The cost of action miscues: hemispheric asymmetries

Adaptive behaviors require preparation and when necessary inhibition or alteration of actions. The right hemisphere has been posited to be dominant for preparatory motor activation. This experiment was designed to learn if there are hemispheric asymmetries in the control of altered plans of actions. Cues, both valid and invalid, which indicate the hand most likely to be called onto respond, as well as the imperative stimuli that indicate the actual response hand, were presented to either the right or left visual fields of 14 normal right handed participants. The delay after a miscue is dependent on the time taken to inhibit the premotor and motor systems of the incorrectly activated hemisphere, as well as to activate the motor systems of the opposite hemisphere, which might have been interhemispherically inhibited by this miscue. Analyses of reaction times revealed that miscues presented in left hemispace (right hemisphere) cost more time than those miscues presented in right hemispace (left hemisphere), suggesting that activation of the preparatory systems controlled by the right hemisphere may take longer to reverse than those controlled by the left hemisphere. This asymmetry may be related to asymmetries in the strength of hemispheric activation with contralateral inhibition.     

Identity construction and career development interventions with emerging adults

Today's wealthy societies are more fluid, varied and complex than they were just a few decades ago. As a consequence, what were “vocational choices” at the beginning of the 20th century now appear as “life designing issues”. In this context, contemporary research stresses the plurality and relative malleability of human subjects as well as their ability to take reflexive stances on their current and past experiences. Fitting in such an epistemology, a self-constructing model is proposed as a basis for a life designing counseling interview. This model describes self-identity as a dynamic system of (past, present and expected) subjective identity forms (SIF), the synthesis and dynamism of which originate in a tension between two kinds of reflexivity. Counseling interviews with emerging adults show that the elicitation of some expected SIF allows them to re-read their current and past experiences from such a perspective and constitutes a compelling incentive to act.     

Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—Brazilian Form: Psychometric properties and relationships to personality

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—Brazilian Form (CAASBrazil) consists of four scales which measure concern, control, curiosity, and confidence as psychosocial resources for managing occupational transitions, developmental tasks, and work traumas. Internal consistency estimates for the subscale and total scores ranged from good to excellent. The factor structure was quite similar to the one computed for combined data from 13 countries. CAASBrazil is similar to the International Form, with the exception of two items that were not included in Brazilian version. Concurrent validity evidence was collected relative to personality factors from the Five-Factor Model of Personality. The relationships between career adaptability and personality factors were as predicted.     

Critical Transference in a Case of Severe Epilepsy

In this paper, the author presents a summary of a brief treatment with a young woman, suffering from severe epileptic illness, which describes the mutuality of cross-transferences of deep and intense feelings and the unorthodox way to receive, to take in persons affected with critical phenomena. This treatment was deeply influenced by the traumatic triad, borrowed from Ferenczi: "amnesia, anaesthesia, aboulia," the ways of forgetting (or erasing) the past/the present/the future. The investigation led us to clarify, on the one hand, the incestophilic-or perhaps incestuous-source in the family, and on the other, the burdensome and tragic genealogy and history of each parent. At the end of this short treatment, which took place at a frequency of one session a week (with the patient sitting, standing, lying on the floor; with sometimes severe fits, deliria, threats; bringing of letters, texts, drawings; and a few phone calls), there was an alleviation of the critical phenomena and revival.     

Effects of an Internet-based intervention for subthreshold eating disorders: a randomized controlled trial

BackgroundWomen reporting initial eating disorder (ED) symptoms are at highest risk for the development of an eating disorder. Preventive interventions should, therefore, be specifically tailored for this subgroup.AimsTo adapt and evaluate the effects of the Internet-based prevention program “Student Bodies?” for women with symptoms of disordered eating and/or subthreshold eating disorder (ED) syndromes.Method126 women, reporting subthreshold ED symptoms (high weight and shape concerns and below threshold bingeing, purging, chronic dieting or several of these symptoms) were randomly assigned to a Student Bodies?+ (SB+) intervention or a wait-list control group and assessed at pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 6-month follow-up. “Student Bodies?” was adapted to be suitable for subthreshold EDs. Main outcome measures were attitudes and symptoms of disordered eating. Pre-follow-up data were analyzed by ANCOVAS with mixed effects.ResultsAt 6-month follow-up, compared to participants in the control group, participants in the intervention group showed significantly greater improvements on ED-related attitudes. Intervention participants also showed 67% (95% CI = 20–87%) greater reductions in combined rates of subjective and objective binges, and 86% (95% CI = 63–95%) greater reduction in purging episodes. Also, the rates of participants abstinent from all symptoms of disordered eating (restrictive eating, binge eating and any compensatory behavior) were significantly higher in the intervention group (45.1% vs. 26.9%). Post-hoc subgroup analyses revealed that for participants with binge eating the effect on EDE-Q scores was larger than in the pure restricting subgroup.ConclusionThe adapted “SB+” program represents an effective intervention for women with subthreshold EDs of the binge eating subtype.     

Cognitive Processing Therapy Versus Supportive Counseling for Acute Stress Disorder Following Assault: A Randomized Pilot Trial

The study tested the efficacy and tolerability of cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for survivors of assault with acute stress disorder. Participants (N = 30) were randomly allocated to CPT or supportive counseling. Therapy comprised six individual weekly sessions of 90-min duration. Independent diagnostic assessment for PTSD was conducted at posttreatment. Participants completed self-report measures of posttraumatic stress, depression, and negative trauma-related beliefs at pre-, posttreatment, and 6-month follow-up. Results indicated that both interventions were successful in reducing symptoms at posttreatment with no statistical difference between the two; within and between-group effect sizes and the proportion of participants not meeting PTSD criteria was greater in CPT. Treatment gains were maintained for both groups at 6-month follow-up.     

Low diversity and low frequency of participation in leisure activities compromise working memory efficiency in young adults

People perform leisure activities (LA) every day; pursuits that entail applying cognitive, physical and social abilities. As in old age, doing LA during early and middle adulthood is related to a reduced risk of dementias, probably by generating a cognitive reserve. As it is possible that a relation between doing LA and working memory (WM) efficiency exists in young adults, we assessed whether the diversity and frequency of LA are related to WM efficiency in this population. Ninety-three healthy young subjects solved the n-back task at two levels of difficulty (2, 3), and answered an LA questionnaire on the activities in which they had participated in the month prior to the experiment. Subjects were classified separately on their scores for (1) diversity (high/low) and (2) frequency (high/low) in order to test the relation between each variable and WM efficiency. Though no differences were found, a subsequent analysis of the average of diversity and frequency ratios of LA performance taken together-the diversity/frequency index-showed that low diversity plus low frequency was significantly associated with reduced WM efficiency at this age; results that suggest that frequent participation in diverse LA during youth is related to WM efficiency.     

Sensory-based mechanism for delayed motor intention

Prospective motor learning (PML) can be defined as learning an action to be performed in the future. The privileged retrieval mechanism behind this delayed motor performance remains unknown. From a motor control and learning perspective, we may conceive of two forms of retrieval: a stimulus- and an intention-based control. Retrieval from intention-based control is based on the anticipation of intended sensory effects related to an action in order to select and control the appropriate motor procedure (i.e., the ideomotor mechanism). In contrast, in a stimulus-based control a connection between stimuli-features and their related action-features is stored in the memory and serves as the retrieval mechanism. In this view, action retrieval from external stimuli is based on the detection of events in the environment to perform the intended behaviour (i.e., the sensorimotor mechanism). In this study, we report an advantage in the action retrieval for participants who use an intention-based mode of control in comparison to a stimulus-based control. Furthermore, a control task reveals that the intention-based advantage is specific to PML. Our findings show that PML is benefited by mental anticipation of a sensory effect that is efficiently processed through an ideomotor mechanism to fulfil delayed motor intentions.