Lay concepts of health and illness from a developmental perspective

Abstract

The concepts of children, adolescents and their mothers with regard to different aspects of health and illness in general and five specific diseases were explored in this study. An exploration with fully standardised questions and open answers was subjected to a content analysis. A reliable rating system was developed to score the sophistication of the answers. The study included 99 Ss of the age groups 5, 8, 12 and 16 years, as well as 48 mothers of the children. Many children and adolescents were able to define health positively (well-being) and not merely as the absence of illness. The definition of illness in general was frequently composed of somatic symptoms and disorders, feeling poorly and things one would like to accomplish but can't. The causality explanations of illness in general were dominated by contagion. The concepts of the older children and the mothers were richer, more elaborated, less concrete and less action-oriented than those of the younger children. However, abstract formulations and complex aspects of illness were very rarely expressed. In addition, concepts regarding the characteristics (definition, symptoms, causality, treatment and prevention) of five diseases (cold, measles, heart infarction, cancer and AIDS) were measured. The pattern of results was strongly influenced by age. By and large, the development of most disease concepts was linear with significant differences between age groups. Conversely, within a given age group, significant differences were found in the cognitive level of disease characteristics, either with respect to the same disease or between different diseases (“horizontal shifts”).     

Decision-making theories: linking the disparate research areas of individual and collective cognition

In order to maximize their fitness, animals have to deal with different environmental and social factors that affect their everyday life. Although the way an animal behaves might enhance its fitness or survival in regard to one factor, it could compromise them regarding another. In the domain of decision sciences, research concerning decision making focuses on performances at the individual level but also at the collective one. However, between individual and collective decision making, different terms are used resulting in little or no connection between both research areas. In this paper, we reviewed how different branches of decision sciences study the same concept, mainly called speed-accuracy trade-off, and how the different results are on the same track in terms of showing the optimality of decisions. Whatever the level, individual or collective, each decision might be defined with three parameters: time or delay to decide, risk and accuracy. We strongly believe that more progress would be possible in this domain of research if these different branches were better linked, with an exchange of their results and theories. A growing amount of literature describes economics in humans and eco-ethology in birds making compromises between starvation, predation and reproduction. Numerous studies have been carried out on social cognition in primates but also birds and carnivores, and other publications describe market or reciprocal exchanges of commodities. We therefore hope that this paper will lead these different areas to a common decision science.     

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Revictimization In Adolescence and Adulthood

Abstract

Childhood sexual abuse must be seen as a pervasive risk factor in children's lives: No demographic or family characteristics have as yet been identified to rule out the possibility that a child will be or has been sexually abused (Finkelhor, 1993). The adverse consequences of sexual abuse, both immediate and long term, have been documented by a large body of research. After a summary of the main findings from this research, the main objective of the present chapter is to examine the impact of childhood sexual abuse on a particular aspect of psychological functioning: the development of sexual behavior and sexual relationships. In this analysis, special consideration is given to the question of whether individuals who were sexually abused as children are at greater risk of experiencing sexual victimization in later life than individuals without experience of abuse. This question has generated a substantial body of evidence (see Messman & Long, 1996, for a review), and researchers are beginning to understand pathways from the experience of abuse in childhood to revictimization in adolescence and adulthood.     

Updating misconceptions: Effects of age and confidence

Young adults are more likely to correct an initial higher confidence error than a lower confidence error (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). This hypercorrection effect has never been investigated among older adults, although features of the standard paradigm (free recall, metacognitive judgments) and prior evidence of age-related error resolution deficits (see Clare & Jones, 2008) suggest that they may not show this effect. In Study 1, we used free recall and a 7-point confidence scale; in Study 2, we used multiple-choice questions, and participants indicated how many alternatives they had narrowed their options down to prior to answering. In both studies, younger and older adults showed a hypercorrection effect, and this effect was equivalent between groups in Study 2 when free recall and explicit confidence ratings were not required. These results are consistent with our previous work (Cyr & Anderson, 2012) showing that older adults can successfully resolve learning errors when the learning context provides sufficient support.     

Objective assessment of the functional role of spike train correlations using information measures

The functional role of correlations between neuronal spike trains remains strongly debated. This debate partly stems from the lack of a standardized analysis technique capable of accurately quantifying the role of correlations in stimulus encoding. We believe that information theoretic measures may represent an objective method for analysing the functional role of neuronal correlations. Here we show that information analysis of pairs of spike trains allows the information content present in the firing rate to be disambiguated from any extra information that may be present in the temporal relationships of the two spike trains. We validate and illustrate the method by applying it to simulated data with variable degrees of known synchrony, and by applying it to recordings from pairs of sites in the primary visual cortex of anaesthetized cats. We discuss the importance of information theoretic analysis in elucidating the neuronal mechanisms underlying object identification.     

Dissociation of sensory facilitation and decision bias in statistical learning

ABSTRACT

The detection of regularities in the sensory environment, known as statistical learning, is an important brain function that has been observed in many experimental contexts. In these experiments, statistical learning of patterned sensory stimulation leads to improvements in the speed and/or accuracy with which subsequent stimuli are recognized. That is, statistical learning facilitates the transformation of sensory stimuli into motor responses, but the mechanism by which this occurs is unclear. Statistical learning could improve the efficiency of sensory processing, or it could bias responses toward particular outcomes. The distinction is important, as these different hypotheses imply different functions and different neural substrates for statistical learning. Here we address this problem by studying statistical learning as a decision-making process, which allows us to leverage the extensive computational literature on this topic. Specifically we describe a method for applying the Diffusion Decision Model (DDM) to isolate different sensory and cognitive processes associated with decision-making. The results indicate that statistical learning improves performance on a visual learning task in two distinct ways: by altering the efficiency of sensory processing and by introducing biases in the decision-making process. By fitting the parameters of the DDM to data from individual subjects, we find that the prominence of these two factors differed substantially across the population, and that these differences were predictive of individual performance on the psychophysical task. Overall, these results indicate that different cognitive processes can be recruited by statistical learning, and that the DDM is a powerful framework for detecting these influences.     

Working memory and counterexample retrieval for causal conditionals

The present study is part of recent attempts to specify the characteristics of the counterexample retrieval process during causal conditional reasoning. The study tried to pinpoint whether the retrieval of stored counterexamples (alternative causes and disabling conditions) for a causal conditional is completely automatic in nature or whether the search process also demands executive working memory (WM) resources. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a counterexample generation task and a measure of WM capacity. We found a positive relation between search efficiency, as measured by the number of generated counterexamples in limited time, and WM capacity. Experiment 2 examined the effects of a secondary WM load on the retrieval performance. As predicted, burdening WM with an attention-demanding secondary task decreased the retrieval efficiency. Both low and high spans were affected by the WM load but load effects were less pronounced for the most strongly associated counterexamples. Findings established that in addition to an automatic search component, the counterexample retrieval draws on WM resources.     

Cognition in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE): The First 10 Years

This paper summarizes and expands research on cognitive aging from the Berlin Aging Study (BASE), a longitudinal, multidisciplinary, and population-based investigation of old and very old individuals. First, we describe previously reported research on five key themes: (a) experimental and mortality-associated components of longitudinal selectivity; (b) comparisons between cross-sectional and cross-sectional/longitudinal convergence age gradients; (c) old-age dedifferentiation of inter-individual differences; (d) possible reasons for the age-based increase in the link between intellectual and sensory domains; and (e) limits to cognitive plasticity in very old age. Second, we make use of multilevel modeling to determine the magnitude and direction of retest effects. Retest effects are classified as either flat (step function from the first to the second measurement occasion) or growing (linear increase after the first measurement occasion). Five of the eight longitudinally administered cognitive tests are found to display significant retest effects of either or both types. Retest adjustment increased the linear negative and decreased the quadratic negative component of cross-sectional/longitudinal convergence gradients in measures of intellectual abilities.     

Impact de la motivation autodéterminée et de l’engagement affectif sur l’intention de rester : une étude chez les militaires

Conducted within the Canadian Forces (N=652), this study explores the role of self-determined motivation and affective commitment in relation to personnel retention within the military. Three groupings of variables are used in order to shed light on the mechanisms underlying personnel retention: a) distal antecedents (i.e. leadership styles), b) proximal antecedents (i.e. group cohesion and work climate) and c) mediators (i.e. self-determined motivation and affective commitment). Illustrated through a structural model, results demonstrate the existence of a partial mediator effect from affective commitment in the relationship between self-determined motivation and intention to stay. These findings are discussed in regards of their implications from theoretical and practical perspectives.