Chronic Sorrow in Caregiving Spouses of Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

The article focuses on the concept of chronic sorrow in a sample of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and their caregiving spouses. A study was designed to determine the long-term grief or chronic sorrow that develops in caregiving spouses and to increase knowledge of the nature of chronic sorrow. Utilizing the Burke Nursing Consortium for Research on Chronic Sorrow questionnaire and Lindgren's (1996) study as a prototype, the author discovered that repetitive feelings of sorrow and distress appear in caregivers when major disruptive changes occur in their lives due to the persistent demands caused by the illness. Continual coping skills are needed to keep caregivers from being mentally, emotionally, and physically depleted. The findings of this study are consistent with Lindgren's 1996 study of chronic sorrow in persons with Parkinson's disease.     

Stuttering treatment control using P300 event-related potentials

Positron emission tomography studies during speech have indicated a failure to show the normal activation of auditory cortical areas in stuttering individuals. In the present study, P300 event-related potentials were used to investigate possible effects of behavioral treatment on the pattern of signal amplitude and latency between waves. In order to compare variations in P300 measurements, a control group paired by age and gender to the group of stutterers, was included in the study. Findings suggest that the group of stutterers presented a significant decrease in stuttering severity after the fluency treatment program. Regarding P300 measurements, stutterers and their controls presented results within normal limits in all testing situations and no significant statistical variations between pre and post treatment testing. When comparing individual results between the testing situations, stutterers presented a higher average decrease in wave latency for the right ear following treatment. The results are discussed in light of previous P300 event-related potentials and functional imaging studies with stuttering adults.Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to describe the: (1) use of P300 event-related potentials in the study of stuttering; (2) differences between stuttering and non-stuttering adults; and (3) effects of behavioral fluency treatment on cerebral activity in stuttering speakers.     

Suspicious spirits, flexible minds: when distrust enhances creativity

Intuitively, as well as in light of prior research, distrust and creativity appear incompatible. The social consequences of distrust include reluctance to share information, a quality detrimental to creativity in social settings. At the same time, the cognitive concomitants of distrust bear resemblance to creative cognition: Distrust seems to foster thinking about nonobvious alternatives to potentially deceptive appearances. These cognitive underpinnings of distrust hold the provocative implication that distrust may foster creativity. Mirroring these contradictory findings, we suggest that the social versus cognitive consequences of distrust have diverging implications for creativity. We address this question in Study 1 by introducing private/public as a moderating variable for effects of distrust on creativity. Consistent with distrust's social consequences, subliminal distrust (vs. trust) priming had detrimental effects on creative generation presumed to be public. Consistent with distrust's cognitive consequences, though, an opposite tendency emerged in private. Study 2 confirmed a beneficial effect of distrust on private creative generation with a different priming method and pointed to cognitive flexibility as the mediating process. Studies 3 and 4 showed increased category inclusiveness versus increased remote semantic spread after distrust priming, consistent with enhanced cognitive flexibility as a consequence of distrust. Taken together, these results provide evidence for the creativity-enhancing potential of distrust and suggest cognitive flexibility as its underlying mechanism.     

A cognitive-behavioral treatment for irritable bowel syndrome using interoceptive exposure to visceral sensations

BackgroundIrritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic and debilitating medical condition with few efficacious pharmacological or psychosocial treatment options available. Evidence suggests that visceral anxiety may be implicated in IBS onset and severity. Thus, cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) that targets visceral anxiety may alleviate IBS symptoms.MethodsThe current study examined the efficacy of a CBT protocol for the treatment of IBS which directly targeted visceral sensations. Participants (N = 110) were randomized to receive 10 sessions of either: (a) CBT with interoceptive exposure (IE) to visceral sensations; (b) stress management (SM); or (c) an attention control (AC), and were assessed at baseline, mid-treatment, post-treatment, and follow-up sessions.ResultsConsistent with hypotheses, the IE group outperformed AC on several indices of outcome, and outperformed SM in some domains. No differences were observed between SM and AC. The results suggest that IE may be a particularly efficacious treatment for IBS.ConclusionsImplications for research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Power and overconfident decision-making

Five experiments demonstrate that experiencing power leads to overconfident decision-making. Using multiple instantiations of power, including an episodic recall task (Experiments 1–3), a measure of work-related power (Experiment 4), and assignment to high- and low-power roles (Experiment 5), power produced overconfident decisions that generated monetary losses for the powerful. The current findings, through both mediation and moderation, also highlight the central role that the sense of power plays in producing these decision-making tendencies. First, sense of power, but not mood, mediated the link between power and overconfidence (Experiment 3). Second, the link between power and overconfidence was severed when access to power was not salient to the powerful (Experiment 4) and when the powerful were made to feel personally incompetent in their domain of power (Experiment 5). These findings indicate that only when objective power leads people to feel subjectively powerful does it produce overconfident decision-making.     

Similarity, Cohesion, and Friendship Networks Among Boys and Girls: A One-Year Follow-Up Study Among Italian Children

This study aimed to investigate the follow-up effects of certain characteristics of children??s friendships, such as similarity and cohesion with friends as represented by the children through drawing, as well as the breadth of their friendship networks as perceived by children. Participants were 115 children who were 6 to 9?years old (M?=?7.09.14, SD?=?0.41; 51?% female), attending two primary schools in northwest Italy. We used children??s drawings and self-reported measures to investigate friendship at both dyadic and network levels. Multiple logistic regressions indicated that mean score of similarity was positively associated with friendship network while an increase in cohesion was negatively associated with friendship network at follow-up. These associations did not vary by sex and stability or change of drawn friend. The paper contributes to the knowledge on the subject of friendship among children, especially in light of its focus on the associations between the components of friendship and the friendship network. Findings demonstrated that boys and girls are much more similar than expected.     

An eye movement analysis of the spatial contiguity effect in multimedia learning

In three studies, eye movements of participants were recorded while they viewed a single-slide multimedia presentation about how car brakes work. Some of the participants saw an integrated presentation in which each segment of words was presented near its corresponding area of the diagram (integrated group, Experiments 1 and 3) or an integrated presentation that also included additional labels identifying each part (integrated-with-labels group, Experiment 2), whereas others saw a separated presentation in which the words were presented as a paragraph below the diagrams (separated group, Experiments 1 and 2) or as a legend below the diagrams (legend group, Experiment 3). On measures of cognitive processing during learning, the integrated groups made significantly more eye-movements from text to diagram and vice versa (integrative transitions; d = 1.65 in Experiment 1, d = 0.85 in Experiment 2, and d = 1.44 in Experiment 3) and significantly more eye-movements from the text to the corresponding part of the diagram (corresponding transitions; d = 2.02 in Experiment 1 and d = 1.35 in Experiment 3) than the separated groups. On measures of learning outcome the integrated groups significantly outperformed the separated groups on transfer test score in Experiment 1(d = .80) and Experiment 2 (d = .73) but not in Experiment 3 (d = .35). Spatial contiguity encourages more attempts to integrate words and pictures and enables more successful integration of words and pictures during learning, which can result in meaningful learning outcomes.     

The growing significance of hot intelligences

Comments on the original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments," by R. E. Nisbett, J. Aronson, C. Blair, W. Dickens, J. Flynn, D. F. Halpern, and E. Turkheimer (see record 2011-30298-001). The present authors note that Nisbett et al's review focuses on intelligences that have been topics of research through the 20th century. Since then, however, attention to a new group of intelligences that the present authors refer to as "hot intelligences" has been growing (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2004). Although Nisbett et al (2012) mentioned potential newcomers to the group of intelligences, such as practical intelligence, the present authors feel that future reviews should consider the burgeoning research in new conceptions of intelligence. Here the authors express a rationale for including a consideration of these newly described intelligences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Specificity and Engagement: Increasing ELSI’s Relevance to Nano–Scientists

Scholars studying the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) associated with emerging technologies maintain the importance of considering these issues throughout the research and development cycle, even during the earliest stages of basic research. Embedding these considerations within the scientific process requires communication between ELSI scholars and the community of physical scientists who are conducting that basic research. We posit that this communication can be effective on a broad scale only if it links societal issues directly to characteristics of the emerging technology that are relevant to the physical and natural scientists involved in research and development. In this article, we examine nano-ELSI literature from 2003 to 2010 to discern the degree to which it makes these types of explicit connections. We find that, while the literature identifies a wide range of issues of societal concern, it generally does so in a non-specific manner. It neither links societal issues to particular forms or characteristics of widely divergent nanotechnologies nor to any of the many potential uses to which those nanotechnologies may be put. We believe that these kinds of specificity are essential to those engaged in nano-scale research. We also compare the literature-based findings to observations from interviews we conducted with nanoscientists and conclude that ELSI scholars should add technical- and application-related forms of specificity to their work and their writings to enhance effectiveness and impact in communicating with one important target audience—members of the nanoscale science community.     

Encouraging employees to report unethical conduct internally: It takes a village

Via three studies of varying methodologies designed to complement and build upon each other, we examine how supervisory ethical leadership is associated with employees’ reporting unethical conduct within the organization (i.e., internal whistle-blowing). We also examine whether the positive effect of supervisory ethical leadership is enhanced by another important social influence: coworkers’ ethical behavior. As predicted, we found that employees’ internal whistle-blowing depends on an ethical tone being set by complementary social influence sources at multiple organizational levels (both supervisory and coworker levels), leading us to conclude that “it takes a village” to support internal whistle-blowing. Also, this interactive effect was found to be mediated by a fear of retaliation in two studies but not by perceptions of futility. We conclude by identifying theoretical and practical implications of our research.