Adult urinary incontinence: Assessment,intervention, and the role of clinical health psychology in program development

Urinary incontinence (UI) is a disorder receiving little attention from clinical health psychologists. This paper establishes the importance of addressing the issue of UI within the clinical and research practices of clinical health psychologists. Over 10 million Americans suffer from loss of bladder control. Incontinence affects over half of older individuals in long-term care institutions, about one-third of hospitalized elderly, and up to 30% of Americans over the age of 60 living at home. Because of social stigma and misconceptions attached to urinary incontinence, it is estimated that less than half of those affected see a physician about their condition. Since UI is generally associated with medical, social, psychological, and economic consequences, a multidisciplinary perspective is important because these factors are integral in the selection of appropriate treatment. Definitions of UI, its incidence and costs, and brief reviews of treatment and management techniques are presented. Psychological sequelae and treatments are presented as a foundation for developing further treatment and research approaches. Guidelines for collaboration and consultation by clinical health psychologists with medical professionals in the area of UI are also discussed.     

The perceived structural shape of thin (wire-like) objects is different from that of silhouettes

Observers are faster at judging the position of convex vertices compared to concave vertices. This is believed to be due to an explicit representation of position for visual parts. The best evidence comes from comparing the same contours perceived as either figures or holes, because this is a pure figure ground reversal (Bertamini and Croucher, 2003 Cognition 87 33 - 54; Bertamini and Mosca, 2004 Perception 33 35-48). Specifically, an interaction is present between type of object (object or hole) and shape. One assumption is that the contour of a silhouette is perceived as the rim of a solid object. It follows that a different pattern should be found for thin (wire-like) objects compared to silhouettes. We confirm this difference in three experiments. We argue that this is due to the perceived parts when contours can be interpreted as self-occlusion rims.     

Four studies on how past and current suicidality relate even when "everything but the kitchen sink" is covaried

T. E. Joiner's (2004, in press) theory of suicidal behavior suggests that past suicidal behavior plays an important role in future suicidality. However, the mechanism by which this risk is transferred and the causal implications have not been well studied. The current study provides evaluation of the nature and limits of this relationship across 4 populations, with varying degrees of suicidal behavior. Across settings, age groups, and impairment levels, the association between past suicidal behavior and current suicidal symptoms held, even when controlling for strong covariates like hopelessness and symptoms of various Axis I and II syndromes. Results provide additional support for the importance of past suicidality as a substantive risk factor for later suicidal behavior.     

The relations of problem behavior status to children's negative emotionality, effortful control, and impulsivity: concurrent relations and prediction of change

The relations of children's internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors to their concurrent regulation, impulsivity (reactive undercontrol), anger, sadness, and fearfulness and these aspects of functioning 2 years prior were examined. Parents and teachers completed measures of children's (N = 185; ages 6 through 9 years) adjustment, negative emotionality, regulation, and behavior control; behavioral measures of regulation also were obtained. In general, both internalizing and externalizing problems were associated with negative emotionality. Externalizers were low in effortful regulation and high in impulsivity, whereas internalizers, compared with nondisordered children, were low in impulsivity but not effortful control. Moreover, indices of negative emotionality, regulation, and impulsivity with the level of the same variables 2 years before controlled predicted stability versus change in problem behavior status.     

Show your pride: evidence for a discrete emotion expression

Abstract— Three experiments provide converging evidence that pride has a distinct, recognizable expression. Experiment 1 showed that judges can agree in identifying a posed expression as showing pride and can reliably distinguish pride expressions from expressions of related emotions such as happiness. Experiment 2 showed that judges can identify the pride expression when the task uses an open-ended response format that does not cue them with the label "pride." Experiment 3 showed that the pride expression includes a small smile, with head tilted slightly back, visibly expanded posture, and arms raised above the head or hands on hips. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that all positive emotions share the same expression, and suggest that pride may be added to the pantheon of basic emotions generally viewed as evolved responses.     

A woman's struggle in academic psychology (1936-2001)

Tracy S. Kendler's strong desire to get a college education had to overcome economic hardships of the Great Depression and a mother's conviction that finding a suitable husband was more important. Solomon Asch at Brooklyn College, by scholarly example, encouraged her to seek a career in psychology. At the University of Iowa she studied with both Kurt Lewin and Kenneth Spence and finally opted to conduct a research program, ultimately on cognitive development, within a neobehavioristic methodological orientation. Being married to academic psychologist Howard H. Kendler, and a mother of 2 sons, created problems in fashioning an independent academic career, but persistence and research productivity, sometimes a result of collaborative efforts with her husband, finally led to a distinguished career.     

Inhibition of return to color: A replication and nonextension of Law, Pratt, and Abrams (1995)

We presented subjects with an unpredictive cue that was followed after a 150- to 900-msec interstimulus interval (ISI) by a detection target. Cue and target were blue or red squares that appeared at fixation and in an otherwise uniform black field. In a filler condition, a task-irrelevant filler stimulus (magenta square) was presented during the ISI; in a no-filler condition, no stimulus appeared during the ISI. Using only a 900-msec ISI, Law, Pratt, and Abrams (1995) reported slower reaction times (RTs) when cue and target were the same color, but only when the task-irrelevant filler was presented during the ISI. They argued that attention is first drawn to the cue color and that inhibition of return (IOR; see Posner & Cohen, 1984) is established when attention is drawn away from that cue color representation by the task-irrelevant filler. Critical to their view is the assumption that IOR occurs only after attention is drawn away from the cue color by the filler. Assuming a time course for the withdrawal of attention from the cue color representation, Law et al. ’s view predicts growth of the inhibitory effect as a function of ISI in the filler condition as well as facilitation at early ISIs in the no-filler condition (because there is no filler to withdraw attention from the cue color). Contrary to these predictions, we found that the inhibitory effect observed by Law et al. at the 900-msec ISI was present at—and did not vary in magnitude across—the range of ISIs tested. And there was never facilitation in the no-filler condition. These results challenge Law et al. ’s inference that IOR for foveally presented colors was operating in their paradigm.     

Testing for developmental continuity or discontinuity: Class inclusion and reversal shifts

Often the data in cognitive development consist of continuous cross-sectional increases in the proportion of children who respond in one of two ways to a diagnostic task. Such developmental trends are, however, ambiguous with reference to the course of individual, longitudinal development because they could be the result of either saltatory or gradual ontogenetic change. The present research tested a nonlongitudinal procedure for discriminating between these two alternatives. This procedure involves the administration of several equivalent versions of the diagnostic task at weekly intervals to children within a given age level in order to obtain a frequency distribution of the number of “successes” produced by each child. A bimodal distribution is interpreted as indicating saltatory ontogenetic change, while a unimodal distribution is taken to indicate gradual change. This method was applied to Piaget's class-inclusion problem and to the optional-shift task by administering four versions of each task to a range of different age-level samples. The optional-shift task produced clearly unimodal, bell-shaped distributions at all tested age levels, results which were interpreted to indicate a gradual ontogenetic increase in the probability of making reversal shifts. On the other hand, the frequency distributions for the class-inclusion task, at the appropriate age levels, were distinctly bimodal, and therefore consistent with a discontinuous ontogenetic transition. The capacity of the repeated-measures method to produce reliable within-task results and to differentiate between tasks was thus demonstrated.     

The Intersections of Gender,Class, Race,and Culture: On Seeing Clients Whole

The author explores the multiple and dynamic intersections of gender with race, culture, and class in psychosocial identity formation to minimize the risk of homogenizing or polarizing our understanding of these characteristics.