Measuring Daytime Drowsiness in Nursing Home Residents: The MSLT-NH

A standardized method of assessing daytime drowsiness in frail nursing home residents has not been previously available. We present here the development and test characteristics of an instrument to measure daytime drowsiness in nursing home residents with cognitive and functional impairment, the Multiple Sleep Latency Test-Nursing Home (MSLT-NH). In a standardized manner, the resident is tested three times in one day (at 9 a.m., 11 a.m., and 1 p.m.) to measure the amount of time until the subject falls asleep. The average sleep latency (minutes to fall asleep) is the measure of interest. We tested the MSLT-NH in 95 residents from six community nursing homes in the Los Angeles area (82% of subjects were female; 81% were white, mean age was 86.6 years and mean score on the Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE] was 9.4). Interrater reliability of the MSLT-NH was quite good (correlations between raters ranged from 0.98 to 0.99; all p values were <.0001). Validity was assessed by comparing MSLT-NH results to simultaneous wrist activity estimation of sleep, and by comparing MSLT-NH findings to results from nighttime sleep estimation by wrist actigraphy the night prior to MSLT-NH. The percent agreement between MSLT-NH and wrist actigraph ranged from 77% to 79% MSLT-NH results were significantly associated with peak duration of nighttime sleep episodes the night prior to testing. The MSLT-NH was also quite acceptable for use in the NH setting. In conclusion, we have developed a promising measure of daytime drowsiness in NH residents. Further testing will help establish whether this test is a clinically useful measure of daytime drowsiness from medications or other conditions in the NH setting.     

Does Leaving Faith Mean Leaving Family? Longitudinal Associations Between Religious Identification and Parent-Child Relationships Across Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

The present study investigated the parent-child relational repercussions of converting to religion, switching, or deconverting from religion. Qualitative research indicates that these religious changes may negatively affect parent-child relationship quality, however, few quantitative studies investigate this issue. Subsequently, we utilized structural equation modeling to test if changes in religious identification during adolescence and emerging adulthood predicted worse parent-child relationship quality using three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (N = 2,352). We found that deconversion between Waves 1–2 significantly predicted poorer parent-child relationship quality at Wave 2 and father-child relationship quality at Wave 3. Further, deconversion between Waves 2–3 significantly predicted poorer mother-child relationship quality at Wave 3. Autoregressive cross-lagged models indicated an association between deconverson and father-child relationship quality. Deconversion had a significant indirect effect on parent-child relationship quality through decreased parental warmth and mother-child religious belief similarity. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

The cognitive interview: does it successfully avoid the dangers of forensic hypnosis?

Seventy-two undergraduates viewed a videotape of a bank robbery that culminated in the shooting of a young boy. Several days later, participants were interviewed about their recollection of events in the film through baseline oral and written narrative accounts followed by random assignment to a hypnosis (HYP) condition, the cognitive interview (CI), or a motivated, repeated recall (MRR) control interview. Participants also completed a forced interrogatory recall test, which indexed potential report criterion differences between the interview conditions. In terms of information provided for the first time during treatment interviews, HYP led to greater productivity than the CI or the MRR interview, which did not differ significantly from each other. Evidence that these differences in recall resulted primarily from report criterion differences rather than differences in accessible memory was obtained from the forced interrogatory recall test. In this test, no differences were observed between the three interview conditions. Finally, the data revealed that participants' hypnotic ability was associated with the recall of erroneous and confabulatory material for those tested in the HYP and CI conditions but not those in the MRR condition. This suggests that some CI mnemonics may invoke hypnotic-like processes in hypnotizable people.     

On the capacity of attention: its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes

Working memory (WM) is the set of mental processes holding limited information in a temporarily accessible state in service of cognition. We provide a theoretical framework to understand the relation between WM and aptitude measures. The WM measures that have yielded high correlations with aptitudes include separate storage-and-processing task components, on the assumption that WM involves both storage and processing. We argue that the critical aspect of successful WM measures is that rehearsal and grouping processes are prevented, allowing a clearer estimate of how many separate chunks of information the focus of attention circumscribes at once. Storage-and-processing tasks correlate with aptitudes, according to this view, largely because the processing task prevents rehearsal and grouping of items to be recalled. In a developmental study, we document that several scope-of-attention measures that do not include a separate processing component, but nevertheless prevent efficient rehearsal or grouping, also correlate well with aptitudes and with storage-and-processing measures. So does digit span in children too young to rehearse.     

Parent Reports and Laboratory Assessments of Child Temperament: A Comparison of Their Associations With Risk for Depression and Externalizing Disorders

Parent reports and laboratory assessments of child temperament traits were compared in terms of their associations with 2 indices of risk for future maladjustment: maternal history of depression and disruptive school behavior. A community sample of 99 pre-school-aged children completed a standardized battery of laboratory tasks designed to tap positive emotionality (PE) and anger. Parent reports of child temperament were collected, and maternal history of depression was assessed using structured clinical interviews. An average of 18.5 months after the initial laboratory assessment, teacher reports of disruptive school behavior were collected. Structural equation models were used to test the association between the 2 assessment approaches of child temperament and maternal history of depression and disruptive school behavior. Laboratory measures and parent reports of anger were equally good at predicting disruptive school behavior, while laboratory measures of PE showed stronger associations with maternal history of depression than parent report.     

A survey of psychologists' attitudes towards and utilization of exposure therapy for PTSD

Although research supports the efficacy of exposure therapy for PTSD, some evidence suggests that exposure is under-utilized in general clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to assess licensed psychologists' use of imaginal exposure for PTSD and to investigate perceived barriers to its implementation. A total of 852 psychologists from three states were randomly selected and surveyed. An additional 50 members of a trauma special interest group of a national behavior therapy organization were also surveyed. The main survey results indicate that a large majority of licensed doctoral level psychologists do not report use of exposure therapy to treat patients with PTSD. Although approximately half of the main study sample reported that they were at least somewhat familiar with exposure for PTSD, only a small minority used it to treat PTSD in their clinical practice. Even among psychologists with strong interest and training in behavioral treatment for PTSD, exposure therapy is not completely accepted or widely used. Clinicians also appear to perceive a significant number of barriers to implementing exposure.     

Neural correlates of the effects of morphological family frequency and family size: an MEG study

Schreuder and Baayen (Schreuder. R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language 37, 118-139) report that lexical decision times to nouns are not sensitive to the cumulative frequency of the noun's morphological derivatives in its "morphological family", even though such a cumulative frequency effect is obtained in the domain of inflection. Under a decomposition view of derivational morphology, this constitutes a puzzling exception to the robust finding that lexical frequency is one of the major determinants of behavioral response latencies. If morphologically complex words are decomposed, each occurrence of a member of a noun's morphological family should add to its root-frequency. We investigated the effects of morphological family frequency on the magnetoencephalographic response component M350, which shows sensitivity to factors affecting early stages of lexical processing, including lexical frequency. We hypothesized that high morphological family frequency should have a facilitory effect on the M350, even though no such effect can be seen in response time, presumably due to competition among possible root-affix combinations. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that high family frequency elicits an M350 inhibition, suggesting that competition among morphological family members occurs at the M350. The result is significant, since there is evidence that competition among phonologically similar words occurs after, not at, the M350. Thus, our results suggest that competition within a morphological family precedes competition within a phonological similarity neighborhood.     

Daily Affect and Intimacy in Emerging Adult Couples

We investigated individual- and couple-level associations between daily intimacy and affective states (N = 2211 observations) in 20 heterosexual emerging adult couples (age 18–25 years, M = 23) who had been in a sexual relationship with one another for at least 3 weeks (M = 12 months). Individual analyses revealed that emerging adults’ feelings of intimacy varied from day to day and that there were no gender differences in daily intimacy. Affect and intimacy were positively associated within day for women, but not for men. Time-lagged individual-level analyses revealed that prior-day positive or negative affect did not predict present-day intimacy for men or women. However, prior-day intimacy positively predicted present-day positive affect in men and negatively predicted present-day negative affect in women. Time-lagged couple-level analyses revealed that men’s prior-day positive affect positively predicted their female partner’s present-day intimacy. Women’s prior-day intimacy negatively predicted their male partner’s present-day negative affect. Implications of the day-to-day associations of intimacy with positive and negative affect within emerging adult couples are discussed.