Pain Intensity,Psychological Inflexibility,and Acceptance of Pain as Predictors of Functioning in Adolescents with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: A Preliminary Investigation

Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) is a chronic rheumatic disease associated with pain and maladjustment. This study investigated whether pain, acceptance of pain, and psychological inflexibility uniquely predicted functional disability, anxiety, general quality of life (QOL), and health-related quality of life (HQOL) among adolescents with JIA. Twenty-three adolescents with JIA and pain were recruited from a pediatric rheumatology clinic. Participants completed self-report measures pertaining to the key study variables. A series of multiple regression analyses demonstrated that higher pain uniquely predicted higher functional disability. Greater psychological inflexibility uniquely predicted higher anxiety, lower general QOL, and lower HQOL. Increases in acceptance of pain were found to be uniquely related to increases in general QOL. These data confirm prior findings that pain impacts functioning, and provide preliminary findings that psychological inflexibility and acceptance may be important targets of psychological intervention for youth with JIA and pain to improve functioning and QOL.     

Visual recognition memory across contexts

In two experiments, we investigated the development of representational flexibility in visual recognition memory during infancy using the Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-month-old infants exhibited recognition when familiarization and test occurred in the same room, but showed no evidence of recognition when familiarization and test occurred in different rooms. In contrast, 12- and 18-month-old infants exhibited recognition irrespective of testing room. Thus, flexibility across a change of room was observed at a younger age than flexibility across a change of background that has previously been seen with the VPC procedure (Robinson & Pascalis, 2004). To determine if limitations in representational flexibility across a change of background could be overcome by experiences during encoding, in Experiment 2, 6-, 9-, 12- and 18-month-old infants were familiarized with a picture on multiple backgrounds. At all ages, infants showed recognition across a change in background at test. These findings indicate that dissociating an item from its context during encoding may be an important factor in understanding the representational flexibility of visual recognition memory in infancy. Developmental changes in representational flexibility are likely driven by changes in the functional maturity of the hippocampal formation, and experience.     

Beyond procedure's content: the role of accessibility experiences and personal uncertainty in procedural justice judgements

Procedural justice concerns play a critical role in economic settings, politics, and other domains of human life. Despite the vast evidence corroborating their relevance, considerably less is known about how procedural justice judgments are formed. Whereas earlier theorizing focused on the systematic integration of content information, the present contribution provides a new perspective on the formation of justice judgments by examining the influence of accessibility experiences. Specifically, we hypothesize that procedural justice judgments may be formed based on the ease or difficulty with which justice-relevant information comes to mind. Three experiments corroborate this prediction in that procedures were evaluated less positively when the retrieval of associated unfair aspects was easy compared to difficult. Presumably this is because when it feels easy (difficult) to retrieve unfair aspects, these are perceived as frequent (infrequent), and hence the procedure as unjust (just). In addition to demonstrating that ease-of-retrieval may influence justice judgments, the studies further revealed that reliance on accessibility experiences is high in conditions of personal certainty. We suggest that this is because personal uncertainty fosters systematic processing of content information, whereas personal certainty may invite less taxing judgmental strategies such as reliance on ease-of-retrieval.     

Shared service centers and professional employability

This paper presents case study evidence of evolutionary changes in business support functions resulting in a fundamental hollowing out of the professional space over time and distance, creating the ‘hourglass’ profession. In an IT-enabled, boundaryless world, many professional activities can now be undertaken, in the manner of the Martini slogan, ‘any time, any place, anywhere’.This paper aims:

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  To investigate the shared service center as an emerging organizational form with the potential to drive fundamental change in the nature and location of professional work.

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  To explore the impact of these changes for individual professional workers, and to highlight the need for a greater focus on individual employability as the driver of an overall career trajectory.

     

We remember the good things: Age differences in learning and memory

We combined a feedback-based learning task with a recognition memory paradigm to investigate how reward-based learning affects the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recognition memory in younger and older adults. We found that positive, but not negative learning improves memory and results in an increased early ERP old–new effect, which is typically associated with familiarity-based memory. This indicates that reward-based learning supports a fast and relatively automatic memory retrieval process. Furthermore, we found age-related impairments in reward-based learning, whereas memory for the learned information was intact in the elderly, suggesting that declarative memory might be less affected by aging.     

Depression and reliance on ease‐of‐retrieval experiences

The relationship between level of depressive symptomatology and reliance on the ease‐of‐retrieval heuristic was investigated. In two studies, differences in ease‐of‐retrieval were instigated by means of the paradigm introduced by Schwarz and co‐workers. Subsequently, participants were screened for depressive symptoms with the Allgemeine Depressionsskala (ADS, Experiments 1 and 2) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants were randomly selected from a non‐clinical population. Results indicate that participants with low levels of depressive symptomatology relied on experienced ease or difficulty, whereas individuals with high levels of depressive symptomatology based their judgment on the accessible content information. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When positive and negative expectancies disrupt performance: regulatory focus as a catalyst

The present research investigates the impact of negative and positive stereotypic expectancies on cognitive test performance. A theoretical framework that relates expectancy effects to self‐regulatory processes as postulated by Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) is presented. Building on the differential sensitivity hypothesis proposed in this theoretical model, we argue that when self‐regulation in a prevention focus is activated individuals are particularly sensitive with regard to negative cues and therefore negative expectancies are likely to result in poor test performance due to an apprehension about meeting minimal goal standards. Conversely, when self‐regulation is guided by a promotion focus individuals are particularly sensitive with regard to positive cues and hence likely to show impaired performance when confronted with positive expectancies due to an apprehension about meeting maximal goal standards. The results of four experiments, relying on both situational and chronic regulatory focus, support these assumptions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Discourse structure and relative clause processing

Studies in several languages have shown that subject-relative clauses are easier to process than object-relative clauses. Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2006) have proposed the topichood hypothesis to account for the preference for subject-relative clauses. This hypothesis claims that the entity in the relative clause that is most topicworthy will be chosen as the subject. By default, the antecedent of the relative clause will be chosen as the subject of the relative clause, because it is the topic of the relative clause. However, when the noun phrase (NP) in the relative clause is also topicworthy, the preference for the antecedent to be the subject will disappear. This was confirmed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested relative clauses with a personal pronoun in the relative clause. We obtained a preference for object-relative clauses, in line with the assumption that personal pronouns refer to a discourse topic and are thus topicworthy. In Experiment 2, the discourse status of the NP in the relative clause was manipulated; either it was not present in the preceding context, or it was the discourse topic. The experiment showed that when the NP in the relative clause refers to the discourse topic, the difficulty of object-relative clauses is reduced, in comparison with relative clauses with an NP that is new in the discourse, even in the absence of any explicit cue in the relative clause itself. The experiments show that discourse factors guide processing at the sentence level.     

Free Choice

In everyday language, the central question raised by “free choice” is not causation but whether I do what I want. We can, however, grant that our wants are caused. We commonly fail to appreciate this because there is no consciousness of these causal processes. Nevertheless a question about the causation of my want may on occasion become relevant to the freedom of my choice. Thus one may ask if my want is caused by my knowledge and values, or by causes alien to these. This is not a question about the truth, or implications, of the theory of universal determinism.     

Adaptation to visuomotor rotations in younger and older adults

Adaptation to a visuomotor rotation is known to be impaired at older adult age. The authors examined whether the impairment is present already at preretirement age and whether it depends on the difficulty of the adaptation task. Moreover, the authors tested predictions of the hypothesis that the age-related impairment pertains primarily to strategic corrections and the explicit knowledge on which they are based but not to the acquisition of an (implicit) internal model of the novel visuomotor transformation. The authors found an age-related impairment of adaptation and explicit knowledge already at preretirement age but no age-related change of aftereffects. With an incremental simplification of the adaptation task, age-related changes were able to be eliminated. Individual differences of the quality of explicit knowledge were associated with differences of adaptation, but not of aftereffects. When age groups were matched by explicit knowledge, age-related impairments of adaptation largely disappeared. However, a reliable difference remained in one of the experiments, suggesting that other processes of adjustment to a visuomotor rotation might be affected by aging as well.