The Role of Occupational Characteristics and Occupational Imbalance in Explaining Well-being

One of the key factors for promoting well-being lies in balancing one’s daily life occupations and the nature of these occupations. Occupation refers to a group of everyday life goal-directed activities which may be associated to any life domain, not necessarily work, such as leisure, education, or self-care. Yet it is not clear what constitutes occupational imbalance, and its association to other factors has not been examined systematically. This study proposed and tested a theoretical model for specifying the structural relationships between occupational imbalance, occupational characteristics, personality and well-being. 288 working adults completed the following questionnaires: Inter-goal Relations Questionnaire (occupational imbalance), Personal Projects Analysis (occupational characteristics), the Big Five Inventory (personality traits) and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (well-being). Twenty-five models were tested using structural equation modeling. All the models fit the data well. Occupational characteristics, with the exception of stress, served as significant mediators between personality and well-being, yet occupational imbalance did not play a significant role across all models. Our findings provide substantial support for the importance of occupation to well-being, however occupational imbalance is still an elusive concept that requires further investigation theoretically and empirically.     

Substance Use and Health and Safety among Homeless Youth

This study examines how substance use is associated with the health and safety of homeless youth using cross-sectional, self-report data from 285 homeless adolescents. Path models were used to examine concurrent relationships between youth’s substance use and multiple aspects of their health and safety, including measures of psychological distress, housing risk and instability, and medical problems. Substance use was examined with both global (i.e., a composite of days of use across various drugs and alcohol) and specific (i.e., rates of use of specific drugs, injection drug use) measures. After controlling for demographic and historical variables, number of days of use was significantly related to psychological distress, whereas injection drug use was significantly related to housing risk. Examination of specific drugs revealed relationships between psychological distress and the use of alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines, and a specific relationship between housing risk and the use of heroin. None of the measures of substance use was significantly related to youth’s medical problems. Implications for interventions with homeless adolescents are discussed.     

Cancer-related fatigue: a systematic and meta-analytic review of non-pharmacological therapies for cancer patients

Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is a significant clinical problem for more than 10 million adults diagnosed with cancer each year worldwide. No "gold standard" treatment presently exists for CRF. To provide a guide for future research to improve the treatment of CRF, the authors conducted the most comprehensive combined systematic and meta-analytic review of the literature to date on non-pharmacological (psychosocial and exercise) interventions to ameliorate CRF and associated symptoms (vigor/vitality) in adults with cancer, based on 119 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and non-RCT studies. Meta-analyses conducted on 57 RCTs indicated that exercise and psychological interventions provided reductions in CRF, with no significant differences between these 2 major types of interventions considered as a whole. Specifically, multimodal exercise and walking programs, restorative approaches, supportive-expressive, and cognitive-behavioral psychosocial interventions show promising potential for ameliorating CRF. The results also suggest that vigor and vitality are distinct phenomena from CRF with regard to responsiveness to intervention. With improved methodological approaches, further research in this area may soon provide clinicians with effective strategies for reducing CRF and enhancing the lives of millions of cancer patients and survivors.     

Parsing the relations between SES and stress reactivity: examining individual differences in neonatal stress response

In an effort to further delineate the reported relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and stress reactivity in children, associations between three domains of perinatal risk: socio-demographic, obstetrical complications, and maternal psychological factors during the perinatal period, and cortisol and behavioral reactivity were examined in 100 healthy African American neonates whose families resided in low-income environments. Behavioral and cortisol response to a heel stick and the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) was measured within the first 2 days of life. Significant associations were found between socio-demographic risk, obstetrical complications, and maternal psychological factors and neonatal behavior and cortisol in the context of the NBAS; few significant associations were found in the context of the heel stick. Greater magnitude of perinatal risk was associated with both higher and lower than average neonatal stress reactivity. The results provide preliminary data on the types of perinatal experiences that may have significant effects on stress reactivity in humans, especially in the context of families living in poverty. Application of these data to the hypothesis that prenatal stress results in programming of the fetal/neonatal stress response system is discussed.     

Exploring the mental number line: evidence from a dual-task paradigm

In a parity-judgment task smaller numbers are responded to faster with the left-hand key and vice versa for larger numbers (SNARC effect; Dehaene et al., in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371-396, 1993). We used the psychological refractory period paradigm involving a parity-judgment task and tone-discrimination task to address the question at which stage this effect arises. When the parity-judgment task is performed second, then we found equal SNARC effects for the short and the long SOA. According to the central bottleneck model, this indicates that the effect arises during the response-selection or execution stage. In Experiment 2 the parity-judgment task was performed first. The pattern of results indicates that the SNARC effect originates during the perceptual encoding or response-selection. Together, our results suggest that the SNARC effect originates while the response is selected.     

Fixed versus dynamic orientations in environmental learning from ground-level and aerial perspectives

Ground-level and aerial perspectives in virtual space provide simplified conditions for investigating differences between exploratory navigation and map reading in large-scale environmental learning. General similarities and differences in ground-level and aerial encoding have been identified, but little is known about the specific characteristics that differentiate them. One such characteristic is the need to process orientation; ground-level encoding (and navigation) typically requires dynamic orientations, whereas aerial encoding (and map reading) is typically conducted in a fixed orientation. The present study investigated how this factor affected spatial processing by comparing ground-level and aerial encoding to a hybrid condition: aerial-with-turns. Experiment 1 demonstrated that scene recognition was sensitive to both perspective (ground-level or aerial) and orientation (dynamic or fixed). Experiment 2 investigated brain activation during encoding, revealing regions that were preferentially activated perspective as in previous studies (Shelton and Gabrieli in J Neurosci 22:2711-2717, 2002), but also identifying regions that were preferentially activated as a function of the presence or absence of turns. Together, these results differentiated the behavioral and brain consequences attributable to changes in orientation from those attributable to other characteristics of ground-level and aerial perspectives, providing leverage on how orientation information is processed in everyday spatial learning.     

Cognitive costs of exposure to racial prejudice

This study examined how encountering racial prejudice affects cognitive functioning. We assessed performance on the Stroop task after subjects reviewed job files that suggested an evaluator had made nonprejudiced, ambiguously prejudiced, or blatantly prejudiced hiring recommendations. The cognitive impact of exposure to ambiguous versus blatant cues to prejudice depended on subjects' racial group. Black subjects experienced the greatest impairment when they saw ambiguous evidence of prejudice, whereas White subjects experienced the greatest impairment when they saw blatant evidence of prejudice. Given the often ambiguous nature of contemporary expressions of prejudice, these results have important implications for the performance of ethnic minorities across many domains.     

The relation of patients' treatment preferences to outcome in a randomized clinical trial

Randomization procedures are performed in order to maximize the internal validity of treatment outcome studies. Objections have been made that this practice undermines the external validity of these studies because it ignores patients' treatment preferences, thereby precluding the self-selection of treatment that can occur in the community. This study used data from a multisite, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial comparing antidepressant medication to cognitive therapy for moderately to severely depressed outpatients. It compared the treatment outcomes of patients who, via randomization, received their preferred treatment versus those who did not. Although the majority of patients stated a preference for one treatment over the other, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of reduction in symptoms of depression between those who received their treatment of choice versus those who did not. These results do not provide support for the claim that the external validity of randomized controlled trials suffers from this aspect of the randomization procedure.