Perceptions of Type 1 Diabetes among Affected Youth and their Peers

Management of type 1 diabetes (T1D) involves balancing several components including diet, exercise, and medication. Peer involvement in management tasks is an important, but understudied, issue in T1D. This study presents results of a preliminary examination of perceptions of disease management in youth with T1D and their peers. Data were collected using a mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative data) approach during medical education time at a camp for youth with T1D and their peers. Results suggest that both youth with T1D and their peers believe that peers need more information about medical consequences of having diabetes. Further, youth with T1D and their peers would like coaching on how peers may help the child with T1D manage their illness better. Results provide preliminary ideas for intervention (i.e., including peers, assessing social support) in the medical setting as well as ideas for future research (i.e., examining relationships among perceptions and gender, time since diagnosis).     

Effects of the stress of marathon running on implicit and explicit memory

We tested the idea that real-world situations, such as the highly strenuous exercise involved in marathon running, that impose extreme physical demands on an individual may result in neurohormonal changes that alter the functioning of memory. Marathon runners were given implicit and explicit memory tasks before or immediately after they completed a marathon. Runners tested immediately upon completing the marathon showed impairment in the explicit memory task but enhancement in the implicit memory task. This postmarathon impairment in explicit memory is similar to that seen with amnesic patients with organic brain damage. However, no previous studies have shown a simultaneous enhancement in the implicit memory task, as shown by the marathon runners in the present study. This study indicates that human memory functioning can be dynamically altered by such activities as marathon running, in which hundreds of thousands of healthy normal individuals routinely partake.     

The role of memory for past test in the underconfidence with practice effect

According to the Memory for Past Test (MPT) heuristic, judgments of learning (JOLs) may be based, in part, on memory for the correctness of answers on a previous test. The authors explored MPT as the source of the underconfidence with practice effect (UWP; A. Koriat, L. Sheffer, & H. Ma'ayan, 2002), whereby Trial 1 overconfidence switches to underconfidence by Trial 2. Immediate and delayed JOLs were contrasted because only immediate JOLs demonstrate UWP. Consistent with MPT for immediate JOLs, Trial 1 test performance better predicted Trial 2 JOLs than did Trial 2 test performance. Delayed JOLs showed the reverse. Furthermore, items forgotten on Trial 1 but remembered on Trial 2 contributed disproportionately to UWP, but only with immediate JOLs.     

The impact of individual trauma symptoms of deployed soldiers on relationship satisfaction.

Research traditionally has focused on the development of individual symptoms in those who experienced trauma directly but has overlooked the interpersonal impact of trauma. The current study reports data from 45 male Army soldiers who recently returned from a military deployment to Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) or Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and their female spouses/partners. The results indicated that increased trauma symptoms, particularly sleep problems, dissociation, and severe sexual problems, in the soldiers significantly predicted lower marital/relationship satisfaction for both soldiers and their female partners. The results suggest that individual trauma symptoms negatively impact relationship satisfaction in military couples in which the husband has been exposed to war trauma.     

Beyond Death: The Treatment of Indigenous Human Remains—a Human Rights Perspective

Indigenous human remains that have been disinterred and removed (often overseas) without the permission of the descendants of the deceased fall within the broader category of movable cultural heritage. It is accepted that the rights associated with culture as well as certain other human rights—such as freedom of expression and association—are applicable directly to cultural heritage. When considering the human rights dimension of the treatment of indigenous human remains, it is vital to appreciate that for indigeneous peoples the bodies of their ancestors represent an important spiritual heritage as well as being an essential element in their sense of identity. Therefore, both their religious practices (which may include the worship of their ancestors) and their right to cultural identity (and the associated material heritage) should be respected. Most legal systems have laws that prohibit the disturbance of burial grounds, although it is not uncommon for old burial grounds to be turned over to other purposes. For indigenous peoples, both the dead and their burial grounds remain sacred even after thousands of years. The potential for conflict between the wider social importance of indigenous human remains as repositories of scientific information and their special significance to the indigenous community concerned is strong. This raises important ethical questions for anthropologists and museum curators in relation to the treatment of indigenous human remains.     

Loss of control over eating reflects eating disturbances and general psychopathology

This study examined the clinical significance of the loss of control over eating as a key component of eating disorders. It investigated the association of eating-related psychopathology and general psychopathology with objective bulimic episodes (OBEs; experiencing a loss of control while consuming large amounts of food) and subjective bulimic episodes (SBEs; experiencing a loss of control while consuming small/moderate amounts). A community sample of 81 women with a range of disordered eating was recruited: binge-eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, subclinical eating disturbances, or no eating disorders. They were interviewed using the Eating Disorder Examination and completed measures of eating-related and general psychopathology. Both OBE and SBE frequencies correlated significantly with measures of eating-related and general psychopathology, and no significant differences were found between the magnitudes of the correlations with either binge episode type. SBE frequency significantly and independently predicted global eating disorder psychopathology. The loss of control over eating, without consuming large amounts of food, was as closely associated with specific eating disorder psychopathology and general mental health as were traditionally defined OBEs. SBEs may be an important target of treatment and should be considered for future diagnostic classifications of eating disorders.     

Real-time comprehension of wh- movement in aphasia: evidence from eyetracking while listening

Sentences with non-canonical wh- movement are often difficult for individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to understand (, inter alia). However, the explanation of this difficulty remains controversial, and little is known about how individuals with aphasia try to understand such sentences in real time. This study uses an eyetracking while listening paradigm to examine agrammatic aphasic individuals' on-line comprehension of movement sentences. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they listened to brief stories and looked at visual displays depicting elements mentioned in the stories. The stories were followed by comprehension probes involving wh- movement. In line with previous results for young normal listeners [Sussman, R. S., & Sedivy, J. C. (2003). The time-course of processing syntactic dependencies: evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 143-161], the study finds that both older unimpaired control participants (n=8) and aphasic individuals (n=12) showed visual evidence of successful automatic comprehension of wh- questions (like "Who did the boy kiss that day at school?"). Specifically, both groups fixated on a picture corresponding to the moved element ("who," the person kissed in the story) at the position of the verb. Interestingly, aphasic participants showed qualitatively different fixation patterns for trials eliciting correct and incorrect responses. Aphasic individuals looked first to the moved-element picture and then to a competitor following the verb in the incorrect trials. However, they only showed looks to the moved-element picture for the correct trials, parallel to control participants. Furthermore, aphasic individuals' fixations during movement sentences were just as fast as control participants' fixations. These results are unexpected under slowed-processing accounts of aphasic comprehension deficits, in which the source of failed comprehension should be delayed application of the same processing routines used in successful comprehension. This pattern is also unexpected if aphasic individuals are using qualitatively different strategies than normals to comprehend such sentences, as under impaired-representation accounts of agrammatism. Instead, it suggests that agrammatic aphasic individuals may process wh- questions similarly to unimpaired individuals, but that this process often fails to facilitate off-line comprehension of sentences with wh- movement.     

Principles of cognitive science in education: The effects of generation,errors, and feedback

Principles of cognitive science hold the promise of helping children to study more effectively, yet they do not always make successful transitions from the laboratory to applied settings and have rarely been tested in such settings. For example, self-generation of answers to questions should help children to remember. But what if children cannot generate anything? And what if they make an error? Do these deviations from the laboratory norm of perfect generation hurt, and, if so, do they hurt enough that one should, in practice, spurn generation? Can feedback compensate, or are errors catastrophic? The studies reviewed here address three interlocking questions in an effort to better implement a computer-based study program to help children learn: (1) Does generation help? (2) Do errors hurt if they are corrected? And (3) what is the effect of feedback? The answers to these questions are: Yes, generation helps; no, surprisingly, errors that are corrected do not hurt; and, finally, feedback is beneficial in verbal learning. These answers may help put cognitive scientists in a better position to put their well-established principles in the service of children’s learning.