Religiosity and well-being among older Jewish Israelis: Findings from SHARE

ABSTRACT

This study examined the correlates of religiosity among Jewish Israelis aged 50 and older. Based on the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, the findings show that almost half the Jewish respondents never pray and that, on average, prayer frequency is lower among Jewish Israelis than it is among most of their European counterparts. Multivariate logistic analyses revealed that those who pray more often have more health conditions, are less able to make ends meet financially, and have fewer years of education. However, when facing ill health those who pray more often display a relatively lesser decline in their sense of well-being.     

The Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI)

The original Maudsley Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (MOCI) has been widely used and is considered to be one of the best available self-report instruments for measuring observable obsessive-compulsive problems such as washing and checking. However, it has several limitations and requires updating. Our revision of the MOCI, the Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI), was designed to provide assessment of a range of obsessions, compulsions, avoidance behaviour, and personality characteristics of known or theoretical importance in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The development of the VOCI is described, and we provide evidence of its reliability and validity. Our findings in samples of people with OCD, people with other anxiety disorders or depression, community adults, and undergraduate students suggest that the VOCI is a promising new measure. We anticipate that, like its predecessor, the VOCI will have widespread use in both research and clinical settings.     

Understanding team adaptation: a conceptual analysis and model

This endeavor provides a multidisciplinary, multilevel, and multiphasic conceptualization of team adaptation with theoretical roots in the cognitive, human factors, and industrial-organizational psychology literature. Team adaptation and the emergent nature of adaptive team performance are defined from a multilevel, theoretical standpoint. An input-throughput-output model is advanced to illustrate a series of phases unfolding over time that constitute the core processes and emergent states underlying adaptive team performance and contributing to team adaptation. The cross-level mixed-determinants model highlights team adaptation in a nomological network of lawful relations. Testable propositions, practical implications, and directions for further research in this area are also advanced.     

Translating multiple assessment techniques into an intervention selection model for classrooms

Translating current research to school-based clinical practice highlights issues not often encountered in laboratory settings. With the assistance of a consultant, teachers conducted functional analyses, brief multielement treatment comparisons, and controlled treatment evaluations under naturalistic conditions in the classroom. Teachers also provided input on treatment selection. Treatment integrity data collected throughout the study suggested that teachers implemented analyses and treatments with high integrity. The functional analysis outcomes combined with effectiveness and acceptability data led to the selection of interventions that reduced problem behavior in the classrooms for each of 3 children.     

After the storm: enduring differences in mother-child recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic events

Despite a growing literature on the collaborative reminiscing of mothers and children, little is known about the kinds of things mothers and children discuss as they recollect shared traumatic experiences. Do mother-child recollections of a traumatic event differ from their recollections of more benign events? To address this question, mother-child dyads (N=29) discussed a traumatic event, namely a devastating tornado, and two nontraumatic events (one that preceded and one that followed the tornado). Each dyad discussed all three events 4-months post-tornado and again 6 months later. Whereas conversations about both event types (traumatic and nontraumatic) varied with children's age, dyads' recollections of the tornado were significantly longer, more narratively coherent, and more complete than their recollections of nontraumatic events. These differences largely endured over the 6-month retention interval.     

A comparison of higher order auditory processes in younger and older adults

The authors conducted 3 experiments investigating the effects of aging on higher order auditory processes. They compared younger and older adults with respect to (a) their auditory channel capacity, (b) the extent of their top-down control over auditory gain, and (c) their ability to focus attention on a narrow band of frequencies. To ensure that subclinical cochlear processing deficits in older adults (e.g., higher thresholds, poorer discrimination of frequency and intensity differences) did not limit performance, the authors used only stimuli that were perfectly discriminable by all participants. No age differences were found in any of these experiments, suggesting that some higher order auditory processes (e.g., top-down control over auditory gain, auditory attention) are preserved in normal aging, despite numerous age-related declines in peripheral auditory functionality.     

Why do older adults have difficulty following conversations?

Age-related declines in understanding conversation may be largely a consequence of perceptual rather than cognitive declines. B. A. Schneider, M. Daneman, D. R. Murphy, and S. Kwong-See (2000) showed that age-related declines in comprehending single-talker discourse could be eliminated when adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults. The authors used B. A. Schneider et al.'s methodology to investigate age-related differences in comprehending 2-person conversations. Compensating for hearing difficulties did not eliminate age-related differences when the 2 talkers were spatially separated by 9 degrees or 45 degrees azimuth, but it did when the talkers' contributions came from one central location. These findings suggest that dialogue poses more of a problem for older than for younger adults, not because of the additional cognitive requirements of having to follow 2 talkers rather than 1, but because older adults are not as good as younger adults at making use of the auditory cues that are available for helping listeners perceptually segregate the contributions of 2 spatially separated talkers.     

A "Jekyll and Hyde" within: aggressive versus friendly interactions in REM and non-REM dreams

We hypothesized that representations of social interactions in REM and non-REM (NREM) dreams would reflect differing regional brain activation patterns associated with the two sleep states, and that levels of aggressive interactions would be higher in REM than in NREM dreams. One hundred REM, 100 NREM, and 100 wake reports were collected in the home from 8 men and 7 women using the Nightcap sleep-wake mentation-monitoring system and scored for number and variety of social interactions. We found that (a) social interactions were more likely to be depicted in dream than in wake reports, (b) aggressive social interactions were more characteristic of REM than NREM or wake reports, and (c) dreamer-initiated friendliness was more characteristic of NREM than REM reports. We conclude that processing of, or simulations about, selected social interactions is preferentially performed while "off-line" during the dream state, with the REM state specializing in simulation of aggressive interactions and the NREM state specializing in simulation of friendly interactions.     

Ambiguous benefits: the effect of bilingualism on reversing ambiguous figures

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children, approximately 6 years old, attempted to identify the alternative image in a reversible figure. In both studies, bilingual children were more successful than monolinguals in seeing the other meaning in the images. In the first study, there was no relation between the ability to reverse the interpretation and performance on the children's embedded figures task, a task that superficially appeared to involve similar processes. The second study replicated this finding but showed that performance was strongly related to success in the post-switch phase of the dimensional change card sort task. In both cases, the meaning of an image must be reassigned, and bilinguals were better in both these tasks.     

Top-down gain control in the auditory system: evidence from identification and discrimination experiments

The influence of intensity range in auditory identification and intensity discrimination experiments is well documented and is usually attributed to nonsensory factors. Recent studies, however, have suggested that the stimulus range effect might be sensory in origin. To test this notion, in one set of experiments, we had listeners identify the individual tones in a set. One baseline condition consisted of identifying four 1-kHz, low-intensity tones; the other consisted of identifying four 1-kHz, high-intensity tones. In the experimental conditions, these baseline tone sets were augmented by adding a fifth tone at either 1 or 5 kHz. Added 5-kHz tones had little effect on identification accuracy for the four baseline tones. When an added 1-kHz tone differed substantially in intensity from the four baseline tones, it adversely affected performance, with the addition of a high-intensity tone to a set of low-intensity tones having a more deleterious effect than the addition of a low-intensity tone to a set of high-intensity tones. These and further results, obtained in an exploration of this asymmetrical range effect in a third identification experiment and in two intensity-discrimination experiments, were consistent with the notion of a nonlinear amplifier under top-down control whose functions include protection against sensory overload from loud sounds. The identification data were well described by a signal-detection model using equal-variance Laplace distributions instead of the usual Gaussian distributions.