A family-based mental health program of recovery from state terror in Kosova

Family processes of communication, mutual support, and sustenance of cultural values can play vital roles in recovery from psychological and material damage in societies afflicted by terror. This is particularly the case when a campaign of terror has specifically targeted family life and its traditions, when the culture is one whose identity has been centered in its families, and when public mental health resources have been scarce. At the end of the 1999 war in Kosova, the Kosovar Family Professional Educational Collaborative (KFPEC) was initiated to counter mental health sequelae of war in Kosova. This initiative focused upon the recovery and strengthening of Kosovar families, rather than the psychiatric treatment of individuals for post-traumatic symptoms. Findings and outcomes from this project may usefully inform the design of other international public mental health initiatives.     

Mindfulness and Marital Satisfaction

This study investigated the relationships among mindfulness, marital satisfaction, and perceived spousal similarity. All 95 subjects responded to a questionnaire measuring each of these variables, and an additional series of demographic variables. A significant positive relationship was found between mindfulness and marital satisfaction, with no statistically significant relationship found between perceived spousal similarity and marital satisfaction. There was a stronger correlation between mindfulness and marital satisfaction than the correlation between marital satisfaction and any of the other variables, including similarity. These results carry meaningful implications for the role of mindfulness techniques within the context of building and maintaining happy marital relationships and general well-being.     

APP23 mice as a model of Alzheimer's disease: an example of a transgenic approach to modeling a CNS disorder

Animal models are considered essential in research ensuing elucidation of human disease processes and subsequently, testing of potential therapeutic strategies. This is especially true for neurodegenerative disorders, in which the first steps in pathogenesis are often not accessible in human patients. Alzheimer's disease is vastly becoming a major medical and socioeconomic problem in our aging society. Valid animal models for this uniquely human condition should exhibit histopathological, biochemical, cognitive, and behavioral alterations observed in Alzheimer's disease patients. Major progress has been made since the understanding of the genetic basis of Alzheimer's disease and the development and improvement of transgenic mouse models. All present Alzheimer's disease models developed are partial but nevertheless essential in further unraveling the nature and spatial and temporal development of the complex molecular pathology underlying this condition. One of the more recent transgenic attempts to model Alzheimer's disease is the APP23 transgenic mouse. This article describes the development and assessment of this human amyloid precursor protein overexpression model. We summarize histopathological and biochemical, cognitive and behavioral observations made in heterozygous APP23 mice, thereby emphasizing the model's contribution to clarification of neurodegenerative disease mechanisms. In addition, the first therapeutic interventions in the APP23 model are included.     

Mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria: maintained attention to and impaired disengagement from negative information

Attentional bias to negative information has been proposed to be a cognitive vulnerability factor for the development of depression. In 2 experiments, the authors examined mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria. In both experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed an attentional task with negative, positive, and neutral word cues preceding a target. Targets appeared either at the same or at the opposite location of the cue. Overall, results indicate that dysphoric participants show maintained attention for negative words at longer stimulus presentations, which is probably caused by impaired attentional disengagement from negative words. Furthermore, nondysphoric participants maintain their attention more strongly to positive words. These results are discussed in relation to recent developments in the pathogenesis and treatment of depression.     

Communication strategies to promote spiritual well-being among people with dementia

Declining communication skills in dementia threaten a person's sense of self. Building on enduring capabilities, pastoral visitors can significantly enhance spiritual well-being through the use of individualized, person-centered strategies. This article outlines the primary spiritual needs of older adults with dementia and some general strategies to improve communication based on enduring abilities. Detailed examples illustrate how these personhood-centered strategies can meet spiritual needs by connecting with individuals with dementia through life stories and through helping them to participate in religious life.     

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but ethnophaulisms can alter the portrayal of immigrants to children

An archival study examined the portrayal of ethnic immigrants to children as a function of the prevailing cognitive representation of those ethnic immigrant groups in ethnophaulisms. The complexity in ethnophaulisms (and, to a lesser degree, the valence in ethnophaulisms) predicted the portrayal of ethnic immigrant groups. Overall, ethnic immigrant groups characterized in terms of ethnophaulisms of low complexity were less frequently present in children's literature, children from these ethnic groups were described more in terms of physical appearance than in terms of personal traits, fictional child characters from those ethnic groups were portrayed with smaller heads and with lower verbal complexity, and the folksongs attributed to these groups had a more negative affective tone. The implications of these results for approaches to intergroup relations are considered.     

Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task

In a previous study, a bilingual advantage for preschool children in solving the dimensional change card sort task was attributed to superiority in inhibition of attention (Bialystok, 1999). However, the task includes difficult representational demands to encode and interpret the task stimuli, and bilinguals may also have profited from superior representational abilities. This possibility is examined in three studies. In Study 1, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on versions of the problem containing moderate representational demands but not on a more demanding condition. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that bilingual children were more skilled than monolinguals when the target dimensions were perceptual features of the stimulus and that the two groups were equivalent when the target dimensions were semantic features. The conclusions are that bilinguals have better inhibitory control for ignoring perceptual information than monolinguals do but are not more skilled in representation, confirming the results of the original study. The results also identify the ability to ignore an obsolete display feature as the critical difficulty in solving this task.     

Functional analysis and treatment of inappropriate sexual behavior

The results of a functional analysis showed that inappropriate sexual behaviors exhibited by a 9-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury were maintained by positive reinforcement in the form of social attention. An intervention consisting of functional communication training and extinction resulted in reduced levels of inappropriate sexual behaviors.     

Project Trust: breaking down barriers between middle school children

This paper analyzes the success of a camp retreat weekend called Project Trust involving middle school students and teachers. The goal of the camp is to break down barriers between cliques identified as active in the school. The camp focuses on building team relationships across clique membership and incorporates elements of peace education and conflict resolution. A treatment group (campers) and comparison group (noncampers) were administered an adaptation of the Bogardus Social Distance Test and the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale before and after the camp. Attendance was found to lower social distance scores for nine of the ten groups/cliques. Campers also had higher self-concept scores after the retreat.     

The relative strengths of indirect and direct word learning

Indirect word learning lacks many of the overt social-pragmatic cues to reference available in direct word learning, yet the two result in equally robust mappings when comprehension is assessed immediately after learning. The 3 studies reported here investigated how 3-year-olds (N=96) respond to more challenging tests of the relative strengths of indirect and direct word learning. In Study 1, children's comprehension of indirectly and directly learned proper and common names was tested after a 2-day delay. Both types of learning resulted in proper name mappings that picked out an individual and in common name mappings that could be extended to another category member. In Studies 2 and 3, children's comprehension was tested after they had been provided with additional, and sometimes inconsistent, information about the scope of previously learned words. There was a hint of a difference between indirect and direct word learning. but results overall suggested that the two were equivalent.