Providing worked examples for learning multiple principles

Worked examples support learning. However, if they introduce easy-to-confuse concepts or principles, specific ways of providing worked examples may influence their effectiveness. Multiple worked examples can be introduced blocked (i.e., several for the same principle) or interleaved (i.e., switching between principles), and can be sequentially or simultaneously presented. Crossing these two factors provides four ways of presenting worked examples: blocked/sequential, interleaved/sequential, blocked/simultaneous, and interleaved/simultaneous. In an experiment with university students (N = 174), we investigated how these two factors influence the acquisition of procedural and conceptual knowledge about different, but closely related (thus, easy-to-confuse) stochastic principles. Additionally, we assessed the ability of students to discriminate between principles with verification tasks. Simultaneous presentation benefitted procedural knowledge whereas, interleaved presentation benefitted conceptual knowledge. No significant differences were found for verification tasks. The results suggest that it is worthwhile to adapt the presentation of the worked examples to the learning goals.     

Wirkung vorgeburtlicher und früh-nachgeburtlicher Umwelteinflüsse auf Gehirn und Psyche

The psyche of a human being is formed in strict correlation with the development of the brain. Genetic, epigenetic regulatory and prenatal influences through the brain of the mother as well as postnatal influences, predominantly as early childhood attachment experiences are all intertwined with each other. This takes place at three “limbic levels”: a lower level at which the infantile temperament resides, a middle level of early childhood impressioning experiences and an upper limbic level of socialization. The cognitive language level develops in a relatively independent manner. At the three limbic levels six psychoneural systems are operative, namely the stress processing, the self-calming, the impulse inhibiting, the motivation, the attachment and the reality and risk perception systems. Mental disorders are characterized throughout by disorders of the first two systems, predominantly in the form of greatly increased cortisol levels and greatly reduced serotinin levels. These then induce deficits in other systems; however, in less severe cases compensatory processes can occur via an attachment-related increased release of oxytocin. Similar processes also occur within the “therapeutic alliance” in the patient-therapist relationship.     

Warum nachhaltige therapeutische Veränderungen im Gehirn Zeit brauchen

Successful psychotherapy requires structural and functional changes in limbic brain centers; however, these differ in manner, effectiveness and dynamics. One primary factor is the therapeutic alliance, i.?e. the mutual trust between patient and therapist. This factor reduces the level of stress hormones via release of the “bonding hormone” oxytocin and increases the production of serotonin and endogenous opioids. As a consequence, a rapid improvement of the mental emotional state of the patient often occurs; however, this is not accompanied by the deeper and longer lasting neuronal changes necessary to treat severe mental illnesses. This occurs only when dysfunctional habits of feeling, thinking and acting residing primarily in the basal ganglia (striatopallidum and nucleus accumbens) and amygdala are reorganized. Rather than being an explicit cognitive process this represents an implicit procedural process, which after an extensive search for resources requires a sufficient length of time and frequent rehearsal of more adaptive emotional attitudes and patterns of behavior. Apparently, this is promoted by the generation of new nerve cells from neural stem cells induced by oxytocin and neurotrophins, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), taking place in the hippocampus and the basal ganglia. All these facts are in favor of a long-term psychotherapy at least in cases of severe mental diseases.     

Measuring Happiness and Overall Life Satisfaction: A Danish Survey Experiment on the Impact of Language and Translation Problems

The paper addresses language and translation problems in the most typical measures of happiness and overall life satisfaction in international surveys using an experimental design. In the experiment, randomly selected groups of Danish university students answered questionnaires in English and Danish, respectively. We found significant differences in the answers on both indices. As such, it was confirmed that the term “happy” is not the same in English and Danish. In Danish the word is similar to the German word “glücklich” which seems to refer to something stronger than just being “happy”. Perhaps more surprisingly, we also found a significant difference between the answers on “overall life satisfaction”, indicating that the answers given in Danish are too high as compared to the English ones. The differences are large enough to argue that such simple tests should be conducted before ranking countries in terms of these two well-established indices of subjective well-being.     

Personalized medicine: evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health

Systems medicine, which is based on computational modelling of biological systems, is emerging as an increasingly prominent part of the personalized medicine movement. It is often promoted as ‘P4 medicine’ (predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory). In this article, we test promises made by some of its proponents that systems medicine will be able to develop a scientific, quantitative metric for wellness that will eliminate the purported vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness—that is, normativity—of previous health definitions. We do so by examining the most concrete and relevant evidence for such a metric available: a patent that describes a systems medicine method for assessing health and disease. We find that although systems medicine is promoted as heralding an era of transformative scientific objectivity, its definition of health seems at present still normatively based. As such, we argue that it will be open to influence from various stakeholders and that its purported objectivity may conceal important scientific, philosophical, and political issues. We also argue that this is an example of a general trend within biomedicine to create overly hopeful visions and expectations for the future.     

Parity and Comparability—a Concern Regarding Chang’s Chaining Argument

According to Ruth Chang the three standard positive value relations: “better than”, “worse than” and “equally good” do not fully exhaust the conceptual space for positive value relations. According to her, there is room for a fourth positive value relation, which she calls “parity”. Her argument for parity comes in three parts. First, she argues that there are items that are not related by the standard three value relations. Second, that these items are not incomparable, and third, that the phenomena she has focused on are not due to the vagueness of the comparative predicates (i.e., that it is indeterminate which of the standard value relations that holds). This paper focuses on the second part of the argument and an objection is presented. By assuming the Small Unidimensional Difference Principle, which is a key premise for the second part of the argument, Chang’s argument could be accused of begging the question. More so, by assuming this principle, the space for incomparability gets severely limited. If these worries are justified, then Chang’s argument for parity as a fourth form of comparability is unsuccessful.     

Maternal distress during pregnancy and language development in preschool age: A population-based cohort study

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the prenatal period for children's cognitive development. Prenatal exposure to psychological distress has been identified as one potential agent affecting neurodevelopment, although research in this area has been marked by some contradictory findings and methodological limitations. This study aimed to investigate the effect of maternal distress during pregnancy on language development of preschool children. This study was based on the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study conducted at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The sample was composed of 34,089 women and their children. We assessed the role of maternal prenatal distress on child language over and above that of premature low birth weight (PLBW) status and postnatal maternal distress. Fear of giving birth had a negative impact on language outcome at age three over and above the effect of PLBW status and postnatal maternal distress. However, this effect was of minimal magnitude. Moreover, when examining whether differences in language skills between siblings were associated with differences in experienced levels of prenatal stress across pregnancies (sibling fixed-effects models), no significant effects were found. Our study suggests that prenatal distress within moderate limits does not seem to have an independent impact on child language performance in the preschool years and emphasizes the importance of considering the contextual role played by more stable maternal and family characteristics.     

Religious Involvement and Health Over Time: Predictive Effects in a National Sample of African Americans

In this study, two telephone interviews that assessed both religious involvement and health‐related quality of life were conducted approximately 2.5 years apart in a national sample of 290 African Americans. Religious involvement was assessed with an instrument that measured both personal religious beliefs (e.g., having a personal relationship with God) and more public religious behaviors (e.g., attending church services). Health‐related quality of life was measured with version 2 of the Medical Outcomes Study 12‐item short form (SF‐12v2). Structural equation models indicated that higher religious beliefs at baseline predicted better physical and mental health 2.5 years later. Higher religious behaviors at baseline contributed smaller, complementary suppression effects. Physical and mental health indicators from the SF‐12v2 at baseline did not predict changes in either religious beliefs or religious behaviors over time. These findings indicate that, for African Americans, personal religious beliefs lead to beneficial health effects over time, whereas individual differences in health do not appear to predict changes in religious involvement.     

Habituation or Normalization? Experiential and Respiratory Recovery From Voluntary Hyperventilation in Treated Versus Untreated Patients With Panic Disorder

Psychophysiological theories postulate respiratory dysregulation as a mechanism contributing to panic disorder (PD). Additionally, symptomatic and respiratory recovery from voluntary hyperventilation (HVT-recovery) have been shown to lag in PD and it is unclear if HVT-recovery normalizes with treatment. Thirty-seven panic disorder patients were randomized to hypoventilation therapy (TX, n = 20) or waitlist control (WL, n = 17) (Meuret et al., 2008). In a secondary analysis, their HVT-recovery was analyzed at pre- and post-TX/WL, compared to 29 healthy controls (HC). HVT included three phases: 5-min baseline, 3-min hyperventilation, and 8-min recovery. HVT-elicited symptom severity and anxiety were rated following each phase, and end-tidal PCO₂ and respiratory rate (RR) were recorded throughout. Treatment, compared to WL, was highly effective in reducing PD pathology (d = 2.21, Meuret et al., 2008). At pre-TX/WL, PD demonstrated delayed HVT-recovery PCO₂ and higher RR. Treated patients demonstrated normalization of HVT-recovery for PCO₂ and RR; however, improvements of HVT-recovery for symptom severity and anxiety did not differ between TX and WL. Results replicate pretreatment HVT respiratory recovery abnormalities in PD and further demonstrate normalization, comparable to HC, following successful treatment. The results provide support for respiratory dysregulation as a feature of PD and demonstrate the utility of HVT respiratory recovery as treatment outcome measure for respiration-based PD therapy.     

The effects of refreshing and elaboration on working memory performance,and their contributions to long-term memory formation

Refreshing and elaboration are cognitive processes assumed to underlie verbal working-memory maintenance and assumed to support long-term memory formation. Whereas refreshing refers to the attentional focussing on representations, elaboration refers to linking representations in working memory into existing semantic networks. We measured the impact of instructed refreshing and elaboration on working and long-term memory separately, and investigated to what extent both processes are distinct in their contributions to working as well as long-term memory. Compared with a no-processing baseline, immediate memory was improved by repeating the items, but not by refreshing them. There was no credible effect of elaboration on working memory, except when items were repeated at the same time. Long-term memory benefited from elaboration, but not from refreshing the words. The results replicate the long-term memory benefit for elaboration, but do not support its beneficial role for working memory. Further, refreshing preserves immediate memory, but does not improve it beyond the level achieved without any processing.