Are families supported to come to terms with an autism diagnosis? A service evaluation of referrals to family therapy for young people with autism in one NHS trust

Young people with autism are increasingly being referred for family therapy (FT) owing to impaired family functioning, but few studies have investigated the support families receive following a diagnosis through specific NHS Trusts. This study examined (1) the proportion of autism cases referred for FT in one Trust and (2) the post-diagnostic support families received. Participants (n = 144; 9.5–19.3 years) were FT referrals between 2019–2020. Autism diagnostic status and the support families received from FT, from the neurodevelopmental (ND) service which specialises in autism, and for co-occurring conditions [e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)] was extracted retrospectively from routine data. Forty FT referrals met autism criteria: several families did not receive FT; few were provided with support from the ND service; and if CBT was offered, no adaptations for autism were noted. Families received insufficient support following a diagnosis through this Trust. Implications include improving post-diagnostic support for families in practice.     

Effects of foster care intervention and caregiving quality on the bidirectional development of executive functions and social skills following institutional rearing

Institutional rearing negatively impacts the development of children's social skills and executive functions (EF). However, little is known about whether childhood social skills mediate the effects of the foster care intervention (FCG) and foster caregiving quality following early institutional rearing on EF and social skills in adolescence. We examined (a) whether children's social skills at 8 years mediate the impact of the FCG on the development of EF at ages 12 and 16 years, and (b) whether social skills and EF at ages 8 and 12 mediate the relation between caregiving quality in foster care at 42 months and subsequent social skills and EF at age 16. Participants included abandoned children from Romanian institutions, who were randomly assigned to a FCG (n = 68) or care as usual (n = 68), and a never-institutionalized group (n = 135). At ages 8, 12, and 16, social skills were assessed via caregiver and teacher reports and EF were assessed via the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. Caregiving quality of foster caregivers was observed at 42 months. FCG predicted better social skills at 8 years, which in turn predicted better EF in adolescence. Higher caregiver quality in foster care at 42 months predicted better social skills at 8 and 12 years, and better EF at 12 years, which in turn predicted 16-year EF and social skills. These findings suggest that interventions targeting caregiving quality within foster care home environments may have long-lasting positive effects on children's social skills and EF.     

Attentional Bias for Threat: Evidence for Delayed Disengagement from Emotional Faces

The present paper reports three new experiments suggesting that the valence of a face cue can influence attentional effects in a cueing paradigm. Moreover, heightened trait anxiety resulted in increased attentional dwell-time on emotional facial stimuli, relative to neutral faces. Experiment 1 presented a cueing task, in which the cue was either an "angry", "happy", or "neutral" facial expression. Targets could appear either in the same location as the face (valid trials) or in a different location to the face (invalid trials). Participants did not show significant variations across the different cue types (angry, happy, neutral) in responding to a target on valid trials. However, the valence of the face did affect response times on invalid trials. Specifically, participants took longer to respond to a target when the face cue was "angry" or "happy" relative to neutral. In Experiment 2, the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was increased and an overall inhibition of return (IOR) effect was found (i.e., slower responses on valid trials). However, the "angry" face cue eliminated the IOR effect for both high and low trait anxious groups. In Experiment 3, threat-related and jumbled facial stimuli reduced the magnitude of IOR for high, but not for low, trait-anxious participants.These results suggest that: (i) attentional bias in anxiety may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from threat-related and emotional stimuli, and (ii) threat-related and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.     

Explaining employees' health care costs: a prospective examination of stressful job demands, personal control, and physiological reactivity

The authors tested the ability of stressful demands and personal control in the workplace to predict employees' subsequent health care costs in a sample of 105 full-time nurses. Both subjective and objective measures of workload demands interacted with personal control perceptions in predicting the cumulative health care costs over the ensuing 5-year period. Tonic elevations in salivary cortisol, moreover, mediated the effects of demands and control on health care costs. Neither the job demands variables nor physiological reactivity measures, however, explained subsequent mental health. The results support findings from the epidemiological literature that demonstrate an important role for employees' control in explaining occupational inequalities in coronary heart disease and mortality. The authors argue that the results also encourage control-enhancing job design interventions by suggesting that their outcomes can benefit both organizations and their members.     

Computer problems: are some people jinxed?

To examine the popular notion that some people are 'jinxed' when using computers 111 undergraduate psychology students were 'jinxed' whilst trying to complete a task over the Internet. No evidence was found to support that notion.     

Inhibitory effects of repeating color and shape: inhibition of return or repetition blindness?

There is a current debate regarding whether attention is influenced by stimulus attributes other than location. The present article replicates and extends previous findings that repeating the nonspatial attribute of color leads to a delay in target detection (M. B. Law, J. Pratt, & R. A. Abrams, 1995). Repetition disadvantage effects were found for the stimulus attributes of both color and shape, as well as for location. However, the nonspatial repetition disadvantage disappeared if the stimuli were presented in peripheral locations (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) or the cue was presented for 50 ms (Experiment 6). Moreover, the magnitude of the repetition disadvantage tended to decline as the cue-target stimulus-onset asynchrony increased (Experiments 5a, 5b, and 6). These results suggest that a repetition blindness mechanism may underlie the repetition disadvantage effects of nonspatial features, rather than an inhibition of return mechanism.     

Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders. In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious. In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention. When a threat cue was presented and a target subsequently presented in another location, high state-anxious individuals took longer to detect the target relative to when either a positive or a neutral cue was presented. It is concluded that threat-related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and the disengage component of attention, leaving the question of whether threat stimuli affect the shift component of attention open to debate.