Drinking and driving “safely”: Who uses a breathalyzer and when?

Breathalyzers are often promoted on the grounds of safety. However, drivers who use them to avoid illegal blood-alcohol levels inadvertently expose themselves to sleepiness-related risks following alcohol intake. Personal breathalyzers may even be counterproductive if they make more drivers engage in more frequent or habitual drinking and driving. This study explores the extent to which and how drivers use the breathalyzer. We contacted nine major breathalyzer importers in Finland and found out that the estimated number of devices delivered during 2006 was almost 50,000, equaling approximately one percent of population and one-and-a-half percent of driving-license holders. Survey data on a representative sample of Finnish active drivers (N = 1121) showed that 11.5% owned a breathalyzer. More men than women own and use a breathalyzer, and most often the men are aged 36–55 years. These men also use it more often after acute drinking (32% vs. 20% in the whole sample). Seventy-nine percent of breathalyzer use occurs the following day after evening or night drinking. Therefore, while in a smaller percentage of cases the risk involves the additive and interactive effects of alcohol and sleepiness in the evening, most users expose themselves to risks related to daytime sleepiness due to drinking the previous night.     

Correction to: Bilingualism Is Associated with a Delayed Onset of Dementia but Not with a Lower Risk of Developing it: a Systematic Review with Meta-Analyses

Neuropsychology Review - The original version of this article unfortunately contained the following mistakes.     

Family context of infantile colic

Psychological factors in families with a colicky baby were studied. A total of 59 families who had enrolled on the basis of information received at the postpartum wards in the city of Turku, Finland, were included in this study. In addition, 58 families with age-matched infants were selected as a control group. These families kept a diary of the infant's crying. Thirty-six infants fulfilled the criteria for severe colic. Twenty-three families with a baby who cried excessively but did not fulfill the criteria were defined as the moderate colic group. A semistructured family interview was carried out to assess the structure, communcation patterns, functioning, and affective tone of the families. Mothers and fathers were younger in the moderate colic group compared with parents in the other groups. In the moderate colic families, the infant was more often the first child than in the control families. On the other hand, neither the infant's gender nor the education of the parents was related to infant's crying. Organized family structure and strong parental coalition were more often present in the severe colic and control groups than in the moderate colic group. Increased family chaos was noted in this group. The severe and moderate colic families had more enmeshed individual boundaries. Generational boundaries were enmeshed in the moderate colic families. Communication patterns did not differ between the groups. The families with a severely or moderately crying baby were less flexible, had decreased ability to cope with daily activities, and showed less energy and vitality than the control families. Both the severe and moderate colic families expressed more anxiety and conflict compared to the control families. In conclusion, an association between infantile colic and psychological characteristics of the family was found. Moreover, the families with a moderately colicky infant had specific psychological features that differed from both the control families and those with severely colicky infants.     

Health examination and scientific inference in occupational health service

In spite of doubts in many quarters there seems to be considerable confidence in the benefits of health examinations. In my opinion it is important to analyze the structure and the purpose of the examinations in order to elucidate the practical thinking and logical quality of OHS. In this article I will conceive health examination as an information process and offer types of inference, i.e. prediction, abduction and induction, feasible for the analysis. I will study the logical conditions and possibilities to draw conclusions using these inference methods and try, in a preliminary way, to show how the qualitative or quantitative formulations of presuppositions affect the formulation of the conclusion. Finally I will explicate the implicit purposes of the health examinations stipulated by Finnish legislation with the aid of the above inference methods. I find the methods feasible for analyzing the information process, and will set forth some conditions for presuppositions used with inference and point out the alternative purposes of Finnish occupational health examinations.     

Relative alpha desynchronization and synchronization during perception of music

Relative desynchronization (ERD) and synchronization (ERS) of the 8–10 Hz and 10–12 Hz alpha freqency bands elicited by music were studied in ten musically untrained right-handed subjects. The subjects listened to two five-minute musical excerpts representing two different musical genres, popular and classical, presented both foward and backward. ERD/ERS of the two alpha frequency bands was examined during the first four minutes of stimulus presentation using one-minute time windows. The results demonstrated that both the 8–10 Hz and the 10–12Hz frequency band exhibited reactivity to musical stimuli. The responses of the 8–10Hz and 10–12 Hz alpha frequency bands were dissimilar, dymanic and dependent on both time and stimulation type. The dynamics of these changes over time may explain some discrepancies in earlier EEG studies during listening to music.     

E-wave and heart rate responses during anticipation of nonmotor events

This study concentrated on three main questions: 1) can anticipatory late negative shift (expectancy wave, E-wave) be elicited in nonmotor S1-S2 paradigm, 2) is it sensitive to variation of emotional aspects of the task and 3) is there a connection between heart rate (HR) responses and E-wave. S1 was a letter row that was replaced tachistoscopically by another letter row (S2). The task of the subjects (n=12) was to detect if the critical aspects of S2 were similar to S1. After their delayed response they received feedback of their performance. The emotional aspects of the task were varied by presenting aversive noise bursts at the end of the feedback period either always, contingently to their performance or not at all. A negative shift was present both before S2 and aversive noise (when presented). Varying the emotional aspects of the task had an effect on the amplitude of the E-wave. There was also a connection between E-wave and heart rate responses: heart rate response seemed to be a precondition for E-wave elicitation. The results support Simons’s conclusion that nonmotor E-wave reflects specifically emotional anticipation.     

The effects of background noise on dichotic listening to consonant-vowel syllables

Lateralization of verbal processing is frequently studied with the dichotic listening technique, yielding a so called right ear advantage (REA) to consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. However, little is known about how background noise affects the REA. To address this issue, we presented CV-syllables either in silence or with traffic background noise vs. 'babble'. Both 'babble' and traffic noise resulted in a smaller REA compared to the silent condition. The traffic noise, moreover, had a significantly greater negative effect on the REA than the 'babble', caused both by a decreased right ear response as well as an increased left ear response. The results are discussed in terms of alertness and attentional factors.     

Estrogen treatment alleviates NMDA-antagonist induced hippocampal LTP blockade and cognitive deficits in ovariectomized mice

Estrogen is implicated in hippocampus-dependent spatial learning as well as structural organization and electrophysiological properties of the rat hippocampus but little is known about its mechanisms of action in mice. In this study, we investigated pharmacologically whether estrogen interacts with the hippocampal N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in ovariectomized mice as postulated for rats. Female C57BL/6J mice were ovariectomized at 5 months, and 2 weeks before testing at 12 months, half of them received subcutaneous estrogen pellets containing 0.18 mg of 17 beta-estradiol. The competitive NMDA-antagonist, 3-((+/-)-2-carboxypiperazin-4-yl)-propyl-1-phosphonic acid (CPP), was administered at 5.0 and 10.0 microM to block induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampal slice and intraperitoneally at 0.5, 2.0, and 5.0 mg/kg to impair spatial learning in the water maze. Estrogen treatment shifted the dose-response curve to CPP in both experiments. First, 10 microM CPP blocked the initiation of LTP in all mice, but 5 microM only in ovariectomized non-estrogen-treated mice. Second, final level of acquisition and probe trial performance in the water maze were less affected by high doses of CPP in the estrogen-treated ovariectomized mice than in non-treated group. In control tests for motor side effects, estrogen treatment did not reduce the tendency of CPP to decrease locomotor activity in the open field and impair balance on a rotating rod, and estrogen by itself decreased swimming speed as did CPP, but these effects did not interact. Our findings support the notion that estrogen treatment increases the number of active NMDA-receptors in the mouse hippocampus.