Spiritual advisors and old age psychiatry in the United Kingdom

This survey investigates the role and views of NHS spiritual advisors across the United Kingdom on the provision of pastoral care for elderly people with mental health needs. The College of Health Care Chaplains provided a database, and questionnaires were sent to 405 registered NHS chaplains/spiritual advisors. The response rate was 59%. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out. Spiritual advisors describe their working patterns and understanding of their roles within the modern NHS, and their observations of the level of NHS staff awareness of the importance of spiritual issues in the mental health care of older adults. They provide insights into possible negative and positive perceptions of their roles at a service level, and contribute suggestions of topics relevant to shared education between pastoral care and clinical services. This survey further highlights ethical and operational dimensions at the point of integration of the work of spiritual advisors and multidisciplinary teams.     

Motor excitability during movement preparation in Tourette syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by the occurrence of motor and vocal tics. TS has been linked to the impaired operation of cortical‐striatal‐thalamic‐cortical circuits that give rise to hyper‐excitability of cortical motor areas, which may be exacerbated by dysfunctional intra‐cortical inhibitory mechanisms. That said, many individuals gain control over their tics during adolescence and it has been suggested that this increased control arises as a result of the development of mechanisms that operate to suppress corticospinal excitability (CSE) ahead of volitional movements. Here we used single‐pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in conjunction with a manual Go/NoGo task to investigate alterations in CSE ahead of volitional movements in a group of adolescents with TS (N = 10). Our study demonstrated that CSE, as measured by TMS‐induced motor‐evoked potentials (MEPs), was significantly reduced in the TS group in the period immediately preceding a finger movement. More specifically, we show that individuals with TS, unlike their age‐matched controls, do not exhibit the predicted increase in mean MEP amplitude and decrease in MEP variability that immediately precede the execution of volitional movements in typically developing young adults. Finally, we report that the magnitude of the rise in MEP amplitude across the movement preparation period in TS is significantly negatively correlated with clinical measures of motor tic severity, suggesting that individuals with severe motor tics are least able to modulate motor cortical excitability.     

Face viewpoint effects about three axes: the role of configural and featural processing

We directly compared recognition for faces following 0 degrees-75 degrees viewpoint rotation about the yaw, pitch, and roll axes. The aim was to determine the extent to which configural and featural information supported face recognition following rotations about each of these axes. Experiment 1 showed that performance on a sequential-matching task was viewpoint-dependent for all three types of rotation. The best face-recognition accuracy and shortest reaction time was found for roll rotations, then for yaw rotations, and finally the worst accuracy and slowest reaction time was found for pitch rotations. Directional differences in recognition were found for pitch rotations, but not for roll or yaw. Experiment 2 provided evidence that, in all three cases, viewpoint-dependent declines in recognition were primarily driven by the loss of configural information. However, it also appeared that significant featural information was lost following yaw and pitch (but not roll) rotations. Together, these findings show that unfamiliar-face recognition is viewpoint-dependent following rotation about each axis (and in each direction), and that performance is based on the availability of configural and, to a lesser extent, featural information.     

Newborns are sensitive to multiple cues for word segmentation in continuous speech

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci 364 (1536), 3617–3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have solved this problem (Bergelson & Swingley, Proc Natl Acad Sci 109 (9), 3253–3258, 2012; Jusczyk & Aslin, Cogn Psychol 29 , 1–23, 1995), but it is unknown if segmentation abilities are present from birth, or if they only emerge after sufficient language exposure and/or brain maturation. Here, in two independent experiments, we looked at two cues known to be crucial for the segmentation of human speech: the computation of statistical co‐occurrences between syllables and the use of the language's prosody. After a brief familiarization of about 3 min with continuous speech, using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy, neonates showed differential brain responses on a recognition test to words that violated either the statistical (Experiment 1) or prosodic (Experiment 2) boundaries of the familiarization, compared to words that conformed to those boundaries. Importantly, word recognition in Experiment 2 occurred even in the absence of prosodic information at test, meaning that newborns encoded the phonological content independently of its prosody. These data indicate that humans are born with operational language processing and memory capacities and can use at least two types of cues to segment otherwise continuous speech, a key first step in language acquisition.     

Is spoken duration a sufficient explanation of the word length effect?

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assumptions of the TDR model. Our procedures produced robust effects of both syllable length and spoken duration in four measures of the time it takes to pronounce the different types of words. Serial recall for the same materials produced robust syllable effects, but no duration effects.     

The role of context in producing item interactions and false memories

Cued recall with an extralist cue poses a challenge for contemporary memory theory in that there is a need to explain how episodic and semantic information are combined. A parallel activation and intersection approach proposes one such means by assuming that an experimental cue will elicit its preexisting semantic network and a context cue will elicit a list memory. These 2 sources of information are then combined by focusing on information that is common to the 2 sources. Two key predictions of that approach are examined: (a) Combining semantic and episodic information can lead to item interactions and false memories, and (b) these effects are limited to memory tasks that involve an episodic context cue. Five experiments demonstrate such item interactions and false memories in cued recall but not in free association. Links are drawn between the use of context in this setting and in other settings.     

A brief scale to assess cognitive impairment in psychiatric patients

The Screen for Cognitive Impairment in Psychiatry(SCIP) is a brief instrument designed to assess cognitive deterioration in patients with psychiatric disorders, for example, schizophrenia. This study presents the first results obtained with the Spanish version of the SCIP in its three parallel forms with a sample of university students, these results being compared with those obtained with the English version. It is concluded that although there are no form effects, and that therefore the different forms can be used without distinction, there are certain practice effects on some of the instrument's sub-scales. There is also a language effect that may be due to sample and/or cultural characteristics. Finally, in both versions intra-class correlation coefficients and factorial structure are very similar.