The existential cost of economic insecurity: Threatened financial security undercuts meaning

Financial security (i.e., a person’s sense that they can afford the things they need now and in the foreseeable future) contributes to psychological health and well-being. In the present research, we explored the implications of financial security for perceptions of meaning in life. In Study 1, we found that perceptions of financial insecurity predicted perceptions of meaning in life above and beyond income. Further, income only predicted perceptions of meaning to the extent that it was associated with reduced financial insecurity. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that financial security threats undermined perceptions of meaning in life. Taken together, these studies suggest that maintaining financial security is important for a sense of meaning in life.     

The role of National Library of Medicine web sites in newborn screening education

Expanded newborn screening programs and subsequent detection of rare genetic disorders challenge parents and their medical providers to learn about the treatment and management of these disorders. Many people seek medical information on the Internet but may encounter requests for registration or fees, or find that resources are out of date, difficult to understand, or buried in advertisements. The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health, provides web-based resources that address the challenges of newborn screening education. These resources include MedlinePlus, Genetics Home Reference, ClinicalTrials.gov, and PubMed. NLM websites are not commercial, do not require registration or fees, and provide varied levels of information for a continuum of audiences from low-literacy consumers to health professionals. Using phenylketonuria as an example, this study describes the information that parents and their medical providers can find through NLM resources. NLM has embraced the digital age and provides the public with reliable, accurate, and up-to-date educational materials.     

Organizational error management culture and its impact on performance: a two-study replication

The authors argue that a high-organizational error management culture, conceptualized to include norms and common practices in organizations (e.g., communicating about errors, detecting, analyzing, and correcting errors quickly), is pivotal to the reduction of negative and the promotion of positive error consequences. Organizational error management culture was positively related to firm performance across 2 studies conducted in 2 different European countries. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative cross-sectional data from 65 Dutch organizations, Study 1 revealed that organizational error management culture was significantly correlated with both organizational goal achievement and an objective indicator of economic performance. This finding was confirmed in Study 2, using change-of-profitability data from 47 German organizations. The results suggest that organizations may want to introduce organizational error management as a way to boost firm performance.     

Source monitoring in eyewitness memory: Implicit associations,suggestions, and episodic traces

Both the distinctiveness heuristic and discrepancy detection hypotheses were investigated by independently manipulating both schema consistency and incidental suggestion in an eyewitness memory paradigm. A sequence of slides was shown, followed by a postevent questionnaire that contained both schema-typical and schema-atypical information. Fifteen minutes later, a source-monitoring task was administered. In Experiment 1, the proportion of source misattribution errors was greater for schema-typical items than for schema-atypical items, and the proportion of errors on suggested items was greater than that on control items. Suggestion affected schema-typical and schema-atypical items equally, providing no support for the predictions of either hypothesis. In Experiment 2, the interval between the questionnaire and the source test was manipulated. The results of Experiment 1 were replicated under the short delay, whereas the proportion of errors increased under the long delay. An associative network model involving two types of episodic traces was used to account for the results.     

Global and local contributions to the optical specification of time to contact: observer sensitivity to composite tau

First-order time remaining until a moving observer will pass an environmental element is optically specified in two different ways. The specification provided by global tau (based on the pattern of change of angular bearing) requires that the element is stationary and that the direction of motion is accurately detected, whereas the specification provided by composite tau (based on the patterns of change of optical size and optical distance) does not require either of these. We obtained converging evidence for our hypothesis that observers are sensitive to composite tau in four experiments involving relative judgments of time to passage with forced-choice methodology. Discrimination performance was enhanced in the presence of a local expansion component, while being unaffected when the detection of the direction of heading was impaired. Observers relied on the information carried in composite tau rather than on the information carried in its constituent components. Finally, performance was similar under conditions of observer motion and conditions of object motion. Because composite tau specifies first-order time remaining for a large number of situations, the different ways in which it may be detected are discussed.     

An Unusual Case of Motor and Vocal Tics With Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms in a Young Adult With Behcet's Syndrome

Behcet's disease is a chronic relapsing-remitting, multi-system inflammatory disorder of unknown etiology, characterized by recurrent oral and genital ulcers, uveitis, and skin lesions. The most common central nervous system findings are demyelization and perivascular cell infiltration; meningoencephalitis, cerebral atrophy, and vascular thrombosis may also occur. Neuropsychiatric symptoms may include: paroxysmal dystonia, parkinsonism, delirium, hallucinations, and behavioral disturbances. We report an unusual case of explosive onset of motor and vocal tics with obsessive-compulsive symptoms in a 22-year-old male with Behcet's disease. The putative roles of infection and autoimmune mechanisms in the pathogenesis of tics and obsessive-compulsive symptoms are explored.     

Phonological–semantic flexibility and its role in reading for Chinese kindergarten children

The present study aimed to examine the role of phonological–semantic flexibility (PSF) in learning to read Chinese. PSF refers to a specific flexibility applied to process the dual linguistic dimensions of words (i.e., sound and meaning). A correlational study (Study 1) was conducted to determine the unique contribution of PSF to three aspects of early reading abilities, including word reading accuracy, word reading fluency and reading comprehension. A total of 190 Chinese kindergarten children were tested on a PSF task and a range of cognitive, linguistic and reading tasks. Results of hierarchical regressions showed that PSF uniquely and significantly contributed to the reading abilities beyond the effects of established cognitive factors (IQ, working memory, inhibition control, and cognitive flexibility) and linguistic factors (syllable skills, morphological skill and vocabulary skill). In the second part, an intervention study (Study 2) was conducted in which two groups of kindergarten children received explicit training on PSF (27 children) and colour–shape flexibility (26 children) respectively. Children in the PSF group showed significantly more improvement in PSF and word reading fluency than the control group. Overall, the present study demonstrated the theoretical and practical importance of PSF for learning to read Chinese.     

Parents’ Verbal Communication and Childhood Anxiety: A Systematic Review

Parents’ verbal communication to their child, particularly the expression of fear-relevant information (e.g., attributions of threat to the environment), is considered to play a key role in children’s fears and anxiety. This review considers the extent to which parental verbal communication is associated with child anxiety by examining research that has employed objective observational methods. Using a systematic search strategy, we identified 15 studies that addressed this question. These studies provided some evidence that particular fear-relevant features of parental verbal communication are associated with child anxiety under certain conditions. However, the scope for drawing reliable, general conclusions was limited by extensive methodological variation between studies, particularly in terms of the features of parental verbal communication examined and the context in which communication took place, how child anxiety was measured, and inconsistent consideration of factors that may moderate the verbal communication–child anxiety relationship. We discuss ways in which future research can contribute to this developing evidence base and reduce further methodological inconsistency so as to inform interventions for children with anxiety problems.