Encouraging Occupation: A Systematic Review of the Use of Life Review and Reminiscence Therapy for the Treatment of Depressive Symptoms in Older Adults

The present systematic review investigates the efficacy of both life review and reminiscence therapy interventions in the treatment of depressive symptoms in older adults. A systematic review of the literature was conducted using three databases: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, and PsycINFO. Six studies met the inclusion criteria, and pertinent variables were extracted for data analysis. In all six articles, the reminiscence therapy or life review intervention was found to be effective in the treatment of depressive symptoms in older adults. These interventions are appropriate for use in occupational therapy practice, as occupational therapists are well-equipped to treat the psychosocial needs of individuals.     

A Field Experiment Demonstrates Near Peer Mentorship as an Effective Support for Student Persistence

The attitudes and behaviors of peers can predict an individual’s own behaviors, particularly during adolescence. However experimental studies have not demonstrated how slightly older near peers can exert a positive influence on important aspects of school motivation that predict student academic achievement over time. We designed and evaluated the effects of a randomized controlled field experiment where 8th-grade participants were randomly assigned to either a mentoring treatment group or a tutoring control group, both led by randomly selected and trained high school students. As predicted, participants in the treatment group increased in their tendency to value and persist through academic difficulty compared to those in the control group, with important potential implications for academic achievement and peer mentoring programs.     

Development of Cognitive Skills in Children with Motor Coordination Impairments at 12-Month Follow-up

The current study presents a 1-year follow-up investigation of the development of executive functions (i.e., inhibition, updating, and shifting) in children with motor coordination impairments. Cognitive and motor coordination skills of children (N = 94) aged between 5 and 7 years with and without motor coordination impairments were compared. A second focus of the study was on pre-academic skills. The results indicate marked stability of motor coordination impairments and persistent executive functioning deficits in motor-impaired children. Inhibition and shifting performance was consistently lower, compared to the children without motor coordination impairments. Moreover, children with motor coordination impairments showed lower pre-academic skills, facing a substantial disadvantage at the beginning of formal schooling. The combined cognitive and motor problems may be the result of an underlying inhibition deficit or a general automation deficit. Implications for intervention are discussed.     

Developmentalism And The Child In Nineteenth-Century Science

In recent years, public science events have been designed as a means to foster a dialogue between science and the public and to contribute to ongoing policy processes. Regardless of their tangible outcome, such events rely on a certain framing, reconfigure scientific knowledge and conceptualise the public in specific ways. These constructs are exemplified by a science festival that was held in the train station hall in Zurich. Novel insights can be gained from a spatial, an object and an actor-related approach borrowed from the artistic context: the discussions about the White Cube can be adapted to contribute to the analysis of the science festival. When we look into the spatial situation created to foster exchange about scientific knowledge, we find how the exhibition display is taking care of minor details. While the organisers transformed the station hall into a laboratory, they created a kind of dialogic situation that filled an authority gap as it equally enabled exchange. The objects put in place in the exemplary case helped to design a customer–supplier relationship between the public and science. Under the umbrella of the science event, a range of diverse research endeavours was homogenised and unified. The audience, finally, was invited to familiarise itself with scientific knowledge. However, they were allocated a consumer role that obliged them to remain guests in the laboratory environment of the station hall. Thus, public science events may be successful in attracting large attendance and allowing more experiences with science, but while they create novel forms of familiarisation with science for visitors, they do not necessarily remedy public doubts about science and technology.     

Exploring self-defining memories in schizophrenia

Previous studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in recalling specific events from their personal past. However, the relationship between autobiographical memory impairments and disturbance of the sense of identity in schizophrenia has not been investigated in detail. In this study the authors investigated schizophrenic patients’ ability to recall self-defining memories; that is, memories that play an important role in building and maintaining the self-concept. Results showed that patients recalled as many specific self-defining memories as healthy participants. However, patients with schizophrenia exhibited an abnormal reminiscence bump and reported different types of thematic content (i.e., they recalled less memories about past achievements and more memories regarding hospitalisation and stigmatisation of illness). Furthermore, the findings suggest that impairments in extracting meaning from personal memories could represent a core disturbance of autobiographical memory in patients with schizophrenia.     

Psychological Predictors of Career Planning among Active Elite Athletes: An Application of the Social Cognitive Career Theory

The present study examines mechanisms underlying career planning among athletes in the context of sport career termination. The contribution of conscientiousness to athletes' career planning was investigated among 180 active athletes (88 females, 92 males; M_age = 20.36) by applying the social cognitive career theory (SCCT). Bootstrap analyses, performed at both broad and facet-level, revealed that conscientious individuals are more likely to plan for their future career because they set higher goals and are more confident in their capacity to plan their future career. Implications for practice are discussed in relation to intervention that could induce career planning among athletes.     

Autonomous Versus Controlled Religiosity: Family and Group Antecedents

Self-determination theory distinguishes between identified and introjected internalization of religious practices, positing that the former is experienced as autonomous, whereas the latter is experienced as controlling. A study of Italian Catholic youth showed that identified internalization was predicted by (a) parents' behaviors reflecting basic autonomy support (BAS; behaviors involving perspective taking, choice-provision, and control-minimization), (b) youth-group leader BAS, (c) parents' intrinsic value demonstration (IVD), and (d) peers' IVD. Introjected internalization was predicted by (a) conditional parental regard (CR) and (b) peers' IVD. Perceived parental warmth did not mitigate the effect of CR on introjection. The study underscores the importance of two socializing behaviors rarely studied in the area of religious socialization: IVD and conditional regard. The findings also highlight the harmful nature of CR in the religion domain as a practice for which robust negative effects on internalization cannot be eliminated by more salutary parental behaviors as warmth.     

Of pharisees and snark‐hunters: Afro‐Cuban religion as an object of knowledge

Examining some recent publications on Afro‐Cuban religions in the US, this essay argues that some of the evident shortcomings of the literature on this subject may hold important epistemological and methodological lessons for the anthropology of religion in general. These concern the pervasive lack of critical attention to the criteria by which formations of religious knowledge and practice are constituted as objects of study; a failure to acknowledge the historical interaction between theoretical models and public demand structures for authenticated cultural difference; the tendency to treat the relation between observer‐ and insider‐discourses as unproblematic and transparent; and a similarly widespread trend towards over‐systematising and homogenising internally heterogeneous and unbounded aggregates of knowledge and practice. What is suggested instead is an ethnographically informed and actor‐centred sociology of knowledge focussed on mutually articulated universes of meaning, and capable of transcending artificial conceptual boundaries between ‘the religious’ and the sphere of ‘everyday life’.     

The Effects of Accuracy Motivation on Children's and Adults' Event Recall,Suggestibility, and Their Answers to Unanswerable Questions

This study investigated children's and adults' event recall accuracy and suggestibility effects when participants' accuracy motivation was manipulated. A total of 240 participants (6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds, and adults) were shown a video and later asked 4 types of questions: answerable questions, both open-ended and strongly misleading, and unanswerable questions, both open-ended and strongly misleading. Participants were either (a) rewarded with a token for every correct answer (high accuracy motivation, Free Report Plus Incentive condition), (b) explicitly given the option of answering with "don't know" when unsure (medium accuracy motivation, Free Report condition), or (c) asked to provide an answer to every question, even when they were not sure or had to guess or both (low accuracy motivation, Forced Report condition). The condition with the high accuracy motivation yielded the highest recall accuracy scores for answerable open-ended and misleading questions. For unanswerable questions, even the youngest age group was able to increase the number of appropriate "don't know" answers when highly motivated to be accurate, but a misleading question format undermined these abilities. The results highlight important interactions between social (accuracy motivation) and cognitive factors (metacognitive monitoring processes) in children's formal interviewing.