disease activity groups. Health assessment questionnaire (HAQ) scores were calculated to describe the functional disability and compared across the disease activity groups. Two hundred and fifty-eight RA patients with the mean age of 71 ± 5 (65–90) and a total disease duration of 8.4 ± 8.5 (.5–50) years were recruited. The proportion of patients with high and moderate disease activity was 70%. HAQ scores were significantly correlated with disease activity (p < .05). Functional disability estimated by HAQ was correlated with disease activity in elderly patients with RA     

Psychological Change in Everyday Life: An Exploratory Study

The innovative moments model was used in a pilot study that aimed to explore the change processes involved in everyday change outside psychotherapy. According to this model, the emergence and development of innovative moments (IMs) as exceptions to a problematic pattern are closely associated with psychological change. A longitudinal design covering 4 months of interviews was implemented with 13 adults who were coping with significant personal problems without clinical psychopathological complaints. Semistructured interviews were used to explore participants' personal accounts of their problems, and change was assessed using a scaling task at the end of the study. A total of 114 interviews were analyzed using the innovative moments coding system. A general linear model showed that higher levels of change were associated with higher proportions of complex IMs over time. Moreover, lower levels of change were associated with an increase in elementary IMs. These results support the idea that successful psychological change in everyday life shares similarities with the change pattern found in psychotherapy using the innovative moments model.     

Teaching worldviews through creative drama for religious education in Turkey

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Worldview Approach has been mentioned in the field of religious education and spirituality. This article aims to determine the effects of creative drama on teaching worldviews and religions. The main purpose of Worldview Education is to assist individuals to have a broader and deeper understanding on self-identity, worldviews of others, and on the meaning and purpose of life. It also helps individuals to think on ontological, epistemological and ultimate questions about life, values and beliefs. The spiritual development of individuals has a need for several guidelines from the fields of philosophy, theology, and education. As an educational tool, creative drama increases imagination, creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking skills and assists students’ personal and emotional development. Combining Worldview Education with creative drama creates a multidimensional educational environment for a meaningful learning on religions, worldviews, and spirituality.     

Does Money Buy Immigrant Happiness?

The relationship between income and happiness for international immigrants has been relatively unexplored. A handful of cross-sectional studies has shown that income and happiness are positively correlated after migration, and that wealthier immigrants are more satisfied with their post-migration lives than are their less privileged peers. What is unclear is if the link between income and happiness remains positive as immigrants assimilate to life in a new country. This question is the focus of our study. Using longitudinal data from over 10,000 immigrants tracked up to 30 years in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, we set out to provide some insight into the long-term relationship between immigrants’ self-reported life satisfaction and the level of their income in its absolute form. Longitudinal analyses revealed that immigrants who experienced increases in income over time reported greater satisfaction with life and that the income-happiness link remained relatively stable over time. The effect of absolute income on immigrants’ happiness was, nevertheless, small. We also observed that country of origin played an important role in the post-migration association between income and happiness. Income was a stronger predictor of the life satisfaction of immigrants from poorer origins than it was for their wealthier counterparts.     

The Development,Psychometric Analyses and Correlates of a Self-Report Measure on Disorganization and Role Reversal

A limited number of measures assess young adults’ perceptions of childhood disorganized and controlling attachment, and although they are empirically strong, the use of these measures can be time consuming and financially straining. The current study aimed to add to the attachment literature by developing a self-report measure, the Childhood Disorganization and Role Reversal Scale (CDRR), to assess for the complexity of those attachment constructs in young adults. This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the CDRR using two separate samples of 750 and 656 undergraduate students (601 females; M_age?=?18.68, 66.4% Caucasian; 531 females; M_age?=?18.68 years, 63.6% Caucasian; respectively), and a community sample of 96 participants (81 females, M_age?=?19.27, 65.6% Caucasian). The results of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed a four-factor structure for both CDRR parent versions. The CDRR mother version includes the Disorganization/Punitive, Mutual Hostility, Affective Caregiving, and Appropriate Boundaries scales, while the CDRR father version includes the Disorganization, Affective Caregiving, Appropriate Boundaries, and Punitive scales. Overall, support was provided for the psychometric properties of the CDRR. For instance, the CDRR scales demonstrated adequate structural stability (confirmatory factor analyses), internal consistency (Cronbach’s coefficient alphas ranged from .78–.95 for mother scale, and .75–.96 or father scale), temporal reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient ranged from .68–.89 for mother scale, and .69–.87 for father scale), criterion-related validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The CDRR will assist researchers in broadening the understanding of psychological outcomes of disorganized and controlling attachment representations in young adulthood.     

Reappraisal inventiveness: impact of appropriate brain activation during efforts to generate alternative appraisals on the perception of chronic stress in women*

Background and objectives: Previous research indicated that more left-lateralized prefrontal activation during cognitive reappraisal efforts was linked to a greater capacity for generating reappraisals, which is a prerequisite for the effective implementation of cognitive reappraisal in everyday life. The present study examined whether the supposedly appropriate brain activation is relevant in terms of more distal outcomes, i.e., chronic stress perception.

Design and methods: Prefrontal EEG alpha asymmetry was recorded while female participants were generating reappraisals for stressful events and was correlated with their self-reported chronic stress levels in everyday life (n?=?80).

Results: Women showing less left-lateralized brain activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during cognitive reappraisal efforts reported experiencing more stress in their daily lives. This effect was independent of self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions.

Conclusion: These findings underline the practical relevance of individual differences in appropriate brain activation during emotion regulation efforts and the assumedly related basic capacity for the generation of cognitive reappraisals to the feeling of being stressed. Implications include the selection of interventions for the improvement of coping with stress in women in whom the capability for appropriate brain activation during reappraisal efforts may be impaired, e.g., due to depression or old age.     

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

Frontostriatal networks play critical roles in grounding action semantics and syntactic skills. Indeed, their atrophy distinctively disrupts both domains, as observed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease, even during early disease stages. However, frontostriatal degeneration in these conditions may begin up to 15 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, opening avenues for pre‐clinical detection via sensitive tasks. Such a mission is particularly critical in HD, given that patients’ children have 50% chances of inheriting the disease. Against this background, we assessed whether deficits in the above‐mentioned domains emerge in subjects at risk to develop HD. We administered tasks tapping action semantics, object semantics, and two forms of syntactic processing to 18 patients with HD, 19 asymptomatic first‐degree relatives, and sociodemographically matched controls for each group. The patients evinced significant deficits in all tasks, but only those in the two target domains were independent of overall cognitive state. More crucially, relative to controls, the asymptomatic relatives were selectively impaired in action semantics and in the more complex syntactic task, with both patterns emerging irrespective of the subjects’ overall cognitive state. Our findings highlight the relevance of these dysfunctions as potential prodromal biomarkers of HD. Moreover, they offer theoretical insights into the differential contributions of frontostriatal hubs to both domains while paving the way for innovations in diagnostic procedures.     

On the limits of statistical learning: Intertrial contextual cueing is confined to temporally close contingencies

Since the seminal study by Chun and Jiang (Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28–71, 1998), a large body of research based on the contextual-cueing paradigm has shown that the cognitive system is capable of extracting statistical contingencies from visual environments. Most of these studies have focused on how individuals learn regularities found within an intratrial temporal window: A context predicts the target position within a given trial. However, Ono, Jiang, and Kawahara (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 31, 703–712, 2005) provided evidence of an intertrial implicit-learning effect when a distractor configuration in preceding trials N ? 1 predicted the target location in trials N. The aim of the present study was to gain further insight into this effect by examining whether it occurs when predictive relationships are impeded by interfering task-relevant noise (Experiments 2 and 3) or by a long delay (Experiments 1, 4, and 5). Our results replicated the intertrial contextual-cueing effect, which occurred in the condition of temporally close contingencies. However, there was no evidence of integration across long-range spatiotemporal contingencies, suggesting a temporal limitation of statistical learning.     

Frequency of finger looking during finger counting is related to children's working memory capacities

Finger counting can be useful in solving arithmetic problems, noticeably because it reduces the working memory demand of mental calculations. However, proprioceptive information might not be sufficient to keep track of the number of fingers raised during problem solving, and visual input may play an important role in this process. The present study was designed to address this question and shows that 8-year-old children look at their fingers in 60% of the trials during finger counting when solving additive problems. Moreover, our results reveal that the frequency of finger looking is negatively correlated with working memory capacities and is higher for more difficult problems. These findings suggest that finger looking is recruited in managing the cognitive demand of the arithmetic task, probably by providing additional external cues to monitor the number of steps that have to be incremented during finger counting.     

Dual-task automatization: The key role of sensory–motor modality compatibility

How do people automatize their dual-task performance through bottleneck bypassing (i.e., accomplish parallel processing of the central stages of two tasks)? In the present work we addressed this question, evaluating the impact of sensory–motor modality compatibility—the similarity in modality between the stimulus and the consequences of the response. We hypothesized that incompatible sensory–motor modalities (e.g., visual–vocal) create conflicts within modality-specific working memory subsystems, and therefore predicted that tasks producing such conflicts would be performed less automatically after practice. To probe for automaticity, we used a transfer psychological refractory period (PRP) procedure: Participants were first trained on a visual task (Exp. 1) or an auditory task (Exp. 2) by itself, which was later presented as Task 2, along with an unpracticed Task 1. The Task 1–Task 2 sensory–motor modality pairings were either compatible (visual–manual and auditory–vocal) or incompatible (visual–vocal and auditory–manual). In both experiments we found converging indicators of bottleneck bypassing (small dual-task interference and a high rate of response reversals) for compatible sensory–motor modalities, but indicators of bottlenecking (large dual-task interference and few response reversals) for incompatible sensory–motor modalities. Relatedly, the proportion of individuals able to bypass the bottleneck was high for compatible modalities but very low for incompatible modalities. We propose that dual-task automatization is within reach when the tasks rely on codes that do not compete within a working memory subsystem.