Clinical Effectiveness of the LE<Superscript>3</Superscript>AN Program: A Military Healthy Lifestyle Program

For several decades, obesity has been a major health concern within the general population of the United States as well as within the unique military population. Unlike the civilian sector, military service requires individuals to meet weight and body fat standards. In order to assist overweight military personnel return to standards, Tripler Army Medical Center initiated the LE³AN Program. LE³AN is a one-week, day-treatment, cognitive-behavioral weight management program coupled with 12 months of weekly follow-up. Baseline data was collected on 387 consecutive participants. Despite physical fitness training and required standards in each military service, the average BMIs for men and women were in the obese range, with male participants’ BMIs significantly higher than women’s (34.3 vs 31.9, p<.005). One year outcome data was collected from 167 participants, i.e. 43.2% of treatment initiators. Among participants who completed treatment, men maintained a 6.56% loss of their initial weight while women maintained a 7.35% loss. Over a quarter, 26.6%, of those who started the program (but did not complete it) maintained at least a 5% weight loss at one year, while 61.6% of treatment completers maintained 5% weight losses. The opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and not those of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.     

Effects of classroom context on university students’ judgments about cheating: mediating and moderating processes

Hypothetical vignettes were used to examine the effects of classroom context variables (pedagogical quality and classroom goal structure) on undergraduate (study 1) and graduate (study 2) students’ judgments about cheating. Consistent with attribution theory and previous findings, poor (versus good) pedagogy and performance (versus mastery) goals structures resulted in more teacher blame and less student blame for cheating, and cheating was rated as more acceptable and more likely in these situations. Participants’ own prior cheating history but not their experience as a classroom teacher also affected these judgments. Relations between classroom context variables and assigned blame for cheating were mediated by students’ assessments of the fairness of the classroom situation.     

Provision of Genetic Services for Hearing Loss: Results from a National Survey and Comparison to Insights Obtained from Previous Focus Group Discussions

Hearing loss is a common sensory deficit and more than 50% of affected individuals have a genetic etiology. The discovery of 40 genes and more than 100 loci involved in hearing loss has made genetic testing for some of these genes widely available. Genetic services for deafness are also being sought more often due to the early identification of hearing loss through newborn screening services. The motivations for pursuing genetic testing, and how genetic services are provided to the client may differ among individuals. Additionally, information obtained through genetic testing can be perceived and used in different ways by parents of deaf children and deaf adults. This study aimed to follow up on focus group studies published earlier with a quantitative survey instrument and assess the preference of consumers for provision of genetic services. We conducted a national survey of hearing and deaf parents of children with hearing loss and of deaf adults. Data was compared and analyzed by hearing status of the participant, their community affiliation and the genetic testing status using nominal logistic regression. Consistent with our focus group results, the survey participants thought that a genetic counselor/geneticist would be the most appropriate professional to provide genetics services. Statistically significant differences were noted in the preferred choice of provider based on the genetic testing status. Parents preferred that genetic evaluation, including testing, occur either immediately at or a few months after the audiologic diagnosis of hearing loss. This data should help providers in clinical genetics keep patient preferences at the helm and provide culturally competent services.     

Counselling after Stroke: An Unmet Need?

Information was gathered by means of a questionnaire survey and interviews from a group of patients (N = 17) and health professionals (N=13) working within a stroke unit, concerning the emotional needs of patients and and their relatives and how staff responded to these needs. Although most of the staff had received some training or information about counselling and felt that their interactions with patients often involved an element of counselling, there was strong support for separate specialised counselling services to deal with psychological problems suffered by both patients and their relatives. Patients rated assistance with personal and emotional worries and advice about physical problems as equally useful. A strong need for a counselling service in some form or other was expressed by patients. Neither the level of the patients' social support nor the presence or absence of aphasia, however, predicted the strength of interest expressed. It is concluded that specialised psychological help could be useful in various ways for both in- and out-patients and for their families.     

Face processing: Human perception and principal components analysis

Principal components analysis (PCA) of face images is here related to subjects’ performance on the same images. In two experiments subjects were shown a set of faces and asked to rate them for distinctiveness. They were subsequently shown a superset of faces and asked to identify those that had appeared originally. Replicating previous work, we found that hits and false positives (FPs) did not correlate: Those faces easy to identify as being “seen” were unrelated to those faces easy to reject as being “unseen.” PCA was performed on three data sets: (1) face images with eye position standardized, (2) face images morphed to a standard template to remove shape information, and (3) the shape information from faces only. Analyses based on PCA of shape-free faces gave high predictions of FPs, whereas shape information itself contributed only to hits. Furthermore, whereas FPs were generally predictable from components early in the PCA, hits appeared to be accounted for by later components. We conclude that shape and “texture” (the image-based information remaining after morphing) may be used separately by the human face processing system, and that PCA of images offers a useful tool for understanding this system.     

Searle on rediscovering the mind

John R. Searle,The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 270 pp. $22.50. I would like to thank my colleagues Bernard Dauenhauer and Beth Preston for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.     

Asymmetry of perception in free viewing of chimeric faces

We have devised a new free-vision task to index functional cerebral asymmetry for processing facial characteristics. Confirming its sensitivity to properties of lateralized hemispheric functions, left- and right-handers were clearly differentiated on this task with respect to several aspects of performance that conform with known differences between handedness groups in hemispheric asymmetry. Additionally, there were highly reliable and stable individual differences in perceptual asymmetries within handedness. Analyses of items in the task revealed that most of the differences between items in the asymmetries they elicited were random.