Reading and Spelling Disabilities in Children with and Without a History of Early Language Delay: A Neuropsychological and Linguistic Study

Language delay is a frequent antecedent of literacy problems, and both may be linked to phonological impairment. Studies on developmental dyslexia have led to contradictory results due to the heterogeneity of the pathological samples. The present study investigated whether Italian children with dyslexia showed selective phonological processing deficits or more widespread linguistic impairment and whether these deficits were associated with previous language delay. We chose 46 children with specific reading deficits and divided them into two groups based on whether they had language delay (LD) or not (NoLD). LD and NoLD children showed similar, severe deficits in reading and spelling decoding, but only LD children showed a moderate impairment in reading comprehension. LD children were more impaired in phonological working memory and phonological fluency, as well as in semantic fluency, grammatical comprehension, and verbal IQ. These findings indicate the presence of a moderate but widespread linguistic deficit (not limited to phonological processing) in a subset of dyslexic children with previous language delay that does not generalize to all children with reading difficulties.     

Multiple stimulus presentation yields larger deficits in children with developmental dyslexia: A study with reading and RAN-type tasks

In this study, we examined the effect of multiple versus single stimulus presentation in typically developing readers and children with developmental dyslexia. The tasks involved either reading single words or arrays of words or naming single or multiple colors and digits (rapid automatized naming or RAN). To be able to compare these sets of conditions, we recorded total response times (i.e., the time between stimulus onset and the end of the participant’s vocal response) in all cases. The study included 43 typically developing readers and 25 children with dyslexia.

Results indicate that typically developing readers have a clear advantage with multiple over single items on both RAN and reading tasks. The children with dyslexia showed a moderate advantage for multiple stimuli in naming colors and digits but presented the opposite pattern in reading.

With regard to reading, the disproportionate impairment of the children with dyslexia in dealing with multiple arrays suggests difficulty in integrating the multiple subcomponents of the reading task over and above the basic nuclear deficit in decoding words. Regarding the RAN tasks, results confirm that the requirement of integrating multiple subcomponents may be critical in mediating the predictive value of these measures on reading.     

Treating PTSD in refugees and asylum seekers within the general health care system. A randomized controlled multicenter study

Objective

There has been uncertainty about whether refugees and asylum seekers with PTSD can be treated effectively in standard psychiatric settings in industrialized countries. In this study, Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) was compared to Treatment As Usual (TAU) in 11 general psychiatric health care units in Norway. The focus was on changes in symptom severity and in the diagnostic status for PTSD and depression.

Method

Refugees and asylum seekers fulfilling the DSM-IV criteria for PTSD (N = 81) were randomized with an a-priori probability of 2:1 to either NET (N = 51) or TAU (N = 30). The patients were assessed with Clinician Administered PTSD Scale, Hamilton rating scale for depression and the MINI Neuropsychiatric Interview before treatment, and again at one and six months after the completion.

Results

Both NET and TAU gave clinically relevant symptom reduction both in PTSD and in depression. NET gave significantly more symptom reduction compared to TAU as well as significantly more reduction in participants with PTSD diagnoses. No difference in treatment efficacy was found between refugees and asylum seekers.

Conclusions

The study indicated that refugees and asylum seekers can be treated successfully for PTSD and depression in the general psychiatric health care system; NET appeared to be a promising treatment for both groups.

ClinicalTrials.gov registry number

NCT00218959.     

Implications of Independent Versus Interdependent Self-knowledge for Motivated Social Cognition: The Semantic Procedural Interface Model of the Self

The Semantic Procedural Interface Model of the Self (SPI) suggests that, depending on the strength of the situational accessibility of independent or interdependent self-knowledge, people will tend to process stimuli either unaffected by context (context-independency) or cognizant of context (context-dependency). In this paper we describe the cognitive processes underlying context-independent or context-dependent information processing. We suggest that degree of context-dependency depends on cognitive control processes (attentional focus on focal or task-relevant information; inhibition of contextual or task-irrelevant information; task-management). Second, we predict motivational effects of the self's independence/interdependence by including assumptions about possible selves.     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Life Events may Contribute to Family Communication About Cancer Risk Following BRCA1/2 Testing

We assessed whether certain life events contributed to the communication about cancer risk within families who have undergone BRCA1/2 testing. We also explored what type of resources participants would have valued to help in supporting family communication about genetic information. Two hundred and forty-six individuals (218 women, 28 men) who received a BRCA1/2 genetic test result 3 to 10 years earlier (mean of 6.4 years) participated in a telephone interview. Participants were asked about the occurrence of a number of life events (cancer diagnosis, death, uptake of prophylactic surgery, and providing care to a family member with cancer) in their family since their BRCA1/2 test result disclosure and, for each occurrence, whether it fostered family communication about cancer risk. A total of 182 participants (74 %) reported that they or one of their relatives received a cancer diagnosis, 176 (72 %) reported that someone died in their family, and 73 (30 %) stated that they or one of their relatives undertook a prophylactic surgery. During this period, 109 participants (44 %) also provided care for a family member who had cancer. Among participants who reported these life events, family communication was fostered by these events in proportions varying from 50 % (death) to 69 % (cancer diagnosis). Our results indicate that life events may contribute to family communication about cancer risk. Further research is needed to determine whether these events provide a “window of opportunity” to reach family members, address their needs and concerns about cancer, update family cancer history, and introduce genetic counseling and risk assessment.     

Increasing self–other integration through divergent thinking

Increasing evidence suggests that people may cognitively represent themselves and others just like any other, nonsocial event. Here, we provide evidence that the degree of self–other integration (as reflected by the joint Simon effect; JSE) is systematically affected by the control characteristics of temporally overlapping but unrelated and nonsocial creativity tasks. In particular, the JSE was found to be larger in the context of a divergent-thinking task (alternate uses task) than in the context of a convergent-thinking task (remote association task). This suggests that self–other integration and action corepresentation are controlled by domain-general cognitive-control parameters that regulate the integrativeness (strong vs. weak top-down control and a resulting narrow vs. broad attentional focus) of information processing irrespective of its social implications.     

Letter transpositions within and across morphemic boundaries: Is there a cross-language difference?

Research on the impact of letter transpositions that arise across morpheme boundaries has yielded conflicting results. These results have led to the suggestion that a cross-linguistic difference may exist in the recognition of Spanish and English words. In two masked-priming experiments run on separate groups of Spanish and English speakers, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the impacts of primes with letter transpositions that arose within morphemes or across morpheme boundaries on the recognition of identical or near-identical Spanish–English cognate targets. The results showed transposed-letter benefits in both Spanish and English that were not modulated by the position of the transposed letter in the prime stimulus. Our findings therefore add to the growing body of literature suggesting that the transposed-letter benefit is not affected by the position of the transposed letters relative to the morpheme boundary, and they dispel previous suggestions that there might be a genuine difference in orthographic coding across the Spanish and English writing systems.     

Willingness to accept occupational change when offered incentives: Comparing full-time and part-time employees

The ability to deal with occupational change is becoming increasingly important. We hypothesized that individual differences determining preferences for specific types of mobility (i.e., global personality traits and uncertainty tolerance) and decisional factors theoretically derived from the theory of planned behaviour (e.g., desirability of change; subjective norms) would be associated with higher willingness to accept occupational change when incentives such as greater autonomy were offered. These hypotheses were tested in a questionnaire study with samples of full-time and part-time employees. We further expected employment situation to function as a moderator in this process. Overall, results of regression analyses confirmed the relevance of the core components of the theory of planned behaviour. In addition, we found decisional factors to be more closely linked to the outcomes of full-time employees than to those of part-time employees. We discuss the practical implications of our results in terms of how best to support employees in adapting to the increasing demands for occupational change.