Greed, death, and values: from terror management to transcendence management theory

Research supporting terror management theory has shown that participants facing their death (via mortality salience) exhibit more greed than do control participants. The present research attempts to distinguish mortality salience from other forms of mortality awareness. Specifically, the authors look to reports of near-death experiences and posttraumatic growth which reveal that many people who nearly die come to view seeking wealth and possession as empty and meaningless. Guided by these reports, a manipulation called death reflection was generated. In Study 1, highly extrinsic participants who experienced death reflection exhibited intrinsic behavior. In Study 2, the manipulation was validated, and in Study 3, death reflection and mortality salience manipulations were compared. Results showed that mortality salience led highly extrinsic participants to manifest greed, whereas death reflection again generated intrinsic, unselfish behavior. The construct of value orientation is discussed along with the contrast between death reflection manipulation and mortality salience.     

Dyslexic students have more everyday cognitive lapses

There is a dearth of information about the everyday performance difficulties of adult dyslexic people. This study investigates the empirical support for anecdotal reports of increased vulnerability to distraction in dyslexia, using the self-report Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). Two groups of university students, a dyslexic group and a non-dyslexic control group, were asked to complete the CFQ. The dyslexic group reported a higher frequency of everyday lapses in cognition, scoring significantly higher on a number of CFQ items. Representative problems include distractibility, over-focusing (so that relevant peripheral information is missed), and word-finding difficulties. A similar measure administered to close friends of dyslexic people, the CFQ-for-others, yielded results consistent with those of the CFQ, with major findings being that their friends considered them to be more disorganised, more distractible, and more absent-minded than normal. The results indicate clearly the continuing effects of dyslexia on cognition in adulthood and demonstrate that dyslexic impairments are not limited to "artificial" laboratory tasks or even literacy tasks but, instead, pervade everyday life.     

Genetic Cancer Risk Assessment and Counseling: Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors

These cancer genetic counseling recommendations describe the medical, psychosocial, and ethical ramifications of identifying at-risk individuals through cancer risk assessment with or without genetic testing. They were developed by members of the Practice Issues Subcommittee of the National Society of Genetic Counselors Cancer Genetic Counseling Special Interest Group. The information contained in this document is derived from extensive review of the current literature on cancer genetic risk assessment and counseling as well as the personal expertise of genetic counselors specializing in cancer genetics. The recommendations are intended to provide information about the process of genetic counseling and risk assessment for hereditary cancer disorders rather than specific information about individual syndromes. Key components include the intake (medical and family histories), psychosocial assessment (assessment of risk perception), cancer risk assessment (determination and communication of risk), molecular testing for hereditary cancer syndromes (regulations, informed consent, and counseling process), and follow-up considerations. These recommendations should not be construed as dictating an exclusive course of management, nor does use of such recommendations guarantee a particular outcome. These recommendations do not displace a health care provider's professional judgment based on the clinical circumstances of a client.     

Pavlovian conditioning of Hermissenda: current cellular, molecular, and circuit perspectives

The less-complex central nervous system of many invertebrates make them attractive for not only the molecular analysis of the associative learning and memory, but also in determining how neural circuits are modified by learning to generate changes in behavior. The nudibranch mollusk Hermissenda crassicornis is a preparation that has contributed to an understanding of cellular and molecular mechanisms of Pavlovian conditioning. Identified neurons in the conditioned stimulus (CS) pathway have been studied in detail using biophysical, biochemical, and molecular techniques. These studies have resulted in the identification and characterization of specific membrane conductances contributing to enhanced excitability and synaptic facilitation in the CS pathway of conditioned animals. Second-messenger systems activated by the CS and US have been examined, and proteins that are regulated by one-trial and multi-trial Pavlovian conditioning have been identified in the CS pathway. The recent progress that has been made in the identification of the neural circuitry supporting the unconditioned response (UR) and conditioned response (CR) now provides for the opportunity to understand how Pavlovian conditioning is expressed in behavior.     

Searching in the center: pigeons (Columba livid) encode relative distance from walls of an enclosure

Pigeons (Columba livia) searched for food hidden in the center of a square enclosure. On occasional tests without food, the enclosure was (a) unchanged from training (control tests), (b) moved to different corners of the testing room (corner tests), or (c) doubled in size (expansion tests). The birds showed localized search in the center of the enclosure on control and corner tests. On expansion tests, some birds searched near the center of the enclosure, suggesting relative-distance encoding. Other birds searched at locations that maintained the training distance from walls, suggesting absolute-distance encoding. These results are consistent with previous studies on chicks (Gallus gallus) in similar enclosures and contrast with previous results on pigeons' responses to expansions of discrete landmark arrays.     

The associative memory deficit of older adults: further support using face-name associations

Previous studies have established an associative deficit hypothesis (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), which attributes part of older adults' deficient episodic memory performance to their difficulty in creating cohesive episodes. In this article, the authors further evaluate this hypothesis, using ecologically relevant materials. Young and old participants studied name-face pairs and were then tested on their recognition memory for the names, faces, and the name-face pairs. The results extend the conditions under which older adults exhibit an associative deficit. They also show that reduced attentional resources are not the sole mediator of this deficit.     

Systematic application and removal of protective equipment in the assessment of multiple topographies of self-injury

We evaluated the effects of systematic application and removal of protective equipment on three topographies of self-injurious behavior (SIB) exhibited by a girl who had been diagnosed with autism. Results showed that when protective equipment was applied, SIB decreased to near-zero levels. In addition, withdrawal of protective equipment for specific topographies of SIB (by removing only the corresponding padding) increased rates of SIB only for that topography of SIB. Next, a functional analysis of hand SIB showed that protective equipment suppressed this behavior in all conditions and that the behavior was maintained by automatic reinforcement when padding was removed. Results are discussed in terms of sensory extinction as a possible mechanism responsible for response suppression.     

"Capacity" reconsidered: interindividual differences in language comprehension and individual alpha frequency

The influence of interindividual differences in cognitive mechanisms on language comprehension remains controversial not only due to conflicting experimental findings, but also in view of the difficulty associated with determining which measure should be used in participant classification. Here, we address the latter problem by proposing that an electrophysiological measure, individual alpha frequency (IAF), may be a suitable means of classifying interindividual differences in sentence processing. Interindividual differences in IAF have been shown to correlate with performance on memory tasks and speed of information processing. In two experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), IAF-based participant groups differed systematically with regard to the processing of ambiguous sentences such that the low-IAF group showed a sustained positivity in the ambiguous region, while the high-IAF group did not. These interindividual differences were independent of whether the ambiguity was syntactic (Experiment 1) or sentence-level semantic (Experiment 2). Moreover, they were reliable only when participants were classified according to IAF, but not in classifications based on reading span, speed of processing (reaction time), or accuracy of processing (error rate).     

Training parents to implement pediatric feeding protocols

Four different multicomponent training packages were evaluated to increase the treatment integrity of parents implementing pediatric feeding protocols. In Study 1 we exposed 3 parents to a training package that consisted of written protocols (baseline), verbal instructions, therapist modeling, and rehearsal training. Results suggested that the package was successful in increasing treatment integrity of the feeding protocols to high levels. Study 2 investigated three different parent-training packages comprised of components used in Study 1. Two parents were exposed to written protocols, verbal instructions, and modeling; 2 parents were exposed to written protocols, verbal instructions, and rehearsal; and 2 parents were exposed to written protocols and verbal instructions. Results of Study 2 showed that each parent-training package produced very high treatment integrity. Follow-up data in the clinic and home for 5 participants suggested that the results were durable for up to 3 months. These results demonstrate a first step in the transfer and application of research findings into routine clinical practice because we evaluated several methods for training parents to implement behavioral feeding protocols, and we demonstrated that these methods resulted in high levels of treatment integrity in a controlled clinical setting.     

On the lateralization of emotional prosody: an event-related functional MR investigation

In order to investigate the lateralization of emotional speech we recorded the brain responses to three emotional intonations in two conditions, i.e., "normal" speech and "prosodic" speech (i.e., speech with no linguistic meaning, but retaining the 'slow prosodic modulations' of speech). Participants listened to semantically neutral sentences spoken with a positive, neutral, or negative intonation in both conditions and judged how positive, negative, or neutral the intonation was on a five-point scale. Core peri-sylvian language areas, as well as some frontal and subcortical areas were activated bilaterally in the normal speech condition. In contrast, a bilateral fronto-opercular region was active when participants listened to prosodic speech. Positive and negative intonations elicited a bilateral fronto-temporal and subcortical pattern in the normal speech condition, and more frontal activation in the prosodic speech condition. The current results call into question an exclusive right hemisphere lateralization of emotional prosody and expand patient data on the functional role of the basal ganglia during the perception of emotional prosody.